Wen Encrypted Ethereum?

Conor Svensson: So, yeah, great to have you guys here and I don't know if you're still in Thailand or you're back from Devcon now?

Cais Manai: Yeah, yeah, back home now. Yeah, it was really good bumping into you at Devcon. What did you think of the event?

Conor Svensson: I thought just it kind of really reinvigorated me. I wasn't at Devcon, the last one but I've been to like the previous four before that and I think just all the energy and the builders and everything together, it just reminds you kind of why we're all you working with Ethereum and focused on that because it's just so fantastic community around it all.

Cais Manai: Yeah, totally agree. There's some real sort of super smart, up and coming people in the Ethereum space as well. Like some of the talks just blew my mind and I'm like, well, how old is that guy? And he's like, oh yeah, he's like 19 years old and still in university and it's like, wow, you know, the future's super bright!

Conor Svensson: Absolutely. And there's some really exciting projects on the horizon and also here now and which is obviously why I've got you guys here. And so just to kick things off, would you like to both introduce yourself? I'll ask Gavin to go first and then Cais and just start with that and then we'll get going properly.

Gavin Thomas: Thanks Conor. Yeah, so super quickly about myself. 20 odd years delivering complex software, originally in TradFi, so I did a few big software releases for some global banks, inter-dealer brokers. Whilst I was doing, it was actually a regulatory program back in, oh my gosh, it must be 2015 that I came across blockchain. Because it looked like Blockchain could be this technology that was going to make regulatory reporting much cheaper, much more efficient, less error prone. And that's actually what took me to a company called r3. And some people listening might know r3 and I joined r3 when it was still very small. I think I was employee number 15. So I really went through that startup scale up phase with those guys. Whilst we were building Corda, their enterprise grade blockchain, that took us quite some time so we figured we would do something in the Ethereum space as well. So that's really what got us together to build Ten. So that's my background briefly. Cais over to you.

Cais Manai: Yeah, like Gavin I spent a lot of time in TradFi as well. So I used to be a quant developer for Credit Suisse. So I used to work on the equity derivatives trading desk and you know build complex trading models and risk analytics for the exotics business. I spent some time in prime brokerage as well but I'm actually a computer scientist. Way back when I was at university Cryptography was something I was always interested in. My final project on the course was around hash chaining and being able to add privacy to VOP or voice over IP. So you know, when Bitcoin first came along and I think I first came across Bitcoin thanks to a talk by Peter Todd. I think it might have been at Qcon in London that was when I first came across it and then went down the rabbit hole immediately. It just made total sense. I think everyone, once you hit that aha moment it totally blows your mind. So yeah I started sort of mining Bitcoin and back in the day you know it wasn't a store of value, it was peer to peer cash. So I was mining Bitcoin and then using it to buy things like my daily coffee. There was a coffee shop in East London where I lived and you can actually spend it there. So yeah that was good. I founded multiple startups in my time as well. I built a platform called Flexurn which is an advanced wage access platform which enables employees to access known wages on demand. I built a gaming pl bitcoin back in 2012 and Gavin I also worked at r3. At r3 I was a product manager so I led some of the initiatives on Corda, primarily around payments and central bank digital currency. These days at Ten, formerly Obscuro, I mainly focus on community marketing and of course product.

Conor Svensson: And you know you guys have obviously spent a lot of time working in the corporate side of things and then kind of moved across to the really, what is a pure play, you know, Web3 protocol that you're building out in the form of Ten Network. What are some of the, I guess, motivations that made you feel right, this is the way we need to go. Now for those of us who I guess have been in that sort of place where enterprise, and then the worlds of enterprise blockchain and so on, and there was a lot of interest in it for many, many years, but it's certainly been, much kind of slower to I think, move forward in the ways that many of us originally anticipated it would. And hence there's been, I think over time, a much bigger shift in focus onto these public protocols and networks. And so what's the thing that brought you guys from r3, which a lot of people, they've gone on to do big things as well from there. But what really made you think, right, we need to focus on these public protocols?

Gavin Thomas: Yeah, that's a good question. I guess we didn't know that we were going to make that switch when we started out with Corda, obviously and I guess to your point, institutions do move incredibly slowly. So, there might actually be more happening from an institutional side than you might realize because some of it's being done behind closed doors. But anyway, to answer your question, it took us six years to get to Corda version four, the version that's being used right now for Italian settlement and for most of the global CBDC projects. And in that time we saw Ethereum become such an enormous ecosystem of liquidity innovation. And we figured we'd built some really good encryption technology with Corda, and we wanted to be able to bring that over to a public blockchain space. And Ethereum was the most obvious destination to do that really. I guess that decision was also qualified, I guess because we were already hearing from the institutions, they were already asking questions. This is back in 20, 21, 22, they were already asking, do we really need to tie ourselves to a private blockchain or could we use a public blockchain if the right technology solutions were there? So I think that probably sowed the seeds in our minds. And then we realized we could actually do it. What do you think, Cais?

Cais Manai: Yeah, no, I agree. I think it made sense to go on the journey that we went on to kind of see things firsthand because when we were working on Corda, although Ethereum showed all this promise, like the biggest use case at the time was Cryptokitties. And you know, it was seen as, you know, I guess by those not involved as a bit of a joke. And it felt like the tech perhaps wasn't going in the direction we'd hoped. But then all that changed, with the advent of DeFi, and then people started taking it really seriously. Right? Because then it felt like, hang on a sec, maybe we don't need to build an enterprise blockchain, maybe we don't need a private blockchain to disrupt fin lines, but actually we can leverage what's being done in the public space. And you know, the speed at which open source software moves, particularly in Web3, like I always say, Web3 is like this microcosm of the real world, except it moves at 100 times the speed and you know, it's just very, very difficult to compete with that. Right? You know, anyone can come along, anyone can build anything, anyone can deploy anything. It's all interoperable, it's all composable and you know, something like Solidity, it's actually very easy to learn and it abstracts away so much of the complexity of software development. So, you know, I think you just get to this point where you're like, well actually I think this is where it's going to go. You know, one big global computer or one big global settlement network, whatever you want to call it, but that's the way forward. It's all about network effects and you want to be part of and be building on the biggest network because that's where the world's going to land. So yeah, I think that's the decision point for us and you. We realize, like Gavin was saying, that, you know, Ethereum is definitely the place to be.

Conor Svensson: So it's really these, I think two things really stuck out with what you said there. One was this firsthand kind of approach to privacy that was identified through innovations being created at 3Real. But then the other is this ability to piggyback and align yourself with where the most rapid pace of innovation is with regards to these public networks.

Gavin Thomas: Yeah, because really the success of any DApp is going to be where the majority of the developers are and I really need to credit some of the people I was working with at 3Real. I think it really established that foundation of our thinking, that we chose to build Corda in a very straightforward language that was used widely. And knowing that you're only going to be successful if you can have a super low friction experience for your developers as well as your users, that's the only way you're going to be successful. It kind of sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it's very easy to get into a workshop with your engineering team and everybody gets really excited about technology. Oh yeah, we could do this, we could do that. But actually if you have the underlying principle that other builders have to be able to use this really easily, because there is such a number of options now you've got so much to choose from if you're building a DApp that you have to be the natural destination and the only way to do that is to be a very good experience to build on.

Conor Svensson: And so the key part of that is obviously the EVM and this powerful ecosystem that surrounds it. So going back to the privacy side of things, I think especially when we talk about how these sort of enterprises have work where they've got to with respect to blockchain and there's large systems of scale behind closed doors that many people aren't aware of that are starting to disrupt TradFi, and then you've got the stuff that's happening more in the open within web 3. What do you see the endgame is with regards to Ten protocol in terms of it providing on chain privacy. Is there a future where it could actually cater for all of the needs of these large enterprises even though it's a public network because of the privacy model that it uses?

Gavin Thomas: Yeah, 100% and really I'll be brief but we have been talking to TradFi like top tier institutions and if they want to, I don't know, have an oracle of equity prices for example, to do that on a public blockchain just massively increases their reach. So there is a very exciting endgame or I should say endgame future for Ten but I'll let Cais really get into it.

Cais Manai: Yeah, so I guess let's first unpack the P word, privacy. It's an overloaded term particularly in Web3. So when we first started building you knowwe were called Obscuro and we were a privacy chain and what we didn't realize was that translated into we’re zcash or we're Monero. And everyone was asking, well are you just a privacy token? It took a while for us to realize, well to figure out rather how to explain what it is we're actually doing. Because it's not about private value transfer because zcash, Monero and the rest of those do a fantastic job already. And there was that ruling today, against OAC, which you should all look into, it's fascinating. But for us it's about smart contract privacy and that's a very different thing. So, you know, if we sort of look back to when some of us first started using a PC, one of our earliest experiences would have been something like Solitaire or Mindsweeper, right? That would have been, you know, us on our PC and we're computing alone. Then the Internet was born and things got more social and this need to compute together was required. Right? So, you know, servers started springing up and really cool applications started being deployed to those servers. You know, applications that would collect people's data, information, process them in interesting ways, and the result would be something like Facebook. Right? But you know, the cost of that was obviously vendor lock in data silos, single point of failure, lots of data sovereignty and all the classic things that we've seen happen over the years. So then when Web3 came along, it's like, okay, essentially we were saying, can we decentralize the server? Is there a better way to build the Internet? But the problem that wasn't really addressed was, if you're going in a decentralized open way where anyone can be a node operator, then you lose some of the superpowers that a server gives you. Right? For all its flaws a server still affords you privacy as long as you trust the operator. If I post something on Facebook and I only want that shared with friends and family, then I can trust the centralized service server would do that for me. So what Ten really is about is enabling those same superpowers you typically see in a centralized server, but in a decentralized world. So with Ten, every node operator doesn't get to see what you're doing. If I want to, I guess the simplest use case is still if I want to send a token from A to B, I can do that. But if I want to do something a bit more sophisticated like let's say I wanted to build decentralized Facebook, that's a serious undertaking right and that's something that I don't think many people are trying to tackle right now because all the complexities of being able to keep various bits private, being able to personalize bits based on complex relationships and so on and so forth. Whereas something like Twitter you can decentralize because that lends itself well to broadcast to all. So yeah, I guess in terms of privacy that's one of the end goals which is -  can we enable developers to build anything they can currently build in web two but with a web three backbone? So that's the direction we're currently heading in. You know the end goal would obviously be for Ten or Ten tech or Ten stack to replace a lot of the existing Internet and for a lot of the applications we currently see to be rebuilt in a decentralized way that gives power back to the users. So that would be one of the end goals for Ten.

Conor Svensson: Oh and then in terms of the technology, one of the things that you're embracing for this is these trusted execution environments and I think it would be good to unpack why they're so well suited to this specific use case.

Gavin Thomas: Yeah we've been working with trusted execution environments for quite some time really right back into the R3 days and even many of the engineering team before then. So yeah trusted execution environments have had a rough ride. They weren't hot at all. You know zkp fhe with a posted TR children for encryption and privacy. But I think TEES have now probably through demonstration, you know the work that Flashbots are doing is pretty cool. When you actually see that this is a battle hardened technology, it's been used for a number of years and it really allows you to achieve the kind of encryption outcomes that are going to be required to meet the vision that Cais has just explained. So by running the entire Ethereum virtual machine within the trusted execution environment you then end up with the out of the box privacy that really these new generation of DApps are going to demand. But more so you also have selective privacy. So the smart transparency that Cais talks about is all down to the ability of being able to choose which parts of the data. As a developer, you want to have private and which parts of the data you want to have public. So you get that perfect mix. It's not all or nothing. And again, that's only achievable, but because we're using trusted, execution environments.

Conor Svensson: So what are the benefits of using TEES, over some of the other approaches that have been taken for on chain previously, there's obviously other protocols that are out there that are focusing on a similar space, but they're not using TEES there. And so what are the benefits of this approach?

Cais Manai: Well, the biggest benefit is that it's available today and works today, and unlocks a huge number of use cases for Web3 today. It's incredibly scalable. So in tests we've done, you know, Ten versus, say, Arbitrum, Optimism, the fact that we're using a TEES only gives us a performance hit of about 8%, which, given the benefits, is hardly anything. Right? It also gives you the ability, like Gavin was saying, to deploy something like an entire EVM within this secure environment and that's huge because you can suddenly give developers this option where they can build with privacy without having to move outside of the EVM, without having to learn a new language. Like, if you look at some of the CK options out there, you know, you've got to learn Cairo, you've got to learn Noir, and that's a friction point, right? Whereas most Web3 developers are solidity developers. So you get to give them that superpower of being able to build with tools and languages they're already familiar with. The other advantage is you get to leverage or stand on the shoulders of giants, right? You get to leverage metamask, you get to leverage all the great stuff that already exists around the EVM ecosystem, without having to change a single thing. I think that's incredibly powerful. And then there's another thing that doesn't get talked about enough, which is this idea of attestation. So it's not just about being able to have things like selective privacy, but it also gives you this absolute guarantee that the code you think is running really is running. So if I sort of build some code, I can deploy it to, sorry, write some code and deploy it to Ten or wherever. If it's running inside a TEE, I can generate an attestation and confirm that you know the source code from some sort of GitHub repo matches exactly what's been deployed and running within that environment. And why that's becoming really interesting is the advent of AI agents, right? You've probably seen loads of them spring up all over Twitter. And the problem they face is nobody knows if these AI agents are really, quote, unquote autonomous or whether it's just some guy in the background writing the tweets and moving things around in their wallets.

Conor Svensson: Right?

Cais Manai: How do you know? But if you deploy your AI agent inside a TEE, all of that suddenly changes because then you know with absolute certainty. Well, the code I think is running, really is running. It's operating in this way. It's generating its own Twitter credentials. It only knows the private key for the wallet that it controls, for example, and you suddenly get this amazing superpower. So I think a good example of that is TE Hee, which was built by the flashbots team. So that'sapprovably autonomous AI agent currently out there and we released one yesterday. It's called Ten Intern. And again, I think that's the second provably autonomous AI agent. So, yeah, I think TEEs are incredibly powerful. and this is why you go Twitter now, you see a lot more positivity about it because people suddenly realize that, hey, hang on, this is actually some pretty cool tech and it can do what we need it to do today.

Conor Svensson: I was interested to hear how the whole AI agent fits into this, because obviously there's been a lot of talk about this recently. I've got to jump back in and ask some questions just about the developer experience side. It's an area very close to my own heart. We still maintain the Web3j library here at Web3 Labs and work with a lot of these other kinds of developer tooling teams at the moment on some initiatives. But the current paradigm that developers have, when they work with solidity, right, they deploy a contract, say, just take the classic ERC20 example. It's on chain, everyone can see it, and so on. So all they really need to think about is whether they're using a known account or a new account for that. But there's no doubt a paradigm shift required for when they're embracing privacy within the context even of solidity. What does that kind of look like, just in terms of a quick sort of overview.

Cais Manai: Yeah, sure, all right. So the mental model is to look at Ten as being just the EVM. So let's say for example you take in the ERC20 contract from a particular token you create. It would operate in exactly the same way as it does on Ethereum or Arbitrum, Optimism or any other chain, right? It would be completely transparent in the sense you know all the functions are available, you can call them so you can get balance of me, Gavin, whoever. Right? Where it gets interesting is it's actually the contract state that is kept hidden, right? Or the computation over that contract that is kept hidden. So why that's interesting is because you can then take something like an ERC20 and say let's say the getbalance function, right? You could add a line of code within that function that says only return the balance if the balance being requested is that of message sender otherwise fail and then now you can keep account balances private and you could write that same code in Ethereum of course. But because everything, all the compute is transparent, the node operator could just run some commander, I'm not sure is it storage out or whatever it is. They could run some command and sort of just see what's really happening and get your balance that way. But that's really the paradigm so it's not really that much of a shift at all. It's just you know, assume everything's transparent as it is today, but then you as a developer have this power to start selectively adding bits of code to restrict data access when and where you need it.

Conor Svensson: Makes a lot of sense. So I mean I'd love to go a bit deeper into that still but appreciate that now's probably not the time to get into the nuances of all the aspects of what can be achieved for developers given we want to ensure that people here can have some broader takeaways. You've launched the testnet for Ten, what's the current roadmap for the project right now?

Gavin Thomas: So yeah, focusing on getting mainnet ready to launch. So just last week with feature complete, at least we're into feature code where we're now really checking things over so that we can make sure that we got everything secure and as bug free as we possibly can to make it ready for early next year so we can do our mainnet launch. But I think some of the most exciting things that we'll be doing in the near term, I guess from a slightly wider context than just the technology. We're looking at being able to distribute a sequence of revenue amongst the community. We've got a great plan around an incentivization approach for people, developers and users alike, that are using Ten that's something slightly unique, that we'll share more details on there at a time. I think what we're particularly looking forward to being able to have a very seamless deployment experience as well. So we've been working hard on making sure that node operators can get up to speed very quickly with deploying a Ten node and that translates into people also being able to use the Ten stack themselves and have their own Ten flavored networks for their own niche purposes or just because they want to have that additional level of control around having an encrypted network. So those are the most immediate things. Cais I'm probably missing off a couple of nice juicy product pieces as well.

Cais Manai: What else? No, I think you've covered most of it. I think like despite our backgrounds and where we've come from and what we've built, we've got some insane Degen stuff coming up as well that we'll talk about closer to the time. But if you thought memes and pump up fun was degen, we've got a few things up our sleeves that’s gonna blow people's minds! Because you know, we think it's interesting. You know, I think meme coins get a bad name and you know more recently a lot of the people that have been on boarded into Web3 have been via the meme coin route. So you know, it's one of these things where you do have to kind of appeal to that demographic as well. So yeah, we've got some really cool stuff coming up around that. Some more stuff around AI agents as well. But yeah, like Gavin says, you know, mainnet itself is mostly feature complete now and it's just about battling it and getting it ready for launch.

Gavin Thomas: Actually if anybody does want to get the best view on the roadmap, we did a Ten roadmap series on Twitter, earlier on in the autumn so if anybody just does a search on #Tenroadmap, they'll pick up all those tweets and it lists everything that's coming up in the near term.

Cais Manai: Cool.

Conor Svensson: That's so awesome to hear. Yeah, and I think very, very, very interested to hear what the memes look like when they come out as well, because there's definitely a big part of the Web3 narrative right now. People, you know, love it or hate it, they're definitely here to stay. So we're at time now, but just to say thank you so much guys for joining us on the space today. It's really, really exciting to hear more about the Ten Network and where you're headed and this whole thing of privacy on chain. It's something that's absolutely key and we need it now. It’s great that you're making so much progress with it so thank you.

Gavin Thomas: Been a pleasure. Thanks, Conor.

Cais Manai: Thanks, Conor. Always a pleasure speaking with you guys.

Conor Svensson: Right bye.

Cais Manai: Thanks everyone.

Conor Svensson: Bye.