The New Frontier of Trustless Crypto Transactions on Cardano
Jan 31, 2024
Brian, Epoch, Jenny, Lido, Block Jock, Noodz
Unlock the future of blockchain technology with our special guests ZK Fold Team and Go Meastro as they unveil the transformative projects propelling Cardano to the forefront of the crypto world. Prepare to be captivated as we exploretheir pioneering work on a novel language for zero-knowledge smart contracts, and a journey from stake pool operator to creator of robust APIs that rival established services. Their shared vision, realized through the Fund 11 catalyst proposals, promises to revolutionize Cardano with a ZK Prover backend for off-chain computations, paving the way for more efficient on-chain processes, reduced transaction fees, and the birth of groundbreaking applications—all while upholding the open-source ethos to deter centralization.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights as we delve into their joint endeavor to tackle the computational complexities of generating zero-knowledge proofs for transactions. We dissect the implications of their open-source libraries, provided by the zkFold team, and the finesse with which Maestro's APIs are poised to enhance user experience. The financial intricacies and ambitious scope of their projects are laid bare, with a spotlight on the trailblazing trustless P2P on-ramp application that could redefine fiat-to-crypto exchanges on Cardano.
Unlock the future of blockchain technology with our special guests ZK Fold Team and Go Meastro as they unveil the transformative projects propelling Cardano to the forefront of the crypto world. Prepare to be captivated as we exploretheir pioneering work on a novel language for zero-knowledge smart contracts, and a journey from stake pool operator to creator of robust APIs that rival established services. Their shared vision, realized through the Fund 11 catalyst proposals, promises to revolutionize Cardano with a ZK Prover backend for off-chain computations, paving the way for more efficient on-chain processes, reduced transaction fees, and the birth of groundbreaking applications—all while upholding the open-source ethos to deter centralization.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights as we delve into their joint endeavor to tackle the computational complexities of generating zero-knowledge proofs for transactions. We dissect the implications of their open-source libraries, provided by the zkFold team, and the finesse with which Maestro's APIs are poised to enhance user experience. The financial intricacies and ambitious scope of their projects are laid bare, with a spotlight on the trailblazing trustless P2P on-ramp application that could redefine fiat-to-crypto exchanges on Cardano.
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Speaker 1:
Welcome everybody to Cartoon Over Coffee. We got a great show for you today and remember you can join us live on X Spaces Monday through Friday, 9.30 am, eastern Standard Time, 2.30 pm UTC. We got some amazing builders on the show today. Joining us is a member of the Gomiestro team and a member from the ZK Full Team and they're here to talk to you about the things that they're building on Cardano. And also we would like you to check out their fund 11 catalyst proposals links down below. Oh, snacks, we're going to talk to the team from Gomiestro. We got Vardys with us and we got Latimer from ZK Full. How are you guys doing today?
Speaker 2:
Hi, everyone Doing great Glad to be here.
Speaker 3:
Hey everyone, thank you Likewise, make sure they invite you.
Speaker 1:
Excellent, I can't wait to. Guys have been building some amazing things over here on Cardano, so I can't wait to kind of talk about what you have going on here with fund 11 and what you see the future is and what you're trying to build. So, latimer, why don't you go first and why don't you introduce yourself to us a little bit? For those that may not know you or for listening on the podcast For the first time, give us a little introduction and tell us how you got to building on Cardano.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, sure. So I've been building on Cardano for two years now and my first project is called Endpoints and it's live on the mainnet, and right now I'm representing ZK Full. It's a company that aims to scale Cardano to be compatible with competitive with other blockchains. So we have a roadmap with several products and right now we are focusing on the first one, which is called ZK Full Symbolic. It's a specialized language for zero knowledge smart contracts, and we have a proposal dedicated to that, and there are two other proposals that we are doing in collaboration with Maestro and with Anastasia Labs.
Speaker 1:
That's a hell of a team right there. That's like a bunch of superstars in my eyes, so it's cool to hear that you three are all working together. We do have Varderis here from Go Maestro, if you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got to Cardano and building here.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, sure, I've been on the show a few times, so I'm really happy to be back.
Speaker 3:
I've been building on Cardano for about two and a half years, somewhere to Vladimir, and we just started running, initially started running at Stake Pool when I still had my full-time job. Then, within six months, I had the opportunity to run the Stake Pools for Genius Yields, ispo, which was pretty big. So use that as an opportunity to spin off, spin out into Maestro and be a go-to infrastructure Stake Pool provider for ISPO's. And since then we've become something quite different in a sense that, like we provide way more tools and services for developers, particularly APIs. We have our own unique APIs and tools, but also we are a direct competitor to the likes of Blockfrost and Koyos. So, yeah, we've grown a lot and we've, in the process, met people like Vladimir at Stake Pool and we love what they're doing and we're believers in the types of projects they're building, and so we want to support them with backend services and infrastructure as much as possible and therefore decided to collaborate on this proposal with them.
Speaker 1:
Actually, and let's talk about, let's kind of just dive right into that proposal, whichever one you want to talk about, vlad first. If you want to tell us the name of it, what category it is first, so that I can bring it up and get a tweet together with it, I think I might have all of them pinned up top, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think it is in the open source category, or do you remember? I don't know if I got in which category, but the developers yeah right.
Speaker 2:
So this is a ZKProver backend. It is basically a backend application that will do the programs for all kinds of ZK applications on Cardano Right. So the idea of using ZK technology is that you bring the computations from on-chain to off-chain, so the chain load is reduced, the throughput is increased, but what you need to do is you need to do ZK proofs off-chain. So for that you need to build infrastructure, and what we are developing is what we will be implementing. Like ZKFOLT, part of this proposal is implementing the proven algorithms and different kind of data manipulations and then on the Maestro side, they will be helping us to shape it as a backend service.
Speaker 1:
Excellent and I'm looking at it and I'm looking at the proposal for those checking out, maybe LightO Nation. There's a great detailed breakdown of everything that you want to do in the budget that you're asking for and that's nice to see. Can we talk about some of the different or what's the advantages to having this? Why would Cardano want this and what would other projects be able to use this in the future? Are you open sourcing it?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so I think we plan to open source the whole component because we want people to be able to run this backend prover on their own infrastructure if they want, so that they are not creating a point of centralization. So if a project wants, it can spin their own servers. So what was the second question?
Speaker 1:
What advantages will this bring to Cardano that we don't have now?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, sure. So first of all, you can use it to reduce fees. If we are talking about the existing applications like DEXS and the Azure DeFi projects and maybe some NFT platforms like marketplaces, so they usually have big volumes of transactions, so with ZK they can basically reduce the fees, the network fees that they are paying quite substantially I mean potentially like tens of times. And also this enables completely new applications to be created on Cardano blockchain, and one such application is our other proposal with Anastacia Labs. So MCoins is like the leading participant, I guess, but ZKFOLT will also participate. So basically it's called Trustless P2P on-ramp and the idea is that you can basically do the same kind of P2P exchange that is provided on platforms like Binance, but with ZK you don't actually need this kind of platform. You can do everything trustless, completely peer-to-peer, and in this case, basically this application is too difficult and very impossible to do without ZK Because there are a lot of computations involved and it will never fit into a single putus script. So with ZK, such applications become possible.
Speaker 1:
I see on that specific proposal there you're asking for a half a million ADA. In my opinion there's a significant amount. Maybe to other people it's not. Can you talk about why such a significant amount and what's the challenges there that you're facing on and maybe why that amount is there?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so this proposal, it's basically a fully pledged application, right? So we'll have a front-end, a back-end, and so there are a lot of work to do on both fronts. So, on the front-end, we need to figure out what's the best interface to access such a system and make smart contracts, because it's clear that, yeah, we need to reduce the number of clicks that people do for it to become really successful project. And on the back-end, there is a lot of coding to do because basically, this proposal was inspired by a prototype, like a super early prototype, that was shared online, and basically we need to do all the ZK stuff, the algorithms, for it to work. So, yeah, it's just a lot of coding that needs to be done for this proposal, but parts of this proposal can be then reused in the future projects because as a part of it, we will design, like a ZK circuit for proving communications over HTTPS. So this is something that potentially have many, many other applications, including Oracles, for example. Okay, go ahead. Hey, krul.
Speaker 4:
Thanks for coming. I was curious the Enquants. There's an Enquant V1 that's available right now, greg, yeah, yeah, who's using that? How is it being used? So?
Speaker 2:
we have some volume recently. I mean, we don't have that many transactions, but there are some and we have collected like several thousands of ADE in terms of fees. So there is some volume there. But what I expect is that it will become much more useful when we launch Enquants V2 because basically we have been waiting on the necessary functionality and basically for Enquants V1, we had a dilemma as we launch it in that state, or we wait I don't know how many months for the hard forks that will enable ZK on chain. So we decided to launch it as it is and this means that the functionality originally was, and is quite limited. But within Enquants V2, we will have like the full vision that we had initially Super cool.
Speaker 4:
So between the V1 and the V2, so the V1 is, I guess, gif or SWAP. Is it also S-screw, or is it not quite S-screw? No, there is no S-screw.
Speaker 2:
So you can convert your ADE to these NFTs and coins and then you can send them to a smart contract and then what you can do is you can share the secret key and transfer. Basically, by doing that, you can transfer this particular coin to someone else. So that's the basic functionality that is available right now.
Speaker 4:
And so then, if V2 add S-screw functionality?
Speaker 2:
It will add like fully featured shielded accounts. So yeah, basically, it will be just much more convenient to send and receive any native assets, really, so we will enable support for all native assets on Cardano.
Speaker 4:
That makes sense. Why is Cardano a better platform versus, say, midnight for something like this?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, with midnight, what you will probably need to do is you will need to use some kind of a bridge first, then you will use midnight and then if you need to go back, then you need to use the bridge again. So I'm not sure how user friendly it will be. So for Encoins V2, I think we will be sharing our designs either today or maybe tomorrow, so you will see that the interface will be simplified quite a lot. So I believe it will be very user friendly and everyone will be able to understand and visually do the transactions.
Speaker 4:
Last question here Um, I was looking at your lucid library, lucid proposal, whoo, that proposal definitely gets my votes because lucid's been Lucid's been Forgotten in the band and it's like the, it's like it's become the step child of Godano. So kudos for picking it up. So if this proposal is the, in this proposal you're asking for 200,000 Ada. The proposal is in a station labs, lucid evolution, redefining off-chain transactions in Cardano. Two questions one, how long Would this cover if funded the maintenance? And then a second question Well, will wasm still be a big, a big part of the, the redefining? Hello, yeah, I thought it was just I'm not involved in this proposal.
Speaker 2:
You know it's an a special.
Speaker 4:
Oh, okay, okay, so this is just Okay. I was confused to him like, why are you talking about? Like oh, you know forgive, forgive the light, oh, he's been, he's been. Who has the question coming up? I?
Speaker 1:
Have. I have several questions going back to the proposal, the zero knowledge provider back end right. Can you talk about a little bit about what ZK smart contracts Will do for Cardano? Does it help with scaling or what impact will that have on Cardano?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:
So ZK smart contracts will, from the developer perspective, will look very similar to regular smart contracts. So our goal is to design the language in such a way that, you know, developers will have various most experienced transition and from regular smart contracts to the K once. But what you will be able to do, you will be able to do to use all you know, all 16 kilobytes of Transaction available to you very efficiently. So you could feel this is the whole transaction with inputs and outputs, and in that way you could, if you, if you have a lot of volume on your application, you could process many, many requests simultaneously. So this will increase the Cardano throughput quite a bit and, for the developers, will reduce their fees that they are paying and, as I said already, it will enable completely new use cases, such as our trustless P2P on RAM and Also, for example I mean this is something that we are planning for the future to do like better voting system, where Basically, the whole working procedure is done off-chain and then you just need to submit one transaction on chain.
Speaker 1:
Barteries, you're down there, maestro. You guys have been building stuff. What? What roar are you gonna play, specifically in the, the zero knowledge Prover back end? Do we lose him or is it me?
Speaker 4:
I can hear you. I can hear you I can't hear anybody. You can't hear me.
Speaker 1:
Oh, there you are. I can't hear varteries. I.
Speaker 4:
Can you hear me yes later? Yeah, I think it's just just what they're there for there is.
Speaker 1:
I've been butchering his name all day.
Speaker 4:
I feel bad for the poor guy, I'm just like six maybe, maybe we don't get to hear him until we say his name, right.
Speaker 2:
I mean yeah, yeah, I think I can answer. So basically we are doing with zk fold, we are doing the algorithms, you know the business logic, and the master part is basically I Turning it into like a backend server, right, so they're doing like the you know network layer, the, the server logic, so they, they have experience in, you know, setting up their servers. So we, we, it will be, we think it will be a great partnership.
Speaker 3:
Can you hear me?
Speaker 1:
I can hear you now.
Speaker 3:
Okay, yeah, sorry, vladimir, did you? I just wanted to? Did you finish up? Yeah, um well, I think for us, you know, the the biggest thing is just really helping scale up the prover Computation right. So it's, it's depending on the, the types of transactions that are being packed into this proof, there will be a lot of computational overhead there to calculate the proof, and so, though, you know, I'll say, all the underlying libraries for the proof, it's proof construction is going to be open source, right from the zk fold team, but my shows is going to provide apis around Around the prover, so people could just leverage us For it instead of, you know, having to run it themselves. And so, in terms of, in terms of the details of, like, what you can and cannot run, you know what's limiting, we don't exactly know yet, but, yeah, essentially just making it really easy for people to Compute these proofs and then be able to sign those transactions, gotcha.
Speaker 1:
I think leido has maybe another question and I I apologize ahead of time.
Speaker 4:
This. What is actually about this proposal? And actually, um, the fine folks from maestro I won't try to Butter, thank you, just sort of touched on that. Right, I know heroes said 500k was a lot, but we had a team in codon I know that burn one million Trying to do zk stuff and they set it right out of money. 500k seems Not a lot. You are going to deliver this in six months, even with some of the unknowns and all that stuff. Um, this particular. Can you say more about that this?
Speaker 3:
particular proposal, the. So, uh, the zk4 team. They have three set. You know, they have three um Proposals and we are collaborating with just one of them. So, maestro only is collaborating with one of them.
Speaker 3:
I told you I apologize, no worries, we're just clarifying up that one has 200,000 adas. So, um, it is, I think, a bit less. You know significantly less work and less unknowns around, kind of building the off-chain libraries and api that leverages those, that library For people that just want to use an api to compete. The proofs right. So it is. It is. You know. There are some unknowns, of course, but way less than the core protocol. You know building that Vladimir and his team are doing for the other proposals.
Speaker 4:
Can you comment, vladimir?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, sure, uh, so the, the, the team that you were talking about, they, they were trying to build the zkRomov. Uh, I guess, uh and uh, what we are doing is, uh, we, we decided early on that we will have a round map with several products and that, you know, uh, our first product will be, you know, a little bit less ambitious, but, uh, at the same time, it will be very useful when, when completed. So we are asking for 200k For zkFall symbolic this is our uh proposal that we are doing uh alone and then another 200k for For proposal with maestro and uh. So this is basically these two proposals. They cover our core Core product, right? So this it is a 400k in total.
Speaker 2:
And then, um, the trustless p2p on-ramp. It's basically an application, a showcase, uh, of how this technology could be used and, uh, I mean we, we think that it will be very, very useful for, for cardinal blockchain, for, you know, attracting new users to the platform because you can uh directly, uh exchange your pus to crypto. So this personality is, you know, there are services that are similar, but usually they use some kind of escrow and what we are trying to do is to completely avoid any escrow. So this is kind of unique application that will be available on cardinal and Uh, as I already said. Uh, you know, when you need to build a front end and back end, a lot of algorithms, it could, you know, take a lot of resources. So that's why, uh, this particular proposal is, uh, that makes sense I.
Speaker 4:
I think that's definitely a steel as far as cost go. Um, being someone who right code myself the the fiat off-ramp or ramp, would that be available to to everyone, including us people? Oh, is there some some legal situation there?
Speaker 2:
Uh, so, uh, basically, what we are designing is, uh, uh, you know, parametrized protocol where you can then connect different team-text solutions as the SPF providers. So you could imagine that one user would want to get I don't know an Airwise transfer, another user would want to get a PayPal transfer. So, basically, we are designing a framework where, as a we or maybe someone else, could then connect more and more different team-text solutions now banks or stuff like this. So whether it will be available to the US people or not, it depends. You know, whether we could find some team-text that would work with the system.
Speaker 2:
But I mean, but potentially you don't need to ask permission from them, right? Because many of them have some kind of public APIs that you could access and you could use it to get a proof of transfer. That's what you need in this protocol. So, but of course, you know you have to consider a legal side. If we will have our own ZKFold back end, I mean ZKFold, basically, if we host this on our website, right, this application, then we will make sure that you know all everything that you can do on this front end, that it is legal, right. So, but since we are developing and this, this will be completely open source right, so you could host your own front end and do whatever you want.
Speaker 4:
Super cool. Back to you Euro.
Speaker 1:
And why would you care, lighto? You're in Africa. Anyways, I just want to thank you guys for coming and talking about what you guys are building, because what you're building is really, I think, the future of Cardono in a way. There's a lot of applications and things that you can do with the things that you guys are building that aren't even realized yet. So thanks for building, because I don't even understand the shit. So I'm glad that you do. But anything you want to wrap up with, I pinned all the proposals up top and Lighto and Jenny also have. So please, folks down below, share them out, get the word out, because it is important that Cardono has these capabilities in the future, right? So anything you want to wrap up with.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I just want to thank everybody for inviting us. It was great to be here and I just would like everyone to vote for our proposals. And, yeah, let's continue building on Cardono. Let's build great new applications.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, same here. Of course, I appreciate all the support. I think one thing that we definitely don't have time for I was trying to squeeze it in, but it's to understand the differences between how ZK works on EVM versus how it will work on Cardono. I think that's an incredibly important discussion to have at some point, just like more for the technical folks and how Ethereum is like coming up against walls trying to pack determinism into their non-deterministic system and they're going to make something work. Don't get me wrong, but I think having a discussion and understanding the nuances there would be really interesting.
Speaker 3:
So hopefully one day we can have a follow-up once we're all live.
Speaker 1:
I would love to have that follow-up because I think it's important to know the differences and, not only that, the technical difficulties that they face.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean, we will face our own unique difficulties, right, but I think in certain cases, like the buildings ZK and Cardono, makes more sense. I mean, vladimir knows this way more than me. But, yeah, let's have a follow-up in the future about it and, you know, once we have everything up and running, that would be really cool to have that. Yeah, that would be awesome.
Speaker 1:
I would definitely enjoy it, for sure. Thanks everyone, hey, thanks everyone for listening to Cardono over coffee and thanks to the team from ZKFood, endcoins and Gomiastro for joining us. We look forward to all the great tools and infrastructure that you're building here on Cardono. We want to give a big shout out to our monthly podcast supporters the wizard, tim, discovercardono, bookio Project, camo, linda from StakepoolTicker, m-a-l-u, twisted Gears, meehan, enigma, stakepoolticker1, monster, stakepoolticker, m-n, str, epochsect and Psycho's the Cardono card game. We appreciate all your support. If you'd like to have your name or business mentioned in future podcasts or have your logo and links displayed in the description of our podcast, click the support button now.
