May 9, 2025 • 32 mins
What if blockchains could communicate as easily as APIs? In The Index's Everything SVM episode, Alex Kehaya and Omar Zaki sit down with Dean Little, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Zeus Network, which is building a seamless way to connect Bitcoin and other major blockchains to the Solana ecosystem. His other work includes cryptography research at Jupiter Research Center, where he focuses on advancing secure blockchain systems. In this episode, Dean unpacks the breakthroughs driving cross-chain interoperability forward.
The Everything SVM conversation dives into JupNet — a groundbreaking SVM chain designed to “aggregate anything, verify anywhere,” unlocking seamless cross-chain activity without the usual friction. Dean breaks down what sets JupNet apart from protocols like IBC, from its novel approach to validator trust to the way its architecture hides complexity behind an intuitive user experience.
We also explore Dean’s cutting-edge Quantum Vault project, where he’s using Winternitz One-Time Signatures (WOTS), to build quantum-resistant vaults on Solana — a bold move to safeguard crypto assets against the looming threat of quantum computing.
If you’re serious about building cross-chain systems, exploring SVM innovation, or staying ahead of where blockchain infrastructure is headed, this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.
👉 Learn more at https://zeusnetwork.xyz/
👉 Follow Zeus Network on X: https://x.com/zeusnetworkhq
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to the index podcast hosted by Alex Kaya.
Plug in as we explore newfrontiers with entrepreneurs,
builders and investors, shapinganother episode of Everything
SVM.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm your host, alex Kahaya, joined by my co-host,
omar Zaki, co-founder and CEO ofMantis, and today we are
excited to have Dean Little onthe show.
He's a chief scientist at ZeusNetwork and a cryptography
researcher for the JupiterResearch Center.
He's had a ton of contributionsto the Solana ecosystem and is
(00:59):
really active and involved as aresearcher here, and if you've
seen him on Twitter, you've seenhim publish some pretty cool
stuff lately related to JupNetand also related to some quantum
resistant technology for Solanathat we'll talk about.
But just as a recap for people,everything SVM we cover, the
Solana virtual machine, theSolana ecosystem here.
This is sort of a sub show ofthe index podcast and it's meant
(01:22):
to be an open forum for peopleto talk about open source and
Solana.
So thanks so much, dean, forcoming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So, dean, like I just want to start from the
beginning, just to give peopleyour background.
How did you get involved inSolana?
You know what was your entrypoint to crypto and kind of tell
me a little bit about why youwake up every day and build in
this space like you're anincredibly talented guy, like
why choose to work on theseproblems versus go to do
something in ai?
(01:50):
Or you know you could be in any, any number of spaces working.
Why, why this?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I think I first heard of bitcoin like like mid 2010s.
The first time that I ever tookit very seriously was in 2017.
Once I figured out what it wasand what it does, I became
basically committed to that ideafull time, mostly because I
think if you allow people totake control of their
(02:19):
communications, their money,their own destiny, you make the
world a much better place.
Their money, their own destinyyou make the world a much better
place.
You rid the world of, I think,a lot of evil and you know,
enable individuals to beempowered to.
You know take control of theirfuture.
I think, like, if you look atall the stuff that came out
during like the 2010s about likeyou know how governments are,
(02:42):
like you know spying on peopleand controlling people and you
know things like that, it was avery like pivotal time in terms
of like how people think aboutthese things.
So I think for me, that waslike my starting point.
Before that, I worked in, youknow, app development.
I did a brief stint in hardwareas well as aerospace, in
hardware as well as aerospace,but, yeah, since 2017, full-time
(03:06):
Bitcoin development, and thenit came out to like around about
I guess, three, three and ahalf years ago or something that
I started getting like moreheavily involved in Solana.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
You were one of the original co-founders of Turbine,
or part of Turbine early days.
Can you talk about that andwhat that was?
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
When I joined, richard, one of the co-founders
of like Turbine's previouscompany, web3 Builders Alliance,
basically said like, oh, we'relooking for people to teach
Solana.
And I'm like cool, like Ihaven't really touched Solana
for like a year and I'm notsuper good at it but and he's
(03:48):
like, oh, the whole thing's Rustbased.
And I'm like, oh, okay, I, yeah, I can do that.
So I just like jumped in andstarted learning as I went and,
yeah, like that turned into memaking kind of like a massive
library of open source, justlike Solana contracts libraries
and stuff like that.
Yeah, we like rolled that intoa new company called Turbine and
(04:12):
basically we used all of theprograms and all the things that
I kind of built to teach myselfSolana to then go out and, yeah
, have quite a large impact onthe ecosystem.
According to Solanafoundation's figures, we had
trained something like 15percent of all active devs.
Uh, like coming up tobreakpoint.
It's been really cool, likejust being able to have been a
(04:33):
part of that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, it's, it's really great tell me more about
your role at zeus network and atthe jupiter research area.
Can you talk more about thosetwo things?
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, sure, so, because I'm a pretty good Solana
developer, hopefully, and alsomy long background in Bitcoin.
There's two people in Taipei,justin and Jim, who I met during
the Solana Hacker House.
Justin calls me and Justin'slike hey bro, how do we put
(05:06):
Bitcoin on Solana?
And I'm like, oh, I got you.
I was like very familiar withall of the cryptography behind
it and I had been working on alibrary like a Rust library for
Bitcoin and it's like.
It's like, in my opinion, likethe best, most usable library.
It just so happens to becompatible with the SVM and
there was only, like you know,one or two major things that I
(05:27):
really had to fix to like makeit compatible.
So, and so the reason.
I like went with like chiefscientist as opposed to like CTO
is because my work there isreally more that of like a
protocol developer and toolmaker, so like I make tools and
(05:53):
then we hand it to the team andthey go and like do awesome
stuff with it.
And then for the JupiterResearch Center, this is like
really funny.
But I just randomly got like amessage on Telegram one day from
Justin Starry Shout out, starry, he's also here in taipei.
And he's like yo meow islooking for, uh, someone who's
good at cryptography.
And I'm like, okay, I think Ifit that description.
(06:15):
I just messaged him.
It was around that time thatzeus was launching our tge on
the lfg launchpad on jupiter andso like they had helped us a
lot at that point.
And so I'm like, okay, likewhat can I do to help them, sort
of thing.
And like I messaged me on andhe's like, bro, fly to kl
tomorrow.
And I'm like, uh, okay, I goand meet them.
(06:37):
And like the jup team is likesuper dope, they're like such
good people.
I went and like demonstratedhow we had managed to.
We're the first team in theworld to have implemented
Schnorr signatures inside of SVM, which enables us to verify all
of the taproot transactions onBitcoin, which has never
(06:59):
previously really been donebefore on Solana.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
What's the significance of the taproot
signature on Bitcoin?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, so there was a major upgrade to Bitcoin a
couple of years ago calledTaproot, and it's the thing that
enabled ordinals, inscriptionsand all of that, and so
obviously that's become its ownecosystem.
At this point, so to simplyjust support the classical
standard Bitcoin transactionsmeans you're missing a very
(07:27):
large part of the protocol.
And Taproot is also really coolbecause it allows you to have
like multiple scripts hidinginside of like a single, like a
tree of scripts, and if you justreveal the execution path that
you're actually using, then,yeah, you can like use whatever
unlocking script it allows.
So it means like it's reallyactually super good for the idea
(07:50):
of like bridging liquidity orsomething like that, because it
allows you to have like a lot ofbackup plans so you don't like
accidentally lock funds and losethem forever or something.
But yeah, so I demoed that tothem and then, uh, you know,
they just me.
I was like you know, you wantto be a technical advisor.
And I'm like yeah, like sure.
And then, just like, over time,just got more and more involved
(08:13):
, like helping out on certainlike products and stuff, until
the point it's like, yo, we'regonna launch jupnet.
You know, do you want to belike a cryptography researcher?
Basically, just like, keepdoing all the stuff you're doing
, like making all this, likeopen source cryptography stuff.
We'll put it under like thisnew entity and, you know, give
you resources and give you sortof support and distribution, and
(08:36):
I'm like sounds great.
So, yeah, they've been supergreat to work with.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Can you walk us through, walk us through some of
the technical details of JupNetand how it works?
And you know you said it's anSVM chain but it's going to be
for like settling on all chains,right?
So can you walk me through howit works?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You know, in the early days of like any project,
like it's trying to find itsidentity right.
But I think like we've got apretty good direction.
So if you think about, likeSolana's North Star, right, it
would be like IBRL rightIncreased bandwidth, reduced
latency.
Ibrl right Increased bandwidth,reduced latency.
And so the way that Solana willdevelop, I believe, is that it
(09:20):
will continue to just seek highperformance transaction
processing over a lot of otherthings.
Right, perhaps many would sayto the expense of other things.
Right, the goal of Jupyter, thevery simple goal, is to be the
svm that people want to fork.
And so if we had to like kindof like nail it down to like our
like you know four wordcatchphrase, it would be
aggregate anything, verifyanywhere.
(09:41):
So, like you know, jupiter is a, is a dex aggregator, primarily
right it it's kind of alreadyalready done a very great job of
aggregating everything.
On Solana, like, if anyonewants to swap a token, it's most
likely the first place thatthey go.
If anyone tries Solana, it'smost likely the first place they
go.
But there's other things that wecan aggregate.
(10:04):
We're focusing heavily onsomething called BLS signatures,
which enable arbitraryaggregation of signatures, and
that allows us to do a lot ofreally cool stuff, like one very
big advantage over like anormal Solana validator would be
, we can pre-aggregate votesover the gossip network.
(10:24):
So it's not like one vote, onetransaction, it could be.
You know, one transaction couldrepresent an arbitrary number
of votes.
This basically frees up a lotof block capacity With aggregate
signatures.
It's like the public key of oneand the public key of two.
Add them together, you get thepublic key of three right
(10:44):
Signature one, signature two.
Add them together, signaturethree and all of a sudden it's
like as though it was created bythis private key of you know
public key three.
But it wasn't.
It was made by you know two ora hundred or a thousand
individual signatures that weaggregated together into this
one tiny, succinct little pubkey and signature right.
(11:08):
So if we're able to do this, ifwe combine this very like
powerful primitive with somedecent like state proofs and
stuff, then it's possible notjust for us to like build like
technologies that enable us toconnect with other chains, but
it's also possible for ourconsensus to be validated on
(11:28):
other chains directly and sothat enables them to know things
about our chaincryptographically.
So our hope is that we willdevelop in the direction of
enabling use cases being goodfor devs.
There's a lot of use cases, asyou know, that mainnet SVM does
(11:50):
not necessarily.
Maybe it's possible, but maybeit's not like the best for
serving a lot of use cases.
We're hoping that we move inthe direction of we enable new
use cases, we enable newcryptography and just like
unlock new things, and thenSolana moves in the direction of
we make more transactions andyou know what, if they're
(12:12):
successful, we benefit and ifwe're successful, they benefit.
So I think that's kind of theway that I would describe it.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Yeah, have you looked at Twine at all in Ethereum
land or some of the stuff?
It was interesting.
You mentioned the state proofstuff Like this is something we
worked on to enable IBC betweenCosmos and Solana, so also just
happy to send some stuff we didon trying to enable IBC, because
(12:40):
it's probably a lot ofoverlapping stuff.
But how Twine works is likethey also they're like sort of
like aggregating a bunch ofproofs and like post them to the
same location.
So they're like sort of likeaggregating a bunch of proofs
and like post them to the samelocation and because of that
they have like pseudo crosschain interoperability because
they're using the samesettlement layer and then
there's some other fancy stuff.
But how do you guys, how do youguys think about sort of like
(13:03):
settlement and like is it goingto be that assets are actually
moving on this chain or is itgoing to be that you're more
just a place where everything isbeing posted, like just a bunch
of zkps being posted on jupnet,which then enables like some
sort of composability, like whatsort of direction do you guys
(13:24):
think you'll take it?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
yeah, I think for zk we're probably probably not
pursuing that angle, maybe forcompression and privacy purposes
, but outside of that, we'remostly pursuing digital
signature aggregation.
We think that it is faster andsimpler and easier to work with.
Ck can be very slow and addmonths or years to your roadmap.
(13:47):
And add months or years to yourroadmap.
We do think it's a verypowerful thing.
Of course, we don't belittle itat all, but, yeah, we're more
so using it where we think it'sa good idea to use it.
We see cryptography as use thebest tool for the job.
A lot of people, I think, willsprinkle ZK onto something and
(14:08):
be like ah, all of a sudden it'sVC friendly or something.
You know what I mean.
Like, like, it can be a bit ofa buzzword, but yeah, definitely
it's.
It's not a buzzword, right, itis definitely powerful as it as
it is.
Now we're able to facilitate,like swaps between multiple
chains using our chain, and sothat's, like you know, quite
powerful.
(14:28):
I would suggest that, uh,although like from the start,
like that's not really what weare doing right now that I think
funds would eventuallyaccumulate on the chain just
because of capital efficiency,but I think you really need to
sort of like create a goodmarket structure and create, you
know, a good amount ofliquidity and enable people to
(14:50):
actually, like you know, makemoney.
Essentially right Cross-chainarbitrage and being able to
aggregate, you know like, forexample, like SVM and EVM
together that's already likemassive.
I think you know we'll probablysee a bunch of funds like end
up on Jubinet natively, but yeah, a bunch of funds like end up
(15:13):
on Jupenet natively, but yeah,sort of starting off from the
interoperability first thing andthen sort of seeing how it
plays out.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
How does that abstraction work for the user?
Like if I'm a fund and I've gotEthan's soul and I want to
trade assets across chains, whatdoes that really look like?
Because I'm not like bridgingsomewhere and then trading right
, I'm just trading.
What's that experience looklike?
And how does it kind of workunder the hood and correct me if
I'm kind of going off in thewrong direction?
But that's kind of myinterpretation of what this is
supposed to be like.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Our take is, like the minimum level of trust that you
can have in a network isbasically in its validators
Right.
Like in Bitcoin, the minimumlevel of trust you can have is
miners and proof of work InSolana.
The minimum level of trust youcan have is the validators Right
, and it's not like you, justyou trust them.
Like they're trying to findeach other lying and, you know,
(16:01):
doing the wrong thing, like allthe time.
So, like you, have a prettygood reason to trust them right.
What we're doing is we'reenabling the validators to,
instead of just validatingtransactions that happen on
their own blockchain, they canvalidate transactions that
happen on other blockchains.
When we see like othertransactions happening on other
blockchains, the validatorsthemselves kind of have like a
(16:23):
mempool and they, you know,stock up these transactions and
then the leader is able tobasically create like a succinct
proof of like this mempoolcommitment and all the other
validators can vote on it andessentially, once we hit enough
signatures on the mempoolcommitment, then we're able to
(16:45):
treat it as oh okay, thesetransactions did happen, they
are finalized.
So the real key to that is thevalidators need to independently
retrieve these transactionsthemselves from multiple data
sources and then eventuallyagree From a user perspective,
like it like all this stuff ishappening under the hood and
(17:07):
you're just like, oh, I got thiscoin and I swap it for that
coin.
You kind of like don't reallylike know or care like where it
is and that's because we havelike, all of these things that
are happening are like deeplyintegrated into your, your
jupyter wallet and into the, theproducts that uh will be
launching on jupnet.
So, from a user perspective, alot is abstracted away, but, uh,
(17:30):
we'll also be able to show you,like transparently on a block
explorer, like, hey, if you wantto see what happened under the
hood, you know all these thingshappen.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
It's similar like to making a jupiter swap today,
right, like it shows the routesthat it took to get from point A
to point B.
Yeah, very similar.
And the mempool thing is that,like, if it's on ETH, if it's a
transaction on ETH, right, themempool kind of triggers the
transaction to actually go allthe way through or just proves
that, like is it sending or isit just reading the transactions
(18:00):
.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Think about how, like consensus works on Solana,
right, like we have a validatorwho basically gets spammed with
transactions and then they takethem all and they sort of like
pack them into like this linear,like commitment scheme and then
they like fan it out to othernodes and then the other nodes
like sort of asynchronously likecause, obviously, like you
(18:22):
cannot keep up with the blockproducer, right.
Like your verification musthappen after they kind of go
through and verify all thesethings, and then they say this
is a valid block, right.
So imagine if, instead of justbeing spammed with you know
those transactions from your ownnetwork, right.
If you're also listening forcontracts and events on other
(18:47):
networks, right.
And then you're packing thoseinto your block on the side,
right.
So it's like here's all thestuff that happens on my chain
and then here's all this stuffthat I've seen or I've observed
happen on other chains, right.
And then the leader will go andbasically propose this bundle of
transactions, right.
And then other valid will goand basically propose this
bundle of transactions, right.
And then other validators, whenthey are coming in and
(19:08):
validating their block, they'rekind of doing the same thing.
They have their own mempool,they've seen these transactions
themselves and they verify thatthey are finalized.
So they could be running a fullnode, they could be running an
RPC node, but the main thing is,if you have a whole bunch of
validators who have all seen thesame set of transactions and
(19:28):
agree on it, you can have a very, very high confidence that
these transactions actually didhappen.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Omar, how does this compare to what Mantis is doing?
How does this work?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Yeah, this does sound just like IBC.
Are you familiar with the IBCprotocol?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Yeah, yeah, I've seen IBC before, yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah, you're just basically describing the way IBC
works.
We have client updates, whichare basically when proofs from
one chain are propagated by arelayer that then sends it to
the other chain, which then hasa light client of the chain a
and verifies the thetransactions in that mechanism.
(20:08):
That's essentially what we'vedone is we have ibc between
ethereum and solana.
So, yeah, happy to help, likeyou know, show how we, how we
did that and stuff.
But yeah, it's that's whatpowers our solver network under
the hood of Mantis, whichbasically facilitates
cross-chain swaps betweenEthereum and Solana.
(20:29):
Even if you have a solvernetwork, you need a layer of
trust that you can actuallyverify and validate, and that's
where we used IBC.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
But yeah, this sounds like basically like a similar
type of protocol to IBC, so I'dencourage you to just check that
out, yeah I think the the maindifference is, like with ibc,
it's like a, it's bi-directionalright, whereas this is kind of
more so like it's more so likeone directional at this point,
(20:57):
like where it's like we're justlike reading and consuming
events from the other chain moreor less, as opposed to like ibc
.
You have you, you haveconnection from both sides
that's kind of getting.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
What I was asking her to is is whether there was like
a bi-directional flow here.
If you were just reading and itsounds like you're just reading
so like how does thetransaction actually get sent?
If you're just reading, like ifI'm swapping soul for eth, like
how does that happen?
How does the actual swap takeplace?
I mean, I get the verificationthat it's happened right, that's
what the networks that you justdescribed verifying.
(21:30):
It's true, so we know it's true, but how does it actually get
routed and sent to the wallet?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
when you create like a wallet for jupnet, you kind of
seamlessly create like a solanaaddress and ethereum address
and like so you kind of alreadyhave all these things sitting
there right.
So like if you were to depositsome eth into the address and
you were to swap for solana,like under the hood, what would
happen is there would be arequest for a swap that would be
(21:58):
published to jupnet and then itwould be like that that request
for a swap would basicallystart a chain reaction of events
where it's like I'm looking fora deposit on Ethereum and when
my validators of this networkhave seen that deposit, then I'm
happy to basically create arequest for Solana to process a
withdrawal right.
(22:18):
So there is the possibility foryou to do things on the chain
itself, but then there's alsothe ability to use the chain as
like a middle point, like apoint of truth that enables you
to swap between multiple chainsand so like inside your wallet.
Like this is all just liketotally seamless.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Got it so like, like, just as an example cause, you
probably be using a differentkinds of pools on both sides,
right, or maybe they're the samekinds of pools, but that's how
you're doing the swaps.
Right, you've got like a soleETH pool, but they're not
actually on the same chain, likethe ETH is on the ETH chain and
the sole is on the sole chain,and so it's like saying, hey, is
this ETH chain representationvalid and there's actually
(22:56):
enough deposits in there to tofor for me to get my accurate
sole1.
Usdc is maybe SPL for one ETH,right, like $1,000 worth of USDC
for whatever the amount, andthen it knows that it's still
there and then it triggers thesend because it says, yes, it's
there, and it triggers the sendon both sides.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
That's yeah, essentially yes, and there's
some really complicated problemsto solve there.
The biggest one that comes tomind is like, like Ethereum all
uses like 256-bit integers,whereas Solana uses all 64-bit.
So then, like you have thequestion of like, if I have this
token on ETH and this token onSolana, like how do I do the
(23:37):
translation?
Because a lot of tokens on ETHhave got like 18 decimal places
or something right, like Solanawould just like never do that.
You know there's multiple waysto solve it.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Like you know, this is There'll be lots of dust,
there'd be lots of roundingright.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, the way we solved it on JupyterNet is we
just have a token program thatsupports 256-bit integers, so we
don't lose precision.
Basically, we have this U64asset and this U256 asset, and
we just allow both, Becauseotherwise we would have to.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
It's not just rounding right.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
It can get even more insane than that.
Like, let's say, you have some,you know, like abk coin right,
like on on on eth, and it's gotlike 20 decimals and like a
bazillion supply right, and youwant to put it on solana.
Like you would actually have tolike create a token that's
called like 100 000 ab ABK tokenor something right, and it's
(24:37):
like 100,000 of the units of thetoken, not like the decimals,
like the units, and then cutthat off so that it would fit in
the U64.
Like Binance has actually donethis as well.
So, yeah, that's one solution,right, rounding, bundling, et
cetera.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
But yeah, yeah, interesting, how far along is
cheap net uh, it's been indevelopment for like quite quite
a few months.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
But like we we have like a functioning like internal
test net that works and we havelike working swaps across
multiple chains.
Uh, if you look at the talksthat we gave at cat's temple,
like we actually have like realvideo of like the real chain and
products working on it andeverything.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
So yeah, it's, it's coming along yeah, well, I can't
wait to add support to svm kid.
I actually was messaging myco-founder this morning after I
chatted with you on on telegramand we can support it while it's
still closed source.
He just needs to talk to you,so I'll put you guys in a chat
and hopefully that'll make yourlives a little easier.
You know, spinning up andtearing down test nets and dev
nets and stuff like that whathave we not asked you that we
(25:41):
should have asked you that youwanted to talk about as far as
any, any any of this stuff goeswe could talk about, like the
technology about zoos.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
We could talk about the quantum vault yeah, quantum
vault.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I want, I want to talk about that, we want, we
talked about that before theshow.
So tell me what the QuantumBolt is.
What is that?
Speaker 3 (25:58):
I think it was around I can't remember if it was like
end of December or start ofJanuary Solana caught some FUD
from one of the usual suspectssaying like oh, solana will be
the first casualty of Quantum.
And I saw that and I'm like youknow, know I've been wanting to
do like some like quantumcryptography because, like I've
(26:18):
done a lot of cryptography, likea lot of people don't realize,
like you know, salada labs hasmade like two signature schemes
that people commonly use, like Imade like four, you know.
So, like I, I do a lot of thislike open source cryptography
stuff and I've always likethought, like quantum
cryptography seems like itshouldn't be possible, like
(26:40):
within such a small transactionsize.
But after doing research andlike just stumbling across like
the correct solution, I cameacross Winternet's signatures
and so they're a hash-basedsignature scheme and so
essentially, with quantumcomputers, the big threat is
that they're very good atfactorizing numbers very, very,
(27:04):
very efficiently, and so thatmeans if you have private keys,
it's able to, for any public key.
Try a lot of, essentially try arange of private keys, very,
very, very, very well, it'll doa whole range of private keys,
and then you can use somethingcalled Shor's algorithm.
(27:25):
It basically enables you tovery quickly derive the private
key from a public key.
So this is really scary.
Obviously we don't really knowwhat post-quantum blockchain
would look like.
As far as I know, there's nosuch thing as, say, like
post-quantum zero knowledgeproofs.
Yet right, like it's prettyscary because the properties of
(27:47):
like being able to, like youknow, aggregate numbers together
and then it like remains asecret is kind of totally blown
apart by efficient factorization.
So for for now, we're kind oflike the.
The common consensus really islike quantum computers are good
at factorizing, bad at hashing.
Right, so for hashing they arestill better than normal
(28:08):
computers, but they are onlyquadratically better.
So, like if you had SHA-256, itwould basically reduce it to
SHA-128 or something likeroughly reduce it by that much.
So the nice thing is, if youactually look at it, it's
possible to do hash-basedsignatures on Solana.
Now, it would have been nice todo Lamport signatures,
(28:32):
considering Leslie Lamport, theguy that Lamports are named
after.
It would have been nice to doLamport signatures, considering,
you know, leslie Lamport, theguy that Lamports are named
after, it would have been nice.
But Winternet signatures areactually kind of a variation on
his idea that allow you to kindof trade like the size of the
proof for some computation, yeah.
So I thought, all right, look,this looks doable.
So I went and just like oneafternoon, just like made a,
(28:54):
made an example of it, got itworking in SVM, and then I
created like a nice vaultprogram for it and the vault is
very simple.
It's a single use signaturescheme.
So it enables you to create avault, close a vault and split a
vault, and so if you rotateyour private key every single
time, you can essentially, youknow, create as many vaults as
(29:15):
you want and you kind of justlike split your funds and
whatever.
This is also applicable tothings like program update
authorities and stuff like that.
It's possible that, like ifSolana or you know any SVM
system were to come under aquantum zero-day attack, that
you would have a safe havenwhere you could send your funds
(29:37):
and everything else would gethacked before you like, your
funds would be safe and a lot ofpeople say like, oh, that's not
really good enough.
Like we need to quantum proofthe whole system and blah, blah,
blah.
It's like yeah, sure, I agreewith that.
Like maybe not today, but likeat some point in the future, yes
, like when it becomes a realcredible threat.
(29:57):
But from my perspective, all Icare about is like if this thing
does get attacked, obviouslyit'll go down.
Validators will like figure itout, like this will happen on
every network, right, and thenthey'll figure out, like you
know what's the migration scheme?
Like how do we, you know, moveforward from here?
What I care about is, if Ilocked my funds up and quantum
(30:22):
computers can't steal them, thenno matter what version of the
ledger or the blockchain state,that like ends up being accepted
and like you know where we moveforward from there, my funds
are going to be safe.
That, for me, is like the mostimportant thing and yeah, it
just so happens that it's doable.
On Solana Mainnet.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
So what you're saying is, like you know, the snapshot
that everyone agrees on isbeing the source of truth for
the restart of a network that'squantum resistant.
After that may or may notinclude your funds, unless they
were locked in this vault.
And if they were locked in thisvault, you're guaranteed that it
will include those fundsbecause they didn't get stolen.
We're kind of at the top of theshow here.
I really appreciate you comingon.
(31:02):
Thanks for all yourcontributions.
How can people follow along andcontribute to JoopNet and kind
of see the work that you'redoing?
Speaker 3 (31:08):
The best way you can find that is just follow me on
Twitter, at DeanMLittle, also onGitHub.
Yeah, stay tuned, because we'regoing to keep dropping cool
stuff Awesome.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
You just listened to the Index Podcast with your host
, alex Cahaya.
If you enjoyed this episode,please subscribe to the show on
Apple, spotify or your favoritestreaming platform.
New episodes are availableevery Friday.
Thanks for tuning in.
Thank you.
Welcome to the index podcast hosted by Alex Kaya.
Plug in as we explore newfrontiers with entrepreneurs,
builders and investors, shapinganother episode of Everything
SVM.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm your host, alex Kahaya, joined by my co-host,
omar Zaki, co-founder and CEO ofMantis, and today we are
excited to have Dean Little onthe show.
He's a chief scientist at ZeusNetwork and a cryptography
researcher for the JupiterResearch Center.
He's had a ton of contributionsto the Solana ecosystem and is
(00:59):
really active and involved as aresearcher here, and if you've
seen him on Twitter, you've seenhim publish some pretty cool
stuff lately related to JupNetand also related to some quantum
resistant technology for Solanathat we'll talk about.
But just as a recap for people,everything SVM we cover, the
Solana virtual machine, theSolana ecosystem here.
This is sort of a sub show ofthe index podcast and it's meant
(01:22):
to be an open forum for peopleto talk about open source and
Solana.
So thanks so much, dean, forcoming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So, dean, like I just want to start from the
beginning, just to give peopleyour background.
How did you get involved inSolana?
You know what was your entrypoint to crypto and kind of tell
me a little bit about why youwake up every day and build in
this space like you're anincredibly talented guy, like
why choose to work on theseproblems versus go to do
something in ai?
(01:50):
Or you know you could be in any, any number of spaces working.
Why, why this?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I think I first heard of bitcoin like like mid 2010s.
The first time that I ever tookit very seriously was in 2017.
Once I figured out what it wasand what it does, I became
basically committed to that ideafull time, mostly because I
think if you allow people totake control of their
(02:19):
communications, their money,their own destiny, you make the
world a much better place.
Their money, their own destinyyou make the world a much better
place.
You rid the world of, I think,a lot of evil and you know,
enable individuals to beempowered to.
You know take control of theirfuture.
I think, like, if you look atall the stuff that came out
during like the 2010s about likeyou know how governments are,
(02:42):
like you know spying on peopleand controlling people and you
know things like that, it was avery like pivotal time in terms
of like how people think aboutthese things.
So I think for me, that waslike my starting point.
Before that, I worked in, youknow, app development.
I did a brief stint in hardwareas well as aerospace, in
hardware as well as aerospace,but, yeah, since 2017, full-time
(03:06):
Bitcoin development, and thenit came out to like around about
I guess, three, three and ahalf years ago or something that
I started getting like moreheavily involved in Solana.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
You were one of the original co-founders of Turbine,
or part of Turbine early days.
Can you talk about that andwhat that was?
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
When I joined, richard, one of the co-founders
of like Turbine's previouscompany, web3 Builders Alliance,
basically said like, oh, we'relooking for people to teach
Solana.
And I'm like cool, like Ihaven't really touched Solana
for like a year and I'm notsuper good at it but and he's
(03:48):
like, oh, the whole thing's Rustbased.
And I'm like, oh, okay, I, yeah, I can do that.
So I just like jumped in andstarted learning as I went and,
yeah, like that turned into memaking kind of like a massive
library of open source, justlike Solana contracts libraries
and stuff like that.
Yeah, we like rolled that intoa new company called Turbine and
(04:12):
basically we used all of theprograms and all the things that
I kind of built to teach myselfSolana to then go out and, yeah
, have quite a large impact onthe ecosystem.
According to Solanafoundation's figures, we had
trained something like 15percent of all active devs.
Uh, like coming up tobreakpoint.
It's been really cool, likejust being able to have been a
(04:33):
part of that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, it's, it's really great tell me more about
your role at zeus network and atthe jupiter research area.
Can you talk more about thosetwo things?
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, sure, so, because I'm a pretty good Solana
developer, hopefully, and alsomy long background in Bitcoin.
There's two people in Taipei,justin and Jim, who I met during
the Solana Hacker House.
Justin calls me and Justin'slike hey bro, how do we put
(05:06):
Bitcoin on Solana?
And I'm like, oh, I got you.
I was like very familiar withall of the cryptography behind
it and I had been working on alibrary like a Rust library for
Bitcoin and it's like.
It's like, in my opinion, likethe best, most usable library.
It just so happens to becompatible with the SVM and
there was only, like you know,one or two major things that I
(05:27):
really had to fix to like makeit compatible.
So, and so the reason.
I like went with like chiefscientist as opposed to like CTO
is because my work there isreally more that of like a
protocol developer and toolmaker, so like I make tools and
(05:53):
then we hand it to the team andthey go and like do awesome
stuff with it.
And then for the JupiterResearch Center, this is like
really funny.
But I just randomly got like amessage on Telegram one day from
Justin Starry Shout out, starry, he's also here in taipei.
And he's like yo meow islooking for, uh, someone who's
good at cryptography.
And I'm like, okay, I think Ifit that description.
(06:15):
I just messaged him.
It was around that time thatzeus was launching our tge on
the lfg launchpad on jupiter andso like they had helped us a
lot at that point.
And so I'm like, okay, likewhat can I do to help them, sort
of thing.
And like I messaged me on andhe's like, bro, fly to kl
tomorrow.
And I'm like, uh, okay, I goand meet them.
(06:37):
And like the jup team is likesuper dope, they're like such
good people.
I went and like demonstratedhow we had managed to.
We're the first team in theworld to have implemented
Schnorr signatures inside of SVM, which enables us to verify all
of the taproot transactions onBitcoin, which has never
(06:59):
previously really been donebefore on Solana.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
What's the significance of the taproot
signature on Bitcoin?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, so there was a major upgrade to Bitcoin a
couple of years ago calledTaproot, and it's the thing that
enabled ordinals, inscriptionsand all of that, and so
obviously that's become its ownecosystem.
At this point, so to simplyjust support the classical
standard Bitcoin transactionsmeans you're missing a very
(07:27):
large part of the protocol.
And Taproot is also really coolbecause it allows you to have
like multiple scripts hidinginside of like a single, like a
tree of scripts, and if you justreveal the execution path that
you're actually using, then,yeah, you can like use whatever
unlocking script it allows.
So it means like it's reallyactually super good for the idea
(07:50):
of like bridging liquidity orsomething like that, because it
allows you to have like a lot ofbackup plans so you don't like
accidentally lock funds and losethem forever or something.
But yeah, so I demoed that tothem and then, uh, you know,
they just me.
I was like you know, you wantto be a technical advisor.
And I'm like yeah, like sure.
And then, just like, over time,just got more and more involved
(08:13):
, like helping out on certainlike products and stuff, until
the point it's like, yo, we'regonna launch jupnet.
You know, do you want to belike a cryptography researcher?
Basically, just like, keepdoing all the stuff you're doing
, like making all this, likeopen source cryptography stuff.
We'll put it under like thisnew entity and, you know, give
you resources and give you sortof support and distribution, and
(08:36):
I'm like sounds great.
So, yeah, they've been supergreat to work with.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Can you walk us through, walk us through some of
the technical details of JupNetand how it works?
And you know you said it's anSVM chain but it's going to be
for like settling on all chains,right?
So can you walk me through howit works?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You know, in the early days of like any project,
like it's trying to find itsidentity right.
But I think like we've got apretty good direction.
So if you think about, likeSolana's North Star, right, it
would be like IBRL rightIncreased bandwidth, reduced
latency.
Ibrl right Increased bandwidth,reduced latency.
And so the way that Solana willdevelop, I believe, is that it
(09:20):
will continue to just seek highperformance transaction
processing over a lot of otherthings.
Right, perhaps many would sayto the expense of other things.
Right, the goal of Jupyter, thevery simple goal, is to be the
svm that people want to fork.
And so if we had to like kindof like nail it down to like our
like you know four wordcatchphrase, it would be
aggregate anything, verifyanywhere.
(09:41):
So, like you know, jupiter is a, is a dex aggregator, primarily
right it it's kind of alreadyalready done a very great job of
aggregating everything.
On Solana, like, if anyonewants to swap a token, it's most
likely the first place thatthey go.
If anyone tries Solana, it'smost likely the first place they
go.
But there's other things that wecan aggregate.
(10:04):
We're focusing heavily onsomething called BLS signatures,
which enable arbitraryaggregation of signatures, and
that allows us to do a lot ofreally cool stuff, like one very
big advantage over like anormal Solana validator would be
, we can pre-aggregate votesover the gossip network.
(10:24):
So it's not like one vote, onetransaction, it could be.
You know, one transaction couldrepresent an arbitrary number
of votes.
This basically frees up a lotof block capacity With aggregate
signatures.
It's like the public key of oneand the public key of two.
Add them together, you get thepublic key of three right
(10:44):
Signature one, signature two.
Add them together, signaturethree and all of a sudden it's
like as though it was created bythis private key of you know
public key three.
But it wasn't.
It was made by you know two ora hundred or a thousand
individual signatures that weaggregated together into this
one tiny, succinct little pubkey and signature right.
(11:08):
So if we're able to do this, ifwe combine this very like
powerful primitive with somedecent like state proofs and
stuff, then it's possible notjust for us to like build like
technologies that enable us toconnect with other chains, but
it's also possible for ourconsensus to be validated on
(11:28):
other chains directly and sothat enables them to know things
about our chaincryptographically.
So our hope is that we willdevelop in the direction of
enabling use cases being goodfor devs.
There's a lot of use cases, asyou know, that mainnet SVM does
(11:50):
not necessarily.
Maybe it's possible, but maybeit's not like the best for
serving a lot of use cases.
We're hoping that we move inthe direction of we enable new
use cases, we enable newcryptography and just like
unlock new things, and thenSolana moves in the direction of
we make more transactions andyou know what, if they're
(12:12):
successful, we benefit and ifwe're successful, they benefit.
So I think that's kind of theway that I would describe it.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Yeah, have you looked at Twine at all in Ethereum
land or some of the stuff?
It was interesting.
You mentioned the state proofstuff Like this is something we
worked on to enable IBC betweenCosmos and Solana, so also just
happy to send some stuff we didon trying to enable IBC, because
(12:40):
it's probably a lot ofoverlapping stuff.
But how Twine works is likethey also they're like sort of
like aggregating a bunch ofproofs and like post them to the
same location.
So they're like sort of likeaggregating a bunch of proofs
and like post them to the samelocation and because of that
they have like pseudo crosschain interoperability because
they're using the samesettlement layer and then
there's some other fancy stuff.
But how do you guys, how do youguys think about sort of like
(13:03):
settlement and like is it goingto be that assets are actually
moving on this chain or is itgoing to be that you're more
just a place where everything isbeing posted, like just a bunch
of zkps being posted on jupnet,which then enables like some
sort of composability, like whatsort of direction do you guys
(13:24):
think you'll take it?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
yeah, I think for zk we're probably probably not
pursuing that angle, maybe forcompression and privacy purposes
, but outside of that, we'remostly pursuing digital
signature aggregation.
We think that it is faster andsimpler and easier to work with.
Ck can be very slow and addmonths or years to your roadmap.
(13:47):
And add months or years to yourroadmap.
We do think it's a verypowerful thing.
Of course, we don't belittle itat all, but, yeah, we're more
so using it where we think it'sa good idea to use it.
We see cryptography as use thebest tool for the job.
A lot of people, I think, willsprinkle ZK onto something and
(14:08):
be like ah, all of a sudden it'sVC friendly or something.
You know what I mean.
Like, like, it can be a bit ofa buzzword, but yeah, definitely
it's.
It's not a buzzword, right, itis definitely powerful as it as
it is.
Now we're able to facilitate,like swaps between multiple
chains using our chain, and sothat's, like you know, quite
powerful.
(14:28):
I would suggest that, uh,although like from the start,
like that's not really what weare doing right now that I think
funds would eventuallyaccumulate on the chain just
because of capital efficiency,but I think you really need to
sort of like create a goodmarket structure and create, you
know, a good amount ofliquidity and enable people to
(14:50):
actually, like you know, makemoney.
Essentially right Cross-chainarbitrage and being able to
aggregate, you know like, forexample, like SVM and EVM
together that's already likemassive.
I think you know we'll probablysee a bunch of funds like end
up on Jubinet natively, but yeah, a bunch of funds like end up
(15:13):
on Jupenet natively, but yeah,sort of starting off from the
interoperability first thing andthen sort of seeing how it
plays out.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
How does that abstraction work for the user?
Like if I'm a fund and I've gotEthan's soul and I want to
trade assets across chains, whatdoes that really look like?
Because I'm not like bridgingsomewhere and then trading right
, I'm just trading.
What's that experience looklike?
And how does it kind of workunder the hood and correct me if
I'm kind of going off in thewrong direction?
But that's kind of myinterpretation of what this is
supposed to be like.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Our take is, like the minimum level of trust that you
can have in a network isbasically in its validators
Right.
Like in Bitcoin, the minimumlevel of trust you can have is
miners and proof of work InSolana.
The minimum level of trust youcan have is the validators Right
, and it's not like you, justyou trust them.
Like they're trying to findeach other lying and, you know,
(16:01):
doing the wrong thing, like allthe time.
So, like you, have a prettygood reason to trust them right.
What we're doing is we'reenabling the validators to,
instead of just validatingtransactions that happen on
their own blockchain, they canvalidate transactions that
happen on other blockchains.
When we see like othertransactions happening on other
blockchains, the validatorsthemselves kind of have like a
(16:23):
mempool and they, you know,stock up these transactions and
then the leader is able tobasically create like a succinct
proof of like this mempoolcommitment and all the other
validators can vote on it andessentially, once we hit enough
signatures on the mempoolcommitment, then we're able to
(16:45):
treat it as oh okay, thesetransactions did happen, they
are finalized.
So the real key to that is thevalidators need to independently
retrieve these transactionsthemselves from multiple data
sources and then eventuallyagree From a user perspective,
like it like all this stuff ishappening under the hood and
(17:07):
you're just like, oh, I got thiscoin and I swap it for that
coin.
You kind of like don't reallylike know or care like where it
is and that's because we havelike, all of these things that
are happening are like deeplyintegrated into your, your
jupyter wallet and into the, theproducts that uh will be
launching on jupnet.
So, from a user perspective, alot is abstracted away, but, uh,
(17:30):
we'll also be able to show you,like transparently on a block
explorer, like, hey, if you wantto see what happened under the
hood, you know all these thingshappen.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
It's similar like to making a jupiter swap today,
right, like it shows the routesthat it took to get from point A
to point B.
Yeah, very similar.
And the mempool thing is that,like, if it's on ETH, if it's a
transaction on ETH, right, themempool kind of triggers the
transaction to actually go allthe way through or just proves
that, like is it sending or isit just reading the transactions
(18:00):
.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Think about how, like consensus works on Solana,
right, like we have a validatorwho basically gets spammed with
transactions and then they takethem all and they sort of like
pack them into like this linear,like commitment scheme and then
they like fan it out to othernodes and then the other nodes
like sort of asynchronously likecause, obviously, like you
(18:22):
cannot keep up with the blockproducer, right.
Like your verification musthappen after they kind of go
through and verify all thesethings, and then they say this
is a valid block, right.
So imagine if, instead of justbeing spammed with you know
those transactions from your ownnetwork, right.
If you're also listening forcontracts and events on other
(18:47):
networks, right.
And then you're packing thoseinto your block on the side,
right.
So it's like here's all thestuff that happens on my chain
and then here's all this stuffthat I've seen or I've observed
happen on other chains, right.
And then the leader will go andbasically propose this bundle of
transactions, right.
And then other valid will goand basically propose this
bundle of transactions, right.
And then other validators, whenthey are coming in and
(19:08):
validating their block, they'rekind of doing the same thing.
They have their own mempool,they've seen these transactions
themselves and they verify thatthey are finalized.
So they could be running a fullnode, they could be running an
RPC node, but the main thing is,if you have a whole bunch of
validators who have all seen thesame set of transactions and
(19:28):
agree on it, you can have a very, very high confidence that
these transactions actually didhappen.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Omar, how does this compare to what Mantis is doing?
How does this work?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Yeah, this does sound just like IBC.
Are you familiar with the IBCprotocol?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Yeah, yeah, I've seen IBC before, yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah, you're just basically describing the way IBC
works.
We have client updates, whichare basically when proofs from
one chain are propagated by arelayer that then sends it to
the other chain, which then hasa light client of the chain a
and verifies the thetransactions in that mechanism.
(20:08):
That's essentially what we'vedone is we have ibc between
ethereum and solana.
So, yeah, happy to help, likeyou know, show how we, how we
did that and stuff.
But yeah, it's that's whatpowers our solver network under
the hood of Mantis, whichbasically facilitates
cross-chain swaps betweenEthereum and Solana.
(20:29):
Even if you have a solvernetwork, you need a layer of
trust that you can actuallyverify and validate, and that's
where we used IBC.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
But yeah, this sounds like basically like a similar
type of protocol to IBC, so I'dencourage you to just check that
out, yeah I think the the maindifference is, like with ibc,
it's like a, it's bi-directionalright, whereas this is kind of
more so like it's more so likeone directional at this point,
(20:57):
like where it's like we're justlike reading and consuming
events from the other chain moreor less, as opposed to like ibc
.
You have you, you haveconnection from both sides
that's kind of getting.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
What I was asking her to is is whether there was like
a bi-directional flow here.
If you were just reading and itsounds like you're just reading
so like how does thetransaction actually get sent?
If you're just reading, like ifI'm swapping soul for eth, like
how does that happen?
How does the actual swap takeplace?
I mean, I get the verificationthat it's happened right, that's
what the networks that you justdescribed verifying.
(21:30):
It's true, so we know it's true, but how does it actually get
routed and sent to the wallet?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
when you create like a wallet for jupnet, you kind of
seamlessly create like a solanaaddress and ethereum address
and like so you kind of alreadyhave all these things sitting
there right.
So like if you were to depositsome eth into the address and
you were to swap for solana,like under the hood, what would
happen is there would be arequest for a swap that would be
(21:58):
published to jupnet and then itwould be like that that request
for a swap would basicallystart a chain reaction of events
where it's like I'm looking fora deposit on Ethereum and when
my validators of this networkhave seen that deposit, then I'm
happy to basically create arequest for Solana to process a
withdrawal right.
(22:18):
So there is the possibility foryou to do things on the chain
itself, but then there's alsothe ability to use the chain as
like a middle point, like apoint of truth that enables you
to swap between multiple chainsand so like inside your wallet.
Like this is all just liketotally seamless.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Got it so like, like, just as an example cause, you
probably be using a differentkinds of pools on both sides,
right, or maybe they're the samekinds of pools, but that's how
you're doing the swaps.
Right, you've got like a soleETH pool, but they're not
actually on the same chain, likethe ETH is on the ETH chain and
the sole is on the sole chain,and so it's like saying, hey, is
this ETH chain representationvalid and there's actually
(22:56):
enough deposits in there to tofor for me to get my accurate
sole1.
Usdc is maybe SPL for one ETH,right, like $1,000 worth of USDC
for whatever the amount, andthen it knows that it's still
there and then it triggers thesend because it says, yes, it's
there, and it triggers the sendon both sides.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
That's yeah, essentially yes, and there's
some really complicated problemsto solve there.
The biggest one that comes tomind is like, like Ethereum all
uses like 256-bit integers,whereas Solana uses all 64-bit.
So then, like you have thequestion of like, if I have this
token on ETH and this token onSolana, like how do I do the
(23:37):
translation?
Because a lot of tokens on ETHhave got like 18 decimal places
or something right, like Solanawould just like never do that.
You know there's multiple waysto solve it.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Like you know, this is There'll be lots of dust,
there'd be lots of roundingright.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, the way we solved it on JupyterNet is we
just have a token program thatsupports 256-bit integers, so we
don't lose precision.
Basically, we have this U64asset and this U256 asset, and
we just allow both, Becauseotherwise we would have to.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
It's not just rounding right.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
It can get even more insane than that.
Like, let's say, you have some,you know, like abk coin right,
like on on on eth, and it's gotlike 20 decimals and like a
bazillion supply right, and youwant to put it on solana.
Like you would actually have tolike create a token that's
called like 100 000 ab ABK tokenor something right, and it's
(24:37):
like 100,000 of the units of thetoken, not like the decimals,
like the units, and then cutthat off so that it would fit in
the U64.
Like Binance has actually donethis as well.
So, yeah, that's one solution,right, rounding, bundling, et
cetera.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
But yeah, yeah, interesting, how far along is
cheap net uh, it's been indevelopment for like quite quite
a few months.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
But like we we have like a functioning like internal
test net that works and we havelike working swaps across
multiple chains.
Uh, if you look at the talksthat we gave at cat's temple,
like we actually have like realvideo of like the real chain and
products working on it andeverything.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
So yeah, it's, it's coming along yeah, well, I can't
wait to add support to svm kid.
I actually was messaging myco-founder this morning after I
chatted with you on on telegramand we can support it while it's
still closed source.
He just needs to talk to you,so I'll put you guys in a chat
and hopefully that'll make yourlives a little easier.
You know, spinning up andtearing down test nets and dev
nets and stuff like that whathave we not asked you that we
(25:41):
should have asked you that youwanted to talk about as far as
any, any any of this stuff goeswe could talk about, like the
technology about zoos.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
We could talk about the quantum vault yeah, quantum
vault.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I want, I want to talk about that, we want, we
talked about that before theshow.
So tell me what the QuantumBolt is.
What is that?
Speaker 3 (25:58):
I think it was around I can't remember if it was like
end of December or start ofJanuary Solana caught some FUD
from one of the usual suspectssaying like oh, solana will be
the first casualty of Quantum.
And I saw that and I'm like youknow, know I've been wanting to
do like some like quantumcryptography because, like I've
(26:18):
done a lot of cryptography, likea lot of people don't realize,
like you know, salada labs hasmade like two signature schemes
that people commonly use, like Imade like four, you know.
So, like I, I do a lot of thislike open source cryptography
stuff and I've always likethought, like quantum
cryptography seems like itshouldn't be possible, like
(26:40):
within such a small transactionsize.
But after doing research andlike just stumbling across like
the correct solution, I cameacross Winternet's signatures
and so they're a hash-basedsignature scheme and so
essentially, with quantumcomputers, the big threat is
that they're very good atfactorizing numbers very, very,
(27:04):
very efficiently, and so thatmeans if you have private keys,
it's able to, for any public key.
Try a lot of, essentially try arange of private keys, very,
very, very, very well, it'll doa whole range of private keys,
and then you can use somethingcalled Shor's algorithm.
(27:25):
It basically enables you tovery quickly derive the private
key from a public key.
So this is really scary.
Obviously we don't really knowwhat post-quantum blockchain
would look like.
As far as I know, there's nosuch thing as, say, like
post-quantum zero knowledgeproofs.
Yet right, like it's prettyscary because the properties of
(27:47):
like being able to, like youknow, aggregate numbers together
and then it like remains asecret is kind of totally blown
apart by efficient factorization.
So for for now, we're kind oflike the.
The common consensus really islike quantum computers are good
at factorizing, bad at hashing.
Right, so for hashing they arestill better than normal
(28:08):
computers, but they are onlyquadratically better.
So, like if you had SHA-256, itwould basically reduce it to
SHA-128 or something likeroughly reduce it by that much.
So the nice thing is, if youactually look at it, it's
possible to do hash-basedsignatures on Solana.
Now, it would have been nice todo Lamport signatures,
(28:32):
considering Leslie Lamport, theguy that Lamports are named
after.
It would have been nice to doLamport signatures, considering,
you know, leslie Lamport, theguy that Lamports are named
after, it would have been nice.
But Winternet signatures areactually kind of a variation on
his idea that allow you to kindof trade like the size of the
proof for some computation, yeah.
So I thought, all right, look,this looks doable.
So I went and just like oneafternoon, just like made a,
(28:54):
made an example of it, got itworking in SVM, and then I
created like a nice vaultprogram for it and the vault is
very simple.
It's a single use signaturescheme.
So it enables you to create avault, close a vault and split a
vault, and so if you rotateyour private key every single
time, you can essentially, youknow, create as many vaults as
(29:15):
you want and you kind of justlike split your funds and
whatever.
This is also applicable tothings like program update
authorities and stuff like that.
It's possible that, like ifSolana or you know any SVM
system were to come under aquantum zero-day attack, that
you would have a safe havenwhere you could send your funds
(29:37):
and everything else would gethacked before you like, your
funds would be safe and a lot ofpeople say like, oh, that's not
really good enough.
Like we need to quantum proofthe whole system and blah, blah,
blah.
It's like yeah, sure, I agreewith that.
Like maybe not today, but likeat some point in the future, yes
, like when it becomes a realcredible threat.
(29:57):
But from my perspective, all Icare about is like if this thing
does get attacked, obviouslyit'll go down.
Validators will like figure itout, like this will happen on
every network, right, and thenthey'll figure out, like you
know what's the migration scheme?
Like how do we, you know, moveforward from here?
What I care about is, if Ilocked my funds up and quantum
(30:22):
computers can't steal them, thenno matter what version of the
ledger or the blockchain state,that like ends up being accepted
and like you know where we moveforward from there, my funds
are going to be safe.
That, for me, is like the mostimportant thing and yeah, it
just so happens that it's doable.
On Solana Mainnet.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
So what you're saying is, like you know, the snapshot
that everyone agrees on isbeing the source of truth for
the restart of a network that'squantum resistant.
After that may or may notinclude your funds, unless they
were locked in this vault.
And if they were locked in thisvault, you're guaranteed that it
will include those fundsbecause they didn't get stolen.
We're kind of at the top of theshow here.
I really appreciate you comingon.
(31:02):
Thanks for all yourcontributions.
How can people follow along andcontribute to JoopNet and kind
of see the work that you'redoing?
Speaker 3 (31:08):
The best way you can find that is just follow me on
Twitter, at DeanMLittle, also onGitHub.
Yeah, stay tuned, because we'regoing to keep dropping cool
stuff Awesome.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
You just listened to the Index Podcast with your host
, alex Cahaya.
If you enjoyed this episode,please subscribe to the show on
Apple, spotify or your favoritestreaming platform.
New episodes are availableevery Friday.
Thanks for tuning in.
Thank you.
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