Anoma: Undefining Money and Scaling Anarchism with Christopher Goes (CER)
This episode is the start of a subseries where I've partnered with my comrade Giulio Quarta from the Crypto Commons Association and their initiative called the Commons Economy Roadmap (CER) where we will be interviewing some of the projects listed as part of the CER. In this first interview we've spoken to Christopher Goes, co-founder of Anoma, a framework for an ecosystem of blockchain based protocols launched in 2021 that introduces an "intent-centric architecture" for decentralized systems...
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Transcript
Alright. Are you ready?
It's going. Cool. Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I am here at Offline, which is a very neat space in Berlin. I highly recommend people check it out, offline. Place if you're in the area. They have really great events. And we are here because of my comrade, Julio, from the Crypto Commons Association, has been working on a project called the Commons Economy Roadmap, which he'll explain to us. And together, we're going to speak to Chris Gose, who is the cofounder of Anoma. So maybe to start off, I'll let Giulio explain a bit, and introduce the Common Economy Roadmap and the project and how this all relates to, all the neat stuff that is going on at Anoma.
Yeah. Thank you, Josh. Excited to do an episode together finally
after three years of events and knowing each other. It's important to notice that the Criker Commons Association is a part of Red Chain
Cooperative. So, yeah, the commons going roadmap briefly is, research and promotional project. We selected 20 projects that we consider the most interesting and relevant and commons oriented of the blockchain space, but not only blockchain. And we are generating basically basic knowledge on them. Like, we call them project cards, and you can look on them in our website. And then extra materials like articles and interviews like this. So this is the first podcast interview with a media partner, which is Never Change Socialist. And, Anoma is one of the 20 projects. Thank you for contributing to the to this first iteration. And that's it. Yeah. In this episode, we will dive deep into Anoma, try to understand it better. And yeah.
So maybe, Chris, if you want to, yeah, just introduce a bit of yourself and what Enoma is, and then we'll start digging into we'll try to bridge the gap with the a lot of the really interesting and crazy technical innovations you guys are working on with kind of what does what is it like sociopolitical implications of of what this means?
Sounds good. Thank you for having me. I'm honored, perhaps a little nervous. So, my name is Christopher. I have been working now that I don't know in crypto, it's always harsh delineate where that space is, but I've been working at least in protocol design for a little while. Specifically before in OMA, I worked Cosmos projects on IBC, the inter blockchain communication protocol. I did a little bit of work on Zcash, you know, Zcash community, and even on Ethereum. And so those projects in particular have informed my view as possible. Then in 2021, Abba, Adrian, my cofounders, and I decided to start Enoma. Honestly, at the time, I think we did not know exactly what Enoma was or would become. You can go we we we're very, I don't know, pedantic about keeping all of our original documents published from the original dates and not changing them so that people can see how our thinking has evolved over time. I don't know what you're thinking. On the blockchain? What? Are them on the blockchain? They're in Git, which is kind of like the OG blockchain. Okay. So it sounds sense. Cool. They're not, you know, not on a not on the Ethereum blockchain. And perhaps if someone notarized, don't give repository hashes, they would be. But in the original kind of VENOMA vision paper, you know, I was really interested than we all were in the question of money and why at least we felt in some kind of intuitive way that the global system of money just wasn't working very well for coordination. Money wasn't actually helping people address their needs. It was creating a lot of confusion or sort of measures of accounting that don't have very much to do with how people actually feel. A lot of the system is kind of out of, alignment with what's happening you know, I spent a lot of time reading a combination of philosophy and information science and kind of what you might call, like, socioeconomics as a political theory as to different reasons as to why that was the case. I read a lot about surveillance capitalism, Shashank Subhas agreed upon this, just different theories of what individuality actually is from an information query perspective. There is what language is, Robert Brandum, some other these are all citations in the vision paper, but just to give you a sense of where this kind of language comes from. So at that point, we set out to kind of try and build a project that would, quote unquote, undefound man. And at the time, the actual thing outlined in the vision paper, basically tries to articulate what it would take to make a technological system that can just allow us to do bartering. So that can, like, handle one challenge for bartering is finding double coincidence wants, finding, like, if I have a sandwich and want the coffee. I need to find someone who has a coffee, who wants a sandwich in order to swap. This can be difficult, and in particular, it's just computationally difficult. Like, you don't have someone assisting you in finding this per this person or maybe finding multiple people so you can turn it in a ring. It's difficult to do this and this is at least one explanation that is sometimes given as to why, you know, money exists. So at the time, we kind of set out to build, like, some kind of technological system that could just allow users to off load all of this computational complexity of executing a bar and figure out, you know, what, what called ring phrase were possible, what complex configuration, sub preferences, which you can often call contents, could be combined together and put into a state transition that everyone would be happy with. For example, maybe, you know, I want a sandwich or coffee. You have a coffee, you want a doughnut, you have a doughnut, you want a sandwich. The three of us put all small. Totally. Exactly. And all of our preferences will be satisfied. So, the thing that's outlined in the Enoma Vision neighborhood in some ways is actually somewhat more crazy than the thing we ended up actually building. Since that time, I read some more anthropology, and I've concluded that this, like, theory of money emerges as a solution to double coincidence of wants is bunk. It appears to have been, like, cribbed by Adam Smith from some Middle Eastern thinkers random book. It's not based in a lot of history. And thanks to reading David Graeber and just the history of credit economies, also good friends with Ethan Buckman, the people who work at various areas in the COFA, and I've gotten credit a lot. I guess, at least personally, I've come to an understanding of a theory of money that's much more around kind of different denominations of credit. Credit emerging as a solution to this. There is a real problem with double coincidence once, but, early societies simply solved it by integrating over time. Right, instead of by trying to find, you know, cows and chickens and sandwiches all at some time time on the market, which we couldn't need to do because they had, like, deep relations and trust. Right? Mhmm. So that in in that kind of understanding plus, I mean, I think around the time of the vision paper, we were kind of like, well, money is evil. We should, like, get rid of the concept. Like, we should build a system that just doesn't use numerical abstraction at all. Mhmm. And I think there's still something to that. Like, there are probably cases where you don't want numerical abstraction or where you want less. But I also think that it's not it may not be necessary to go that far. Like, my understanding at the moment is more, you know, understanding at the moment is more, you know, a big problem right now is not there's numerical abstraction per se, but that there's, like, one number, like the US dollar, and everyone is using that. One dimension of numerical abstraction versus many dimensions of numerical abstraction, which are different things. These are very different systems. Mhmm. And I'm not sure if I would expect numerical abstraction to, like, completely go away. Like, I still think it has its uses. We don't want an accounting system that represents everything exactly. We can accept some lawfulness. Can you just this is sorry. It's a law. And I think for the I think about the listeners,
that is these attempts to overcome fiat money and crypto money and tokens and use credit instead, which basically is like, you change the numbers on the ledgers without moving tokens or moving Only it's called collaborative finance, and there are resources online. Maybe we will share them in the description. I think we don't have time to explain today. But, yeah, like for Anoma, it takes a bit to to get in the mindset of, like, moving away from commodity theory of money and moving toward credit. So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I did a I did a interview. We did a COFI event here in this place in March. We were here. It was cool, and we will show the recording as well. So Sure. I was just gonna say I did the interview with Ethan Buckman,
and the the team at Informal Systems about collaborative finance so people can check out that episode as well to to learn a bit about, the idea is basically credit clearing. Imagine what banks are able to do with credit clearing, but instead, extending that to, like, individuals, essentially.
Yeah. It was because it seems like, naive or utopian, but we're not saying to just drop the existing monetary system and do bartering. It's more like, starting to use these new tools in complementary with, the existing tools. And then progressively we can, move more and more towards just
not money. Right. I mean, I would even personally, like, consider the existing money system to already be a credit money system. Just one in which special parties, namely banks, have the authority to issue credit money and nobody else does. Right. I'd say, like, banks get the credit
whereas we get the commodity in some kind of or we we we we experience it as a commodity.
Yeah. I mean, if you hold, for example, T bills directly, you can. Like, people can hold credit directly. Right. But most people in practice don't. Most people are holding or they're holding secondary credit. They're holding like bank promises Mhmm. That are they might say say backed, but like in some sense supposed to be promises about the US dollar and there are some laws that try to enforce that they will be whether or not they succeed. Not my area of expertise, but often these are tertiary or like further sort of credit
derivatives along the original asset. Mhmm. Yeah. But so continuing on this, so, like, basically, you guys went in with I mean, it sounds to me, I would argue, like, a very, very different view on money than is kind of like the I mean, just the average crypto person, like, thinks about money. Like, I like, the average person is either very, like, let's go back to the gold standard. Or, I mean, if they're maybe slightly more well read, maybe they're into Hayek or something like that, which I also think is, like, problematic because it's like a I mean, basically, what you're saying, I think he he would say that prices are, like, the perfect, is, like, computation of, like, all these factors, and then we we, you know, you we compute the price through the market. And this, like, gives you a number that then you can coordinate with and money the coordination system that, like but, there is, like, a lot to say about, like, this not really taking in all the information that's available, but instead actually just, like, being a blunt instrument for enforcing, like, things to move forward on the market. Because it doesn't consider, like, the environmental damage that, like, whatever the production of a particular commodity does or, like, whatever else. So a lot of these things in economics, they just move to the side and say those are externalities. So this is, like, I think part of the issue with, like, the monetary system is, like, this lack of that it is actually a very bad computer, for computing what what what should and ought to happen and real pricing of things.
Right. I mean, you know, prices are just some kind of signal. Right. And what kind of information that signal tracks depends on the whole causal path that, like, leads to the price. Right? Yeah. And if you have, you know, a system that externalizes things almost by definition. It's certainly in practice. You're not incorporating them into your price. So I guess to me, I wouldn't say that, like, prices are inherently incapable of representing such information, but just that in the current economic system and the current way, you know for example, if we put source taxes on carbon emissions, prices would incorporate this information. Right. Right. Because we don't have such taxes, prices don't. So Right. Maybe that's a distinction. But that would require, like, a legal kind of, like,
you know, enforcement of that, which is also very anti libertarian, like, which the people a lot of crypto people would then be against. But then it's like, okay. Then we're not considering this damage as part of, like, the price signal that we're receiving through the market. But, yeah, but, anyways, like, if we move forward, like, how then how do you see Anoma trying to, yeah, think about this? Right. So
I think it is helpful to draw a distinction between, like, the semantics of how particular assets are used as money and the syntax of what the databases system actually does. And Anoma only makes decisions about syntax. It doesn't make decisions about semantics. So for example, that particular symbol represents, like, a symbol represents, like, a CRED. There's, like, some promise in the real world to, you know, for example, where the US dollar is at least credit in the sense that you can use it to pay your tax liabilities. You know, the US government has implicitly and explicitly made a promise that this symbol, if you have some, can use to, like, clear your tax liabilities. That promise doesn't it doesn't really it doesn't exist, like, in their database. So there's a database of who holds a bunch of dollars, blah, blah, blah, and nothing in that database can say anything about that promise. That promise is just a social or social systems thing that everyone understands written down in law or researched conceptually. Right? And the same distinction holds for Irma. So Anoma is a database system. And then database system, you know, we, of course, consider these theories of money when designing it. But nothing in the database system, like, says that a particular asset is correct. Right? Or something like this.
It's like, one could say that it's agnostic to the value definition of the agents using it. It's like just, mediator between the different agents'
value expression? Yeah. But that that's that's It's a bit abstract, but compared to the some examples. Particular so Anoma works with this concept that we call an intent. And an intent in our terminology and or grammatical definitions is a declarative statement of preferences and constraints for some kind of change you want to happen to the state of the system as a user. So you could have an intent that says, oh, I want to, you know, trade five die for 5 ETH. I want to get at least 5 ETH. That's kind of constraint, but I'm happier the more ETH I get. That's preference, right? And you could send that intent into an OMA and buy into an OMA. And over here I'm talking about the network. So it's sent over the peer to peer network. Different parties. These parties, some of whom we call solvers, can look at that intent and try to match it. Another intent, like maybe someone wants to swap five e, five dot, dye bread.
That'd be an incredible price. Well, you know.
So good. Price signals could change. Yeah. And then a solver could take that intent, take the two intents and math work together and create a transaction. So Anoma covers everything from kind of this syntactical definition of intent in constraints and preferences all the way to how that gets gossiped around the network, how that gets matched, how that gets sold, what sort of semantics, you know, the fact that now the ledger has changed and now I have five more ETH and five less spread or something like this. What that change in the ledger means in terms of real world promises. You know, Anoma itself doesn't say this is up to users using the system.
So maybe to make to, like, to summarize a bit, like, Anoma is, I I I I went to the talk by, I think, the other cofounder, Adrian, at DAPCON, and, it's like it's an intent centric architecture. It if I'm not mistaken, Anoma is not itself a blockchain. It is a kind of protocol for basically, I mean, I have I mean, I was telling you earlier, like, an intent almost sounds like you make a wish. You, like, make you you intend for something to happen for some sort of stage change. Like, I would like x to happen. I would like you know, I think the the the easiest kind of example of that is, like, basically a trade, that you want, you know, 5 ETH for five bread or something like that. And you you intend that out you you send that out to to all the robots out there, which you call solvers. And the solvers are kind of crawling the the space of other intents that they can match up. Basically, a kind of, like, very complex, like, coincidence of wants type of situation that then, like, if they find a match, then they kinda ignites a a whole trail of of trades or what you whatever you you have. And then, it's once it's, like, cryptographically proven that this can happen, it simply happens.
Can you open that? An example for people less into crypto, maybe and you can tell me if it's very wrong. I don't think it will be, literally this, but let's say if I want to if we're in Berlin, I want to order a kebab. And, there are, I don't know, five delivery apps. And instead of going through all of them, theoretically, through the Anoma protocol, I could say to Anoma, I have, €7 max. Give me the best kebab. And the protocol, the solver goes through, like, check all the platforms, and then they execute the order, and they give it back to me.
Right. Like, you know? No. No. I mean Okay. Absolutely.
Because I don't think it's, like,
counterparty discovery where people maybe is not super, as you know. I think that's a good example. I guess what I want I want to demystify a little bit Mhmm. Because I really, yeah, technology has magical properties in some sense, but it also, at at least in the sense that we want to build it should really be, like, discreetly analyzed well. Like, users should be able to know exactly what will and won't happen Mhmm. As a result of their interaction system. So one, yeah, one kind of thing I just want to note there is the only thing Enoma is really doing is, like, helping you find counterparties and kind of agree on their change to the state of the system in fancy and complex and, you know, ways that require serious design to do correctly, but that's ultimately what it's doing. It's just helping you fire. So, you know, there's no enoma does not produce kebabs, right? Like, someone produces kebabs. And those people, you know, they produce kebabs because they choose to produce bobs, and some other people might choose to try to get bobs that offer money or other things Mhmm. In exchange for them. And the only thing Enoma is doing is helping these people find each other. Right? It's not it's not, you know, itself. It's not a rule. It's not doing anything other than that. Mhmm. Then I work kind of so on this question of is Anoma a blockchain? So I you know, the word blockchain, of course, words are used in the social contracts that don't It's a loaded turn. Single meaning that many things in the word blockchain started out as it was not in fact used in Satoshi's white paper. I don't know how it'll become. He used the word distributed time stamping server so much more clear. So I don't know how the word blockchain can spot. It. But, as it was originally used, the blockchain was just a data structure. Right? It's like a linked list of blocks that are hash linked to each other. As a data structure, like, I don't know. It's fine. I have I don't have strong opinions towards data structures. Data structures are like numbers. It's like like the when you when you hear the word blockchain, think like the number in, like, 72.
It's like There are some numbers that are are better than others. Yeah. Okay.
I like I like to ask numerical neutrality. Right? Yeah. All numbers are equal. Not to each other, but, so okay. Yeah. In in in the sense of, you know, the word blockchain has come to me come to be kind of a metonym for the space, which includes many things that are not in fact just ringlets, the blocks, the data structures. I think this use is just super confusing, and I don't like using it personally because I think it makes the system harder to explain. It's kind of like, like if you think of a car, right? So, in this analogy, you know, some complex system like theory, or OMA is like a whole car. Like, it has a bunch of different parts. And some of those parts, or one of those parts is the data structure of our blockchain. So from a blockchain to Ethereum to to Cosmos or to Enora is like the rubber in the wheel to your car, as in describing the car as the rubber. It's not exactly like, it's not totally wrong. Not the whole nature. Is a component of the car. But not only is it not a public picture, it doesn't illustrate anything about what the purpose of the system actually is. Right? Like, if you explain your car by starting to talk about the chemical compounds in the wheel, that's very similar to trying to explain what the purpose of of blockchain is by starting to talk about the specific data structure. Like, there are no magic properties of the data structure. Mhmm. I think so in this sense, I think it's confusing. Mhmm. The, you know, over time as we've gone back and discovered more of the research interaction is is more like distributed operating systems design. Like, there are a bunch of computers, you want to network them together, and you want to provide a kind of unified abstraction to users that they can treat as many computer. Not exactly as if they were one, but is at least as if they were like a connected system or a connected network. And you can write programs that can be run on many of these computers and, you you you will care about which computers they run on, but it's like different code for each individual CPU. You know, a long, long time ago, you did. You had to write different assembly code for each CPU where they came up with standardized instruction sets and operating systems on top of them that abstract of the file system and stuff like this.
Maybe we can explore more the your framing of a third generation protocol. Like, Bitcoin is the first, like, only tokens and then Ethereum, second generation smart contract with the tokens. And then there's been a lot of innovations with all the, layer two and roll ups and whatever. And now Anoma seems like to be the third generation protocol, which you can explain what you mean. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, in this Hong Kong show, of course, this is a little bit of a simplification. There are, like, lots of things that came before, and we draw aspirations from many areas. Probably the three protocols I know it draws most from, like, maybe four, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Cosmos, simple, I guess. By grid generation, so Bitcoin started with just kind of Bitcoin actually is a little bit programmable, but it's like scriptable settlement. You can can send your Bitcoin around. You can use Bitcoin script to do simple things. Time locks got a little bit more capable over time, but there were no, you know, attempts to build other assets on Bitcoin. Colored coins mostly didn't work. It's not clear as to as to what the reasons for this were primarily technical or cultural, but at least Bitcoin, like, definitely treated other assets as sort of second half things. Like, BTC, the asset was the main deal, and everything else, you know, kind of had to hack Mhmm. In order to get everything to work. So Ethereum brought, programmable settlement with smart contracts, so you could write codes and control different assets. But it's still like one blockchain. Right? So you're still when you use Ethereum, you're always accepting, like, the trust assumption of the Ethereum validator set, and you're always paying to have your transactions ordered with, like, all of these other transactions that are also going to be Ethereum chain. So Anoma kind of into this, it, you know, builds on these. Of course, involves, we don't call them smart contracts. We involve programs. That's well, of course, right. But it adds two ingredients, which I think are particularly important. One is heterogeneous trust. So rather than being one chain, Anoma is, I think, easier to think of it as just a network where different participants in the network can agree to run different consensus whenever they want. Right? So when you run an Ethereum node, you start a node and that node, like, connects to the Ethereum blockchain, it downloads the Ethereum blocks, and it just processes the Ethereum blockchain like it's dealing with one chain. Right? Whereas when you start with a NOMA node, that node connects to the network, which has, you know, many chains. And the chains are we think of blockchains as these very, like, long lived things. Right? Like, you start the chain, then it goes forever. Anoma doesn't really have this conception, so blockchains might be like you ever watch chain for an hour. Right? Or they you know? Some 50. We would understand, the consensus and the rank list of blocks is really corresponding to what state transit sheets you actually want to order with respect to one another because ordering is very expensive. So, the more you can order unrelated things in different places, just the cheaper the system is for users. Jesus. So to make this example much more concrete, imagine that you wanted to play, like, digital settlers of Qatar. Right? You know, the key settlers of Qatar. Pretty complex game. Mhmm. You could run run with logic of digitally. Maybe you wanna play with friends over the Internet. And when you're playing Settlers of Catan, you know, maybe you even wanna bet, like, $5 on the game or bet a sandwich or something like this. You want some interactions with the exchange system. But while you're playing the game, you don't need to send your transactions to some global blockchain. Right? You're playing it with friends. You probably, like, trust each other enough that you can use your own consensus for Ultra Lock a game. Maybe you even wanna play it offline. You don't wanna be connected to global Internet all the time or not need to be, and you don't wanna pay, like, expensive global transaction fees every time you make a move in the game and make the whole thing infeasible. So in a Nomo world, this would be what we call a fractal instance, or like temporary chain that you start when you start the game and you run a bunch of state transitions which are free, like you don't need to pay gas, or maybe there's gas fee, you don't need to pay like tokens as fees because you all just trust each other enough in the system. And Then when you're done, you have kind of a compact proof of all the state changes that took place, maybe who won the game, and you can submit this elsewhere. So if you just run Hennominoes on your phones or your computers, that's sufficient to counter use the system in this hot way. Does that make sense? That's that's the energy use trust aspect. Mhmm. So allowing users to express, like, who they want to trust for different particular interactions, who they want to trust, do ordering, to do storage, to do computation, and, the requisite networking components to allow the whole system to communicate even when we don't assume that, like, everyone in the network shares trust assumptions. Right? Theory assumes that everyone shares some trust assumptions. We assume that we'll have different trust assumptions and just have a bunch of protocols that kind of help them figure out when their trust assumptions match enough to allow them to interact. So, that's heterogeneous trust angle. Then the other ingredient which Enoma adds is information flow control. And information flow control is kind of like, if you think about privacy is is thinking about hiding brings. Information flow control is the inverse angle. It's like how you think about what you want to reveal, whichever one is closer to the choices there we have. Those users with these current distributed systems, we always choose what to reveal. And And information flow control in our usage, which is sort of inspired by the academic research discipline, say, hey, we want to draw a lot from, is oriented around giving users very precise control over what is disclosed, both in their inter initial interactions with the network and in subsequent interactions that are kind of mediated. Like, as a user, if I send my intent to a solver, I might want that solver to look for a match, but then not to, like, broadcast the intent to everybody else. Mhmm. Right? Maybe I trust you a little bit as a solver, and I'm willing to give you some information about what my preferences are, on, you know, hope and belief that you will not use that information against me or you will not use it to, you know, record me to someone who might not like what I'm doing or stuff like this. And, information flow control gives me me at least the ability to state what I walk through clearly to you so you can follow those preferences if you want. Mhmm. So those are the two aspects that we have.
So maybe if I can try to summarize some of that for people. Anoma is a protocol that is not a blockchain. So it doesn't have, like, a universal state in itself. Right. Simply based on how users are using it, I guess, like, it will use a blockchain perhaps for the the amount of time that maybe you need a blockchain for, which could also be hyperlocal in many ways. So that also doesn't have to be part of the universal state of Anoma. But since you're using this protocol with other people, maybe you can have your own little blockchain for a moment that you need for your for your game or something like that. And there are certain trust assumptions whenever you're more local than when you are global. So, I mean, then I mean, it makes me think of, like, I don't know, like, like, permissioned blockchains almost, type of, you know, discourse that was, like, more prevalent years ago. Okay. And so with that, you have a lot more, customizability, in trust assumptions with types of consensus you can use for particular moments, and as well, therefore, that means you can control a lot more information, and, like, how it's revealed to people and among each other.
Is that correct? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think another frame that can be helpful is that Enoma is really driven by demand side design instead driven right now. Like people someone starts a blockchain and then you as a user can like look at the blockchains on offer and decide what she want to use. Whereas in Anoma, you describe in your intent what blockchain you would like to use, like who you would like to run consensus, what promises you would like them to make, what data they keep private or feel. And you can describe that blockchain even before it exists, right? Like these parties might not have run consensus together yet. They might not have made such processes, but you can say like, I would like such a thing to exist maybe even If you run it for me, I will pay you something or other. And those parties can decide, you know, they can decide whether they want to do that or not. Does that mean in part that, like,
Anoma is almost like wrap can also be wrapped around existing blockchains at the moment and therefore can communicate. It almost sounds like a also a universal bridge and potentially.
Yeah. I mean, it's, one could call it like a like a distributed database abstraction layer or universal abstraction layer for applications, which wants to have stayed on different existing blockchains and perhaps some new ones. It's not and the word bridge sometimes is used now to indicate, like, a particular place where assets are sent through. Like, a physical bridge. You know, you start on one side of the river, you walk across the bridge, you go to the other side of the river. And it during part of that, you're, like, on the bridge and you're accepting the bridge's security assumptions. If the bridge breaks, you're in trouble. Mhmm. That metaphor applies accurately. It's like the way people use the word bridge in the blockchain space currently, but it doesn't apply to Enoma in this case. As in, if you're using Enoma to interoperate between Ethereum and Cosmos, for example, it's more like there's, like, an Enoma contract on Ethereum, which we call protocol adapter, and some kind of Enoma contract on Cosmos, and these like virtualize. So, they're like it's like when you run a virtual machine on your computer when you run the Java virtual machine, then your computer can run Java programs. And there are different Java virtual machine implementations or Windows and x86, 64 bit CPUs, ARM CPUs, stuff like this. But they all provide like once you have a Java Virtual Machine implementation you can run all Java programs. And NOMA is more like this. So, running a Java Virtual Machine on your laptop. Doesn't mean that you send your data to some microsystems or call it now. But, it does mean that you have this universal interface. Yeah.
So then is Enoma more like a I mean, then I I hear you describing it as more like a programming language and not necessarily as like a like, does Enoma need nodes that run the Enoma network? I think I'm I mean,
I definitely expect that there will be and, like, our our ops are, you know, people might want a lot of consentside that don't currently exist. I will put it like that. Okay. So the only thing that everyone wants is, like, the current Ethereum consensus, then maybe the only inner mod that everyone uses is the one that has protocol adapter deployed on Ethereum. Okay. So then okay. Okay. Okay. Then it like, there has to be, like, there has to be people running,
like, part of this network in order to be able to basically grant people's intents on the network for that to happen. So people will do it, and I assume either they're getting paid somehow or whatever else, but, they're incentivized then to, like, make your wish come true.
Yeah. I mean, there's no you know, just as we assume general universal set of trust assumptions, we assume no universal asset or no universal set of practices. So it's difficult to use the word incentivize in some of our design context because we just assume that everyone has different products. So we can't like we can't incentivize someone if we don't want. Undefined incentives or usually defined incentives. Right. Right. Users can express I mean, you can express conditional promises in your And then You can say, alright. You know, I will run a blockchain for you if you pay me asset x. Right? Right. And then someone can say, oh, like, I cost them enough, and that price is reasonable. I'll pay it tomorrow. That could be Ethereum. That could be love. Love. Right. Right.
I I was thinking that maybe now some of the listeners may be confused because we're already very upset. But it also I think it's impossible to simplify things, too much, especially at the beginning. And, in terms of the plans for the future, like Anoma would be progressively become more real because there are many components being developed. Right? And Namada would be the first fully operational component of the whole system. So maybe we want to touch on Namada a bit. Yeah. Absolutely. Because I I think it's difficult to understand that something, like, take a lot of time in different component. And then maybe at a certain point, it's finally that thing as a whole, but now it's like, we are very early in the process.
Right. So should I describe Nomada? Yeah. Yeah. So Nomada is an early product we're building kind of this part of the ecosystem, although it doesn't use all the same protocols, because we're still designing in OA. Some of the protocol details are, like, being worked out. We need to make decisions now for Namata. Namata is just really, like, it's a it's blockchain that uses a tenorimeter comment. It does not use Cosmos SDK, but it's kind of like it will use IPC, it will be connected to the Cosmos ecosystem. And it's just focused on multi asset shielded transfers. So allowing users to send around whatever assets they already have or new assets they might wanna create in the curve of IPC IPC connected ecosystem with very strong data protection. That's, yeah, it's pretty simple. I'm always surprised that this thing doesn't yet exist as a product in the crypto or blockchain ecosystem because I think it's just the most straightforward product. There are, of course, lots of blockchains where you could do transfers and where you could do transfers of multiple assets, but they all reveal all of your data to the world. Mhmm. And there's Zcash, which has world class privacy technology, world class data protection technology, but only allows them to use ZAC, the asset. And at least our hypothesis is that there are a lot of users such as me who would like to send transactions, shielded transactions, but at least don't always want to use SAC. Right? They don't always want to use the z address. So that's kind of the product that I'm on.
So it would be possible to send a lot of different assets like Ethereum or DAI or whatever in a without anybody seeing
who I'm sending to? Yeah. That's great. Okay. I mean, a lot of the reason I think this is important is it's just, you know, we live in a world of global surveillance. And when you use a transparent system like Ethereum, the question that you really have to ask yourself is not only is someone going to be unhappy with me for the thing that I'm doing now, but rather is someone in the future. This transaction log is public forever. It's never going away. So is someone in the future going to be unhappy with me or prosecute me or cancel me or whatever because of the thing that I'm sending to the blockchain right now. And I find that absolutely terrifying. Mhmm. You know, I don't wanna use transparent systems at all because, you know, we live in a very politically uncertain world and, like, regardless of what specific beliefs you hold, the chance that someone in power will disagree with them in the next like rest of your life seems very high. So, I think that that basically means that transparent blockchains cannot be used for most purposes. People would want to use them even for just sending assets, which is the simplest thing, right?
That's a good move to the next part of the interview, maybe on politics and the sociopolitical impact. But I just have a small question from the poetic technologist team, which I was hanging out yesterday with. And they they asked me to ask you what you think about Anoma as anonymous machine architecture. They were laughing a lot, so I don't know what's the mean here, but Definitely so sorry. If you let we then words, Anomal,
as far as we know, is made out of our mountain. Of course, you were inspired by more things that we could track in some subtle, some unconscious ways, but we didn't specifically pick it from, like, the world. But one reason we liked it is it's kind of like, Noah, like, need less. Right? Right. Earth. Oh, I know. So, that's a bit similar to anonymous. I don't know. The word anonymous can carry many associations in in sort of linguistic usage, and I don't know if all of them are accurate. But but I certainly think that there's some, you know, some interesting association there. Yeah. I mean, I know one thing that really tries to be, like, nameless in the computer science sense. Like, there are no privileged assets or privilege. There are no sort of arbitrary decisions about specific parties and protocol, and we kind of there's no, like, need or would there need service? It's kind of not in the same way. You don't canonical one. Mhmm. So I think there's some pretty steep differences.
Okay. Yeah. Then speaking of global surveillance and the bad times we are living in, maybe the readers the readers, yeah, the listeners want to know how Anoma could be useful for political purposes, how can
help us to change the system, short term, long term, some examples? I think the the question is more like, what are the sociopolitical implications of such a new Yeah. System?
Right. Well, first off, I guess I should say that I think they are, like, long and very uncertain and not, you know, I I wouldn't wanna be able I wouldn't wanna claim to be able to predict exactly. But Knowing that we can't predict everything. Yeah. I think, you know, one way that I I I also think it's easy to, like, over attribute agency to technology. Mhmm. Your technology is not neutral. I mean, it opens up space for opens new affordances. It opens up up space for people to do things they weren't previously, at least, previously practically able to do. But it's also not an agent. It doesn't itself make decisions. Right? So, you know, ultimately, it will be people, you know, using a neuromodic or a mnemonic who are making the decisions. Technology is there, kind of as a tool. Our goal is to communicate what that tool does very clearly so they can make informed decisions. I mean, I think compared to the sort of current technological landscape, in the current technological landscape, you know, some people, small number of people have access to kind of, let's call it privileged or like more capable founders of infrastructure. People in government or CIA knows how to pay people privately if they want to. People in positions of sufficient power in the current system that they're just not worried about being targeted, stuff like this. Like those people, they can freely express their preferences, whatever. Even if I disagree with them, like they're able to express them right in the current system. But many people cannot, partially because some of these technologies slow to peer to peer credit or it's not practically available, partially because they might, you know, be kind of at the mercy of whoever is controlling the current sort of intermediated financial system. So, do something that PayPal doesn't like, your account will get closed. Many of the ways this works, financial surveillance and control books right now, you don't even have legal recourse anymore. It's just like the arbitrary decision of some company. And these companies are driven by their risk, their lawyers who are telling them to close anyone's account. There's any risk at all, right? So, you know, Namada in the short term, I think just provides more space for people who might disagree with the consensus, the mainstream consensus or disagree with what the powers that be want or don't want to happen to express their preferences by funding projects that they care about, funding people who they think deserve help, Even, I don't know, paying for pineapple on pizza. Whatever. Mhmm. Mhmm. I don't think that's or, you know, that applies I don't know if it applies equally along the political spectrum, but it, like, it kind of depends on who is at power. Like if right now the financial system is just very top down control. So if someone on the left is in power, then maybe it's hard to express preferences that are more right wing. It's a sense of so on. If the right is in power, maybe it's hard to express pros that are more likely. I, you know, different people probably have different views in their local context about, like, where that balance lies right now, and it varies. But, I would say, at least my goal in thinking about the working about the technology in this way is just to kind of, on balance shift more, yeah, you know, action capacity and freedom to people who don't currently. Mhmm.
I can I I find it really very exciting that Namada in itself will allow for private transactions, which maybe, I don't know, to us in the privileged world is not a big deal because, like, we are, like, relatively okay with everything, and we don't have, like, active oppression, at least the most of the categories? But, there are trends indicating that many of the governments of the world, especially the big countries, are becoming very authoritarian, and they are adopting digital surveillance techniques. And so it's reasonable to think that in five or ten years, everything that goes on a blockchain will be under the scrutiny of a government. And now, Namada as well as other a lot of other projects and privacy coins and mixed nets are creating this alternative infrastructure for anonymous, communication transactions and so on. And then Anoma could be kind of the long term, like, the one of the protocols mediating between these different,
privacy technologies. Other contrast that I would love to draw in the case of Minerva is a contract with the current architecture of SaaS for building some hot services. Mhmm. So if we go sort of this comparison, it's a little bit reductive, but I think that it's helpful if you look at, like, web one, web two, and it has I don't know. Web three. So web one, users render on servers. This was a lovely world. I would be happy to be in again. For many reasons it wasn't very practical. One was that many users did want to run their own servers. Another was that many user wanted to engage in, like, multi party interactions, like getting a mob, getting a car. And so just running your own servers doesn't like, it doesn't find that. Right. Someone has to, you know, mediate or provide counterparty discovery. So Web two came along based some, you know, bad theories of capital. But, in in particularly in Silicon Valley and California, but also later elsewhere has become quite a whole lot's not happening in Web two. Typically, there's a lot of a warm company who develops software, run servers, contracts with a lot of cameras run to run servers and, you know, operates. And when you there this is true. Uber, all food delivery apps, whatever. They're all Right? Software as a service. Like, you kinda send your data to the company. You can ask their website, dot company, and I'm gonna, like, verify the application. And the this means that these decisions are all coupled. So as a user, like, if you want to, you know, use the in theory, there's sort of a Google protocol. Right? Like, Uber built a bunch of software that's mediates our infractions between, you know, drivers and language, but that's not for its closed source. It's only run on their source. So if you want to use the protocol, you must trust Uber or not. You must send your data there. You must allow them to make profit and to do whatever is they're going to do with it. It's not already Mhmm. They want to. And I think that that is I mean, I think it's, it just produces, like, practical practical freedom that people have. Like, someone might want to use a protocol without a personal company. Mhmm. And I also just think that it's super inefficient. Like, there are all of these companies that are basically replicating basically the same ride sharing protocol. Like, they're quite similar in the end. The apps look quite similar. They feel quite similar. The algorithms are probably mostly the same, and the engineers move between the companies. But because it's all closed source and run on different server, they just love to replicate this work. Right? Mhmm. The main reason that they replicate the work is that, actually, people care about, like, political distinctions. Right? Like, I, you know, want to use maybe a more European company when I'm working hard. Europe, Western America, we're on stuff like this. People have different reasons. They were trust and not trust certain people. People want to make decisions about trust, but it will be probably more efficient if we if we could just all agree on pro like TCPIP or email. But these are protocols from back in the day. We'll build protocols to try to standardize them. Mhmm. And is I mean, email is become very difficult to find your own email server out. That was gonna be generating. So it's protocol. Mhmm. And, I guess, with Anoma, part of our the thing we're in is a kind of distributed operating system on which you could run, like, for example, a car, a protocol of the application on Anoma, where the protocol or the choice of provider to voice a computer trust are separate. So that's everyone kind of agree on the same protocol because agreeing on a protocol doesn't entail the agree on who to send your data to or how to determine even which drivers you trust and the stuff. Mhmm. So that I think that, you know, in in, say, in web one, you could choose to run your own server or not. In web two, you can choose to use the service or not. With Inova, you can choose to use an application fully and independently of who you choose to perform or storage and other parts of the small school. These choices are Mhmm. I think that there's the least reason to accept that kind of architecture, just allows people to better express.
Mhmm. Mhmm. One of the things I mean, I this is still, like, a half thought in my head, but it sounds almost like an attempt at you have this, like, efficient market thesis from, like, Hayek and libertarians. No. It which I think is, like, a little bit, a little bit silly about, you know, markets moving towards, like, perfection or or efficiency and, like, basically, it implies of, like, decreasing profit margins because assuming that, like, consumers or people who are making demands are, like, actively always searching for lower and lower prices or something like that. But it almost feels like in an in an intent a a world filled with intents, that almost sounds like I'm imagining, like, everyone can then choose to make, like it's like a giant ordering book almost where we're all able to make the intent of, like, we all want, like, maybe, like, x price, not Uber, like, this so then you can almost make, like, it almost sounds like if really a lot of people are using this type of intent centric architecture, then everybody can, like, really express what they want rather than feeling like I only have the choices that are laid out in front of me or that I know of. Right. So now now we're in a world where, like, you don't even have to know whether or not there's a better option. You can simply express that you want a better option. Right. And maybe there either there is, like, a company or group or whatever that then sees, like, there's a lot of people who want, like, a better option. And maybe I can calculate a little bit, like, you know, my profit maybe or, like, my revenue will be this much because all these people are have this intent for Alright. Like, either they they want a non Uber, like, at this price and, like, that's that's, you know, doable if we run as, like, a worker cooperative or something like that. Like, you know, then you can, like, start to configure what how then do we make that? So that's just something that's kind of, out of my head. It's I think it's interesting.
One thing that is super, in current markets, like, the markets that we use, you know, especially with these SaaS companies, I would argue that there are a lot of preferences that just cannot be expressed. Yeah. Because the only preference that people can express is, like, do I use Uber or not? And that's very weird. There's no way to see that, oh, like, there's all this latent demand for an app. It's, like, less or a company. It's, like, less shitty than Uber. If only someone would build one. Right? Right. That signal, like, actually isn't in the market. Right? And adding it to the markets you know, could open up a lot of, you know, open up a lot of new opportunities and not only ways for people to trust what they want, but also ways for people on another side who are, like, you know, producers of who were, like, perhaps worker cooperatives, drivers, or stuff like this. See, oh, like, we don't have to work for this company anymore. We can, like, do our own writing. Here's all this, like, credible commitment your office, credible commitments to demand. We'll support this.
Oh, so just a comment. It's not often mentioned that most of the most famous tech startups and platforms like Uber, Airbnb, whatever, they are the champions of the old model and the platform economy, and they either just became profitable after twenty years of VC money burning or they're not profitable at all. Right. So it's like, it's not that, now the system is so solid and it's so efficient. Like, all the stakeholders are discontent with the state of the system except the investors because they are the only one accepting this. I know with Uber, like, the drivers are underpaid. The users pay a lot. Uber is not too profitable. Like, nothing works in, like, this efficient market. So maybe a solution could be to move to a, tech stack, which is more in line with how reality works and society works. So maybe, the civil system. And now it seems like, very far fetched and economically unreasonable, but the current system is just not working at all. And now we can say it, there is a lot of data.
The setup, they just bloom. I also at least I I absolutely agree with that. And in my view, Anelma is really, like in retrospect, it will probably seem obvious. Like, all social systems in the world are heterogeneous trust. You know, no no water was used historically, like, even a money system where we accepted one single canonical database. That's what, you know, sort of a wild, you know, a world blush or something is proposing to be called. Right? Mhmm. And know, you know, what SaaS companies are doing where you kind of outsource trust and usually data. Like, you're physically sending all of the data to California. Exactly. Or at least for many discoveries, this is true. That's just I mean, from a physics perspective, it's inefficient. You're sending it across an ocean. The driver is, is, you know, three kilometers away. So why it's just yeah. It's unnecessary. And I think that's learning from not only kind is heterogeneous trust clearly present in most social systems and the only thing we're really doing is just translating this to this more kind of technical context. But also people naturally kind of expect systems to work this way anyways. Like often the apps sort of mislead you into thinking that you're, oh, like I'm sending a message, you know, I use WhatsApp or at least WhatsApp has some encryption now, but I use iMessage. I'm sending a message to, you know, my partner. But actually you're sending a message to your partner and Apple and the CIA. Right? There's two recipients that don't show up. But but you should a more a more accurate interface would show you. It's like who you want to message. I want to message, you know, my girlfriend or my boyfriend or whatever and Apple. And not the CIA. And not and not want to mess those are the options that are be that are actually there. Right? So, yeah.
I don't know if you've seen, like, been meaning of, like, did you forget to ask someone? And it's like the CIA. Another kind of at least just because in my mind, I have it in my head of like sociopolitical implications. I don't know. You've thought about like I don't know. In the like the labor union context of like intention to go on strike. Like like, this sounds like it's very similar to, like, the Byzantine, you know, generals problem of, like, both labor union strikes and blockchains have this interesting property of, in order for something to work, for this action to work, you need, like, a certain level of commitment by people to to want that action to to happen that they will commit to that, which commits can also maybe interchange with intent. They intend for that to happen. And so if you like, it seems like another potential, like, space for intending collective action potentially generally to happen. But, yeah, I don't know if you can.
Yeah. I mean, I think maybe an analogy is helpful just to distinguish what a rumor does and doesn't do. Mhmm. So if you think of it, an intent is a way that you can, yeah, you can make a commitment and you can make it or if you can digitally sign it, you can sort of make it in a credible way, but it's still just like a message. So, in an analogy, imagine an intent like a piece of paper that you write something down on and sign. So, you could write it down like I commit to, you know, go on strike tomorrow, like the following conditions are not met. Signed Christopher. Right? And then you can like circulate that. And in, I don't know, if you have some very efficient labor union bureaucracy or whatever, I suppose it could process these kinds of things. Like everyone could sign their intents to strike or not strike under what conditions and the bureaucracy could figure out like, Oh, like here's our kind of collective position on this. It could aggregate those preferences. And the thing which Anoma is doing in this example is like helping with the progress application. It's not itself making the statements credible or not credible. So, in the source social sense. So, you know, I could send an intent that says I will go on strike, but if like no one believes me, then it doesn't work. So, Noema doesn't solve that problem. When there's some social precedent that these things are meaningful in this context and that people historically when they have sent them, they have actually done what they promised to, then Noema could potentially help with the kind of accounting bureaucracy on this.
No. Yeah. I so far we did simple examples to make people understand, like, I don't know, the kebab, the car, whatever. But referring also to the limitations of Anoma, I think we'll agree that, like, the change in the political systems that need to happen, they won't happen through Anoma. And we need to, I don't know, to fight with our governments and to allocate for new policies changing how money, taxation, the economy works. And then if we manage to do that, Anoma will be even better a protocol to organize our society and our economy. Am I right? Makes sense? Because maybe we don't want to, again, to to see Anoma as, like, the solution to the problem of the current systems, but, like, something that, it makes sense. And then it will make even more sense after we do some collective action to change the structural problems, which are not technological problems.
Yeah. I mean, I I would just see in our minds are opening up different reports. There's a little different space for action that is not currently open, and this matters to you. The existence of in critical communication definitely makes a difference in practice. Yeah. Sort of political organizing things. Yeah. However, if that didn't exist at all, we would learn a different world today, at least personally, of course. Mhmm. So I'm happy that it exists. Mhmm. But encrypted messaging itself is not, like, doing anything except allowing people to fear of communication. Right. People are still choosing to go to the protest. People are still choosing to work, negotiate with their government, to work their company, whatever it is that they're engaging in. The imperative communication is just there to kind of allow them to do that sort of freely and with the strong protections of order by cryptography. Their information doesn't go anywhere else. Mhmm. Mhmm. And then, normally, it is I mean, it's like a bit more abstract and it's more trying to provide an abstract interface for applications, not just communication, but it's similar in this sense of it's just like opening up more space for people to do things and express their preferences higher freely. Mhmm. But it's still, you know, ultimately, I know my end and honestly and money and markets in general are just like the kind of work imaginary database systems. Like, they they they they gain whatever causal that they're you know, they can't make people do anything. People can look at a number and say, oh, according to this number, I will do something. Mhmm. But people still have, you know, their own trans Adelphia. Right? So I don't wanna yeah. I don't wanna over attribute any. Yeah.
I appreciate that because usually yeah. This is not the narrative in tech. And like, if you're a tech founder, you have to convince everybody that your tech is like. Save the world. Yeah. I was just thinking that, like, on Twitter the other day, you shared a paper about, how to scale anarchism and cybernetic humanism. And you said, something like, Anoma is an attempt in to to sort in this direction to,
what you wanna comment on that? Yeah. So so the paper in question is a paper by Aurora Abilito, was tested on the CRSS of where we go. It's a diversity of society. The paper itself is, you know, I I don't want to endorse all the cruises in the paper. I think people should read it because I think it's interesting when reading the paper itself is critiquing money. And it's also critiquing, like, it's critiquing search for historical attempts at what my device will have identified as anarchist organizing. Not on the basis of what they were like, bad attention, but just on the basic, they didn't really ever scale. Like, either they kind of worked in the local context, but a small community and helped our small community was great, Or they tried to apply themselves to global context, like, sort of a state of active communism, so what it is. And, just fellow credit to a lot of the difficulties of, like, essential lowest power in the state. Right? Mhmm. People enrich themselves. There was corruption. There were actually, well, kind of very similarness. And in particular, I think the opera of critique is, kind of trying to get, like, anarchists to take math seriously. This is like math is not opposed to poetry or something. World is not shitty because of mathematics. She thinks that that's that's too far. And that rather the problem is that we have this currently very low dimensional mathematics The money that we organized that on the basis on, we should try to societal higher. Mhmm. And then in the in section three of the paper, it was really I mean, the historical sections are they're interesting, but they're not maybe, like I can tell if they were kind of working quickly. They're not the most grounded in all of the evidence. Mhmm. But section each there are some applications. You can tell where actually you slide. The second very interesting. And that actually describes this kind of theoretical alternative system for measurements. That instead of trying to measure like, you know, just some price or some some decision about a number, it tries to measure complexity. So it can be used to measure like complexity of different objects, like perhaps both parts, and complexity of like the latent potential for action or in the system, sort of, later than that or system. Mhmm. So Inova is not doing exactly that. It's more like trying to Inova is more like trying to give people the freedom to create many different kinds of measurement, which represent different things. They don't all represent the same thing. Mhmm. And, like, express their preferences as to how, you know, at least they want to look at their own actions and actions they can concert with others with respect to those matters. Right? Yeah. Whereas this paper is trying to define a particular measure. It's just a very different one. And I think it's an interesting one. I don't know if I mean, the measure itself, I think, is quite difficult to compute Mhmm. But maybe you kinda approximate it in some ways. And it's not, you know, it's not clear if you would I still think there's some danger in, like, picking a measure and then allocating resources just based on that measure or if there was to always taking human inputs. Mhmm. So, you know, I don't know if that's the right direction, but I think it's a very interesting one. And I would like to see more, like, detail and engage there. Mhmm. That was why I showed you up there.
Great. Should we briefly touch on governance of an owner to conclude? Or you have any Sure. I mean, you're Yeah. So as we said, Anoma is not fully operational yet as an ecosystem or as a protocol. But, how do you envision the governance to work? Yeah. Because it's a very complex system. Yeah. Yeah.
So I think here, it's important to distinguish between the three things, which all current sometimes have very minimal aperture, sort of a principle of solver. One is the protocol. The protocols are mechanical abstraction code. Right? The protocol is the thing that's permissioned, Wesley. Protocol or I mean, rather. The second thing is the networks. The network is like actual physical ears. Run the protocol, connect to each other. Right? Now we're sort of physically protocol. And the third thing is the token. So our foundation will propose Genesis Block at some point in the future for and the Gnome token is only tied to the protocol of network in, like, Amy. Like, there's no you know, you can use the network and use the protocol without losing it. Yeah. User, that's a free choice This, you know, users may have. Mhmm. Or we'll try and design token distribution, maybe some of the goods funding or different kinds of redistribution. However, we have some ideas to make the code very useful when, what we want. I don't know. Design something interesting that the users use, but ultimately, it's up to their free choice. They can use the protocol network without ever using the token if you don't want to. Mhmm. And that is very Mhmm. So in many of them I mean, even if you use it sometimes, we expect that there'll be, like, many tokens running denominations. Well, settlers on the top, we probably don't need to use it. Why do you need it? No. My governance is, like, yay. Right. And not. So now governance, that's it. So I wanted to just draw that up the same, should we just to clarify a bit right? There are different things that are sort of gathered right here or whatever. So the protocol is like, right, and then you won't copy it and change it. You know? I would argue that it doesn't really need governance. Like, you know, there might be, I don't know, papers or work up together of those asset governance. There's no there's no miscommunication source here. Right? Like, if you want to take another one or change aspect of extra value, just do that. Mhmm. Tell the people about it, and they like it there. The network, I would say, doesn't speak to what like, so in the network and, you know, network nodes are making local local decisions about who they connect to, what messages they process, so you know what recipes they want to see, what messages they want to send. And they don't need to, like, agree with all of the other routes on what else is very so there there is governance, but it's not like there's not one reference. There are many governances, I would say. Mhmm. You might want to engage in things that are kind of, like, not legal contracts with other nerds that I, you know, I will process messages for you, that you process messages for me. So pretty much like usual need message processing. Mhmm. This work that understands the form of governance, but it's not something that needs to have a lot of full network Huddl as well. Yeah. You know, the cost. Mhmm. And then the end of token, will probably have some kind of governance mechanism over, like, future future token issuers. Well, I don't know exactly what that looks like. Yes. Or what we're also we're considering is a kind of intent based governance where a bunch of users, you know, people who will interpret in different ways would not it's not it's not like voting. Like, voting is, like, there's a specific vote on it. This would be more like you express different preferences and sort of negotiate each other. Like, oh, I think it's valuable to file this public good. You think it's valuable to file this other public good. Like, I'm willing to fund your public good if you file my help. I'm sure there are versions of that, and we've been in verse so we can find something. What exactly the trade offs are, how business basis. But I also think, yeah, maybe this is a little bit extra ease for Well,
Namada, the first, component would be like a normal blockchain
for this or they have a governance token. Yeah. It's it's a lot of cost per style. Okay. I mean, it's still there's still a protocol we could still have. It's the protocol for you. But there is, like, one blockchain, not one Specific to Pain. And that turbine can be water based air bubbles. Yeah. Everything's a lot of stuff off of those hardware, mechanisms. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Well, I don't know if this is
not too awkward of a question or not, but, do you have any thoughts or plans? Because Enoma has raised, I think, this 50,000,000, something like this. How do you plan on, I guess, contending with the pressures of investors and whatever else on this type of protocol. And, like, you know, I imagine you will have pressure to make a token, pump the token, dump the token, whatever else. Like, do you guys have any thoughts on that? Right. That's a good question, Tom. That is so real.
I first want to kind of give a little bit of context as to why we did this in the first place. So, unfortunately, I mean, right now, the the crypto ecosystem is weird. So one thing that's weird is you can raise a lot of money without a product. This creates a lot of A lot. This creates a lot of bad ideas. But it also means that you can do exploratory research as a startup. And this is basically like, by startup, I just mean a new company. And this is basically impossible like anywhere else in the world. Like, an OBAMA just does a lot of research. Like, we have researchers. We, you know, pay the competitive salaries. You know, some of them are, like, very selfless and will work just because they believe in the project. Some of them were not. I think that diversity in preferences is important. Like, our dominance did chip the thing that we promised. Right? And for some of them, they have the ability to pay people competitively. Especially, it depends. Right. Right. So, you know, we need to I mean, we've done years of research, frankly. And I am very happy to have had the freedom to do that. You know, we publish that in the open and we can use it. So that's part of why we like Grace Mellon because it allows us to do that. Mhmm. We've also spent time kind of carefully constructing a governing structure even for this money. They're just sort of, I don't know what the right word is, but it's like investors don't have any control over how the money is dispersed. The money is stewarded by us. It's not nature that's controlled by our three founders, all raging myself. And, I mean, we might make the wrong decisions or we might make bad decisions, but, like, there are decisions. No investor can force us to do anything. They can complain about it. They can, like, ask us to do things, you know, so can everybody else. So far, this hasn't happened a lot. I mean, I think if we were, like, clearly doing bad things or, like, spending a lot of money on, I don't know, renting yachts, they would complain and perhaps rightfully so. So far, it hasn't happened too much. I mean, there is some you know, we spend time talking to them. We spend time talking to other market participants, and there's definitely, like, different people watch different things. There's social pressure in that sense, and I think that we have to balance that carefully. I don't think that it has, like I think the thing that this governance matters for is, like, can we ship the protocol or not? Like, once we ship the protocol, you know, things will evolve differently in most of these other governance mechanisms of the protocol and network. And even the token are, like, not. They don't relate that much to, like, how do you get fundraising or even our own decisions. They're more up to the criticism than we're. So I think that it does, you know, all kind of contracts and expectations you enter into people with into what people carry some risks. And I don't want to, you know, say that there aren't risks. Like, I don't know. If we spend too long different doing research, maybe someone gets really mad at us and sues us, but, like Mhmm. We haven't promised not to spend a lot time. We will that's a I think we should like long to do it. But That's fine.
View. So,
as far as you can disclose, like, what what kind of agreement you have with these, investors? You have, like, a capital terms or something? They have SAP contracts with the foundation. So Okay. The foundation Union Foundation is, you know, in some sense, legally obligated. Hence, the genesis block will include some token allocations too.
So in a way, it's not really a VC investment. Right? It's just VC funds, but the kind of, it's not like they want 10 x in three in three years.
I don't know, but people won't. I can't consent. We have not promised that, like, prices could go up. We we're not Okay. Okay. You know, people could expect that. They could not expect that. I don't know. I mean, we pick who we work with carefully. You know, we don't work with very warmly because this sort of You know? You know, in terms of harm or or just kind of just intends to make a profit, like, doesn't care about anything else. You know, people have different preferences that we also have to not everyone is going to agree with us on everything. Mhmm. So yeah. I I I don't know if that answers your question. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yep. No. I think there is something to say for I mean,
in crypto rather than VCs getting equity, they get tokens Right. For the most part. And there is, I think, I started to think about it a little bit more. There's a lot there's a bit more room in that paradigm. It doesn't mean that there is, like, of course, I don't know you saw with, like, Solana or whatever. Like, investors, they get they get their tokens real cheap, and then they dump it on on retail. Like, that that is, of course, a a phenomenon. But it also because of the programmability of tokens, it does, like, allow for, like, different types of property relations than, like, a traditional stock in equity in a company.
Right. Kinda does legally. Right. I think maybe I would want to draw it down here in the sort of, like, market structure problems between the actual, like, legal contract to get a token, which I think is basically I mean, the thing that I think is kind of apparent about that is mostly that, like, we have to restrict that due to sort of existing loss. You know, if if if the contract if the, like, expectations are created or communicated, I mean, back when we started and our, like, you know, I think there was very little certainty that we could do anything interesting at all. Like, crazy data. So I really appreciate the people who gave us the ability to try. Mhmm. You know, we're thankful for that. And not everyone, like, has that kind of risk tolerance, honestly. It's like super simple. So I think that that, you know, some pricing difference maybe makes sense. The, I think a lot of, you know, what you described in kind of investors dumping on retail, I think a lot of this maybe has more to do with sort of bad theories of money and like the market structure of advertising than it does like like no one has to use the Solana term. Like, if people want Solana or the blockchain, they can just kind of copy the code and like start a different thing. Right. So maybe that requires some organization. It requires some work to do. But the thing that the investor actually funded, like the production that they funded is is, you know, basically mostly stuff that public goes. Like it's free. Like, so we code this along the blockchain. Our users don't have to use the token. Why are they using the token? I think it's some confirmation or, yeah, these things being difficult to coordinate and coordination with other users. And a lot of people are also looking for love. You know, they treat sometimes these token cases as an investment product. They're looking for like dollar returns. Yeah. But I don't think you can you know, that's kind of maybe they're I'm not saying they're right or wrong to look for that, but it's not necessarily a problem with the black market. Sure.
No. Sure. I think that what is interesting in all this at the same time is, like, yeah, kinda a lot of what is created is kinda inherently open source a lot of the times. Like, I mean, I don't pay attention to to Solana really at all. I don't know exactly. I assume everything is open source. But, yeah, a lot of we're in a weird very weird contradictory situation in capitalism, like, in the crypto space where private a lot of private capital is going into open source products. And I think there is this ongoing kind of, like, back and forth of how do they
capture that value, of course. I mean, I just kind of depended the market structure for a sec, and now I actually wanna critique it. I think one thing that's really terrible about it is that it's super, like, top heavy and supply side driven. So most of the capital goes to, like, quote unquote, layer one projects, which is a lot of astute. Right? The station doesn't need anything. And, they kind of often, they sort of gerbil it out to application developers or, like, they, you know, basically internalize a lot of the, like, various difficult to account for parts, research, and and hearing to communications and building these protocols. You know, it would be much nicer to exhibit, like for example, we just have to raise a lot of money in parts because we, like, need to fund all of this stuff ourselves. Makes it not going to emerge. And I think it would be, you know, for example, perhaps a lot better if more funding went to, like, the applications, the application layer and applications. So collectively funded the infrastructure and the research onwards they get. There's a lot of, like, research and engineering work. One thing projects is they're like, I don't know, like, a few dozen, like, big pools of money, which kind of fund stuff in their ecosystem. And this is Yeah. I think it's not super critical.
May I just want to add, recommend to all the listeners the article by Trent McConaughey, which in this is, like, I think is very relevant. It's called capital and enclosure in software commons. And it's a very detailed, very well documented analysis on how now a capital is trying to enclose these open source systems because, like, it's open source, so how does it work? Yeah. And we also we will also we test with him. I was speaking about and so on. But, yeah, that's a Q reading.
No. I helped him edit that. Yeah. Right.
High trend. So yeah. And I just mentioned that, in the June, the from the thirtieth to '4, we have a COFA event. It's the second annual, collaborative finance gathering. It will be a retreat in Brussels. We will put the link in day four. And after that, we have another COFA events in the ice, more like on the local, economy. So but I think there will be room to speak about, Anoma as well and all the other lock protocols into COFA. Yep.
Yeah. I guess I would just I would leave this off with, what we really like to advise is critique. Right. Critique. The protocol, preheating our strategy, critique of all of those things that they need. Yeah. We live in a world that's kind of dominated by protocols, for better or for worse. Mhmm. There's questions as well. There should be, you know, so many hyper logically and community interactions. We've got a little far, but sometimes they're useful. Mhmm. But, we don't have a lot of work critique. And I would love to just ask for us. Let's look at our good critic is, like, the most high resource to have. Mhmm. Mhmm. At least in part two.
Cool. So the next thing going up is, Namada lunch. Right? Yes. That'll be somewhere somewhere. Like yeah. Good. You are the host.
Yeah. No. I mean, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. If you wanna leave any, yeah, just any any plugs for people to check out,
to do more research on Anoma and everything else. Yeah. I guess, specifically, I would plug we have we've built this kind of internal peer review system called Anoma Research Topics. Artists. Art. Especially to Jonathan Helix was doing there. And this solves kind of the problem that we found in trying to conduct research and that sometimes we would just do blog posts, but we needed something with our structure and papers and reviews, People could understand each other. And sometimes we would do academic peer review, but academic peer review is super long, like, six to nine months. And just really oriented around, like, adhering to the linguistic standards, which is different discipline rather than making your work legible to people who come from different specialties. So we wanted something, like, much faster and oriented towards synthesis, and we found this super, super useful. And I think I mean, it's supposed something that we invite external contributions to, readers of, boutiques of, and that we hope that people will just copy as an idea and do more of it in this space. So I can introduce a couple. That's if you go to art.anerba.dance, you can find both of the details there.
Cool. Great. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. And, yeah, we'll stay in touch. Curious to see, how it develops. Thank you so much. Thank you.