- Introduction
- How was your day?
- When did you start Sovryn and what was really the goal of Sovryn?
- How BOS even came to be involved with Cardano
- Why Cardano?
- So what is the first chain that you guys are going to build this Bitcoin integration on?
- Are you going to use the BTC-OS token to incentivize Bitcoin liquidity on Cardano?
- Are Sovryn an incubator or an investor?
- A few things about the $BOS token
- How are you kind of balancing security between the different blockchains and which blockchains stand out?
- $BOS Token utility
- How could BitcoinOS work on non-UTXO chains?
- How to make this happen quicker?
- Is there really a benefit to having all of these different blockchains?
- Have you open sourced all your work so far?
- What would be the benefit to someone that's just using Bitcoin to store, as a savings instrument?
- How far are we away from having Bitcoin using BOS on Cardano?
- Why did you consider Cardano to be vaporware in May 2022?
- Where will $BOS token be actually issued?
- Are you guys healthy financially? Is $BOS token to raise capital?
- What in particular are you querying from the Cardano blockchain that you need to access?
- What do you think about Charles saying that whatever bridge and hybrid application for Bitcoin DeFi must include an option where you always pay with your BTC
- Why not just focus on Cardano, make it perfect, then move on to the next one?
- Are you in talks with any of the founding entities?
- Is this the project that you're working on with Bob Bodley?
- Where is that going to live?
- Why aren't there much technical details released yet?
- Has there been any research into Ergo and the Rosen bridge as a potential processing layer?
- Charles, Elon, SpaceX and Hedera
- Conclusion
Hello everybody.
Thank you for joining.
It's going to be an awesome space tonight.
I've been working all day preparing some great, great questions for you.
I'm going to be playing music for the next three to five minutes.
You may hate the music.
I am sorry.
It's my first time ever playing music for a space.
We're going to be getting started about three or four minutes and we're going to play some music in between.
Thank you.
Thank you everybody for tuning in.
We're going to be playing music for about three minutes until we have all of our co-speakers today.
I've made a bunch of questions for today.
I've been really excited about the PCOS for quite a bit now and then we had the token news earlier and it kind of freaked a lot of people out.
We're going to dig into it today.
We're going to learn more about the founder.
We're going to learn more about his past, how he met emergo, and then what led to Cardona and what led to the token.
You guys may have seen the post where he actually called Cardano Vaporware a couple of years ago.
So I'm going to ask him, essentially, what changed your mind?
I see Iago already requesting.
I'll just bring him on up here.
There's already so many people in the space.
You guys don't even need to hear my terrible music.
Iago, how are you doing today, my friend?
It has been an extremely exciting and educating day.
Quite exhausting too.
I'm glad to be able to join you guys.
Looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for joining.
I'm going to go ahead and invite you as a co-host, just in case it increases our connection a little bit.
I am on an Island now.
I'm on Starlink.
So if you guys have any connect, if we have any connection issues and the space crashes, just check my account, you'll see a new space start right up after that.
So, uh, honestly, you know, let's, uh, you know, how was your day?
Uh, yoga.
We'll, we'll keep it a little light here for a minute.
Let some more people join in.
Cause we're not even at the time yet.
Sure.
I mean, look, I woke up to a huge amount of messages.
Many of them, you know, really seemed very angry.
And I have to admit, it took me very much by surprise.
Partly because the token sort of wasn't a new idea.
Partly because,
you know, it doesn't detract anything from what we're trying to do.
In my view, it only adds, and certainly no one was going to be forced to use the token.
But also, I think just more broadly, I think, you know, I come from a Bitcoin Maxi background, right?
And I, over the last few years, have sort of
moved away from believing that we need to get rid of tokens.
But, you know, but my people, right, the Maxi people have attacked many, many projects just for the fact that they have a token.
And I think Cardano in particular has been under attack for a long time.
And one of my goals here is to try and break that, to try and change that, because I think it's a terrible narrative for Bitcoin.
And I think it's a terrible narrative
really for the entire crypto space.
And the reason it's a terrible narrative for Bitcoin is because I think it makes people small-minded.
I think it has made Bitcoiners dumber.
It has made them unable to see what is going on.
And it has more importantly limited the opportunities for innovation because innovation requires the ability to experiment.
It requires the ability to create new types of incentives
tokens are key to creating those new types of incentives.
And I also think tokens themselves are this really, um, are basically the, the, the, the found that they're the reason this entire industry exists, right?
I think maybe some people have already heard me talking about the fact that I think that the fact that we call this the blockchain industry is, is just a deep, um,
sign of how little we understand what the purpose of our industry is, what the purpose of our movement is.
It's not about creating blockchains.
It's not about producing blockchains.
It's about producing ownership.
It's about creating the most perfect ownership that we've ever had.
And tokens are the thing that you own.
These things that grant you new powers, that grant you the ability to transact internationally, because they embed in them the rights
To a service or the ability to to to unlock new features without needing a contract without needing to Figure out how you're going to provide different kinds of services in different regulatory environments and so I just think that the the whole sort of Bitcoin attitude of there should only ever be one token has been so completely counterproductive so I think you know on the one yeah, I woke up this morning and I
In many ways, I thought it was just such a sweet justice that I was being attacked, that BOS was being attacked on this because, you know, we deserve it, right?
Bitcoiners have created this culture and we deserve the shoe to be on the other foot and for people to be kicking us in our heads.
But on the other hand, I was also just very, very surprised.
I wasn't expecting, you know, the Cardano community is not a community that I've been deeply embedded in.
But just on the basis of the fact that the Cardano community has sort of built additional tokens, has been on the wrong end of these kinds of attacks.
I just didn't think that sort of that would be something I encountered.
So, you know, I'm looking forward to this conversation because there's a lot that I want to understand.
There's a lot that I want to learn.
Me as well and I want to say thank you for taking the time.
You know, I woke up this morning and I saw some of the same posts that you did and I shot you a message and you responded right away and kind of speak into, you know, why I think people have that response is because a lot of people have been sold this idea of ownership of, you know, crypto assets of these protocols and they buy these tokens and they take their ADA or their Bitcoin and, you know, they buy these tokens that never come to fruition and the founder just kind of runs off with the bag of money.
And because you guys didn't really mention this token from day one, I think a lot of people in the Cardano community kind of viewed it as, you know, almost like an upgrade to Cardano.
I know that we have Taproot on Bitcoin and, you know, there's some, you know, the hard fork that happened recently on Cardano added some extra ability.
And I want to get into that tech a little bit later, but I think it would be good to ask you, you know, about your past.
You know, when did you find crypto?
I want to learn more about Sovin.
As well, I heard that 10% of the token supply of BTC-OS is going to go in them.
So when did you find crypto?
When did you start Sovryn?
And what was really the goal of Sovryn?
So the project is called Sovryn, like a sovereign individual or sovereign ownership.
So let me sort of rewind the clock a little bit, and I'll tell you a little bit about myself and sort of how I ended up here.
It's... I had a particular moment when I was speaking on stage at a Cardano conference around a month ago, right?
Which is kind of like a wreck-it-scratch moment.
And then the narrator comes in, I never expected to find myself here.
So let me tell you sort of how I ended up here.
So I was born in South Africa.
South Africa at the time was an apartheid country.
And my family were members of the ANC, which was Nelson Mandela's sort of resistance movement.
And before that, my family had sort of managed to survive the Holocaust by hiding jewels inside of themselves.
And there's a huge amount of stories I can tell about that.
Those were the stories that I grew up on.
And then I grew up in South Africa, and at some point, part of my family were forced to flee the country because they had been designated as terrorists by the apartheid government.
And so I found myself at the age of nine, between the ages of nine and 11, smuggling gold.
My mother would sew Krugerrands, these gold coins, into my clothes.
And I would go through the airport at Jan Smuts because they wouldn't look too carefully at children.
And I would fly with these gold coins and smuggling these gold coins to get money to my family.
And years later, we left South Africa.
And I sort of have always had this very, very strong libertarian streak in me, which kind of didn't mesh very well with my family, which was much more left wing, much more
communist, but I think we were on the same wavelength in terms of really believing in the ability for every person and the responsibility for every person to try and make the world a little bit better.
And with that libertarian aspect of me, I was also very, very enamored with technology, because my view is that really only two things have really materially improved
human life.
And that is free markets and freedom in general, but free markets are the basis for freedom and technology.
And I was very, very worried about the internet because what I saw was this, the growth of this like 21st century technology, which had the economic and social sophistication of the, you know, of the iron age, of the bronze age.
A few pharaohs controlled the entire flow of the Nile in Egypt and a few pharaohs controlled the entire flow of information on the internet.
And there was no such thing as an economy on the internet.
There was no such thing as private property on the internet.
There was no such thing as data or privacy control on the internet.
Everything was owned by the pharaohs.
At the same time, I was working on, I was a neuroscientist and I was working on AI.
I was trying to replicate human,
neural networks and also rat neural networks into code so that we could use that to sort of create the first kinds of AI.
So I was like into AI in 2011 and that was what I thought I was going to be doing.
And because I was reading a lot of papers in network science, I came across the Satoshi White paper and it hit me like a brick in the face.
It blew my mind.
By the time I'd ended, by the time I'd finished reading that paper, I had emailed everyone I knew.
I told them that Bitcoin was going to be huge, that one day it would have a market cap of maybe even a billion dollars.
And I was convinced that this is how we were going to bring free markets to the world, private property to the internet.
And we were going to fix the problems that I saw with the internet.
And we would also fix the problem that forced, you know, nine-year-old me to have to smuggle gold.
And I've been in Bitcoin ever since.
And I've had huge ambitions for what I think Bitcoin and crypto can be, which is a way to fundamentally rethink the degree of sovereignty that people can have and to build tools and institutions that are based in code, that are transparent, that are available to everyone
and that most importantly are incorruptible.
And so over the course of the years, I started one of the first remittance companies in the space.
We sent money all over the world using Bitcoin, got money into places that you couldn't get money into like Ukraine or Zimbabwe.
And I worked with some of the largest banks in the world.
trying to get them integrated into Bitcoin.
And when the pandemic hit, I worked with a bunch of Bitcoiner friends that I had to set up a network to get masks to hospitals around the world.
Supply chains had broken down.
And so we set up a network, a decentralized network of people who were producing masks and delivering them to hospitals and to
to fund this, we were providing some of the funding, but we wanted to raise money.
And so we wanted to create some way of giving people NFTs for every single mask that they donated.
And we wanted to do this on Bitcoin.
And so at the time we were called the Distributed Collective.
And we started playing around with the tools that we had available to us on Bitcoin at the time.
And sort of that initial work led to two developers going and actually building a DEX on Bitcoin because, you know, the exploration had led to new things.
And that ultimately led to the creation of Sovryn, which became the first DeFi platform on Bitcoin, reached scale, was the first one to reach scale, is still today the biggest, has an extremely robust DAO with 20 to 30% participation, no large holders like
extremely distributed and extremely innovative.
Built the first Bitcoin decks, built the first Bitcoin lending system, built Bitcoin-backed stable coins for the first time.
Just a huge list, like built the first decentralized bridge for runes in BRC20s.
And part of the thing that we were doing is we realized the technologies that we had still meant that we needed federated pegs,
still meant that there was a lot of trust in the system.
And so even in 2000 and 2021, we set up a group to study how we could bring true scalability and rollups to Bitcoin.
And we started working on ZK proofs for Bitcoin.
And, um, and so that's how I ended up here.
Um, it's been, you know, Sovryn has been just such a phenomenal force in terms of innovation.
in the Bitcoin space has really changed the Overton window in terms of what people can think of, talk about and do in Bitcoin.
And BOS is maybe the biggest, most important thing that has emerged from Sovryn.
Awesome.
Well, I really appreciate you going into that history there.
And, um, you know, I definitely really like your story.
You know, I think a lot of us have our personal stories as far as what led us to crypto and, you know, yours is right there on the ground, you know, to happen to bring gold over to another area.
So, you know, with Sovryn, you know, 10% of the, the BTO BTC OS supply is going to go to Sovryn and we're going to get into what is BTC COS right after this question.
But I wanted to go into.
you know, the future of BTC OS and Sovryn and a little bit about the history, you know, what value has Sovryn provided to BTC OS in the past and what value will they provide in the future ultimately.
So I'd be happy to get into that.
And I also, you know, want to make clear that I'm here to, you know, answer questions and also to ask questions myself and try and learn.
Uh, sure.
But, but I, I think there are a few things that are,
are worth pointing out before we get into the specifics of Sovryn and token distribution and stuff like that.
So, yeah, that makes sense.
I'm really just trying to get, you know, a history from you.
There's a lot of Cardano people here, and I can tell that your audience is here as well.
And, you know, we just kind of want to learn more about you, because you guys kind of popped up out of nowhere and, you know, just kind of started killing it in terms of engagement.
So we just want to learn more about that history.
But feel free to ask questions as we go forward.
And anyone listening in, click that little comment button to ask your question, or we'll give you a little bit of time later in the space to come up.
Sorry, Iago.
No problem.
That's awesome.
Thank you.
So I think, you know, I've been reading the comments and I've been trying to understand what people's concerns are and how people are thinking about this.
And I think it would be helpful to understand sort of how BOS even came to be involved with Cardano at all.
Because that wasn't the initial thought or the plan.
It wasn't even on our radar.
Initially, as we were building this,
our plan was we were going to build the first ZK rollup on Bitcoin.
And sort of that was our thinking four and a half years ago.
And as we started working and actually solving some of the deep technical problems of how you actually do this, which most people consider impossible on Bitcoin, without some kind of hard fork or at least a soft fork.
As we were building this, this movement that
to a great extent Sovryn had started, which is DeFi and Bitcoin continue to grow.
And also, because of Taproot, we saw the emergence of BRC20s, we saw the emergence of Ruins, we saw the emergence of Ordinals, and suddenly Bitcoin was in this revolution.
And we saw over a few months at the beginning of this year, more and more and more projects coming
out saying that they were building layer twos for Bitcoin, they were building roll-ups for Bitcoin, and none of them were actual roll-ups for Bitcoin, none of them were actual layer twos for Bitcoin.
They all had the same problem, which is that they needed exactly the technology that we were building.
And so we realized that actually the big opportunity for us was to help these projects become real layer twos, real roll-ups to Bitcoin.
And it was a huge market.
Even now, Merlin has a billion dollars in TVL.
Bitcoin squared has a billion dollars in TVL.
Cordow has even more.
Just a few of those projects were billions of dollars in TVL, billions of dollars in asset value, and they were more and more popping up all the time.
And so we were racing to get this technology ready.
And we put out a paper in April,
describing how we were going to make this happen.
And then in July at Bitcoin Nashville, the largest Bitcoin conference of the year, the same one that Trump spoke at, for the first time ever, we demonstrated ZK on Bitcoin mainnet without any changes to Bitcoin.
And we got an influx of interest, a huge influx of interest, which we kind of expected.
But what surprised us was that the influx of interest was not just coming from
Bitcoin projects.
It was coming from Ethereum L2s.
They were asking, can they become a Bitcoin L2?
It was coming from bridging projects.
It was coming from projects focused on building ZK apps.
And it was coming from other L1 projects, which we really didn't expect.
And one of the most aggressive projects that sort of reached out to us was Cardano.
Ultimately it was Emurgo and Sheldon.
who sort of were the prime driver behind this.
And so we started learning about Cardano for the first time.
And even though Cardano didn't figure into our initial plans, as we started to learn more and more about Cardano, we realized that it was just an amazing fit for this because it has the same
long-term vision as Bitcoin, the same sort of patience and building as Bitcoin.
It has the UTXO system, which matches Bitcoin like a glove matches a hand.
And its community was huge, which we realized after, like, we had no idea, but after I gave my talk at the Dubai conference, at the Cardano conference, the
reaction that we got from the Cardano community just showed us how much bigger the Cardano community was than anything else.
And so we've been sort of on this multi-year program to build out this technology.
And we've been sort of racing to get it working as soon as possible.
And the way we're doing this is an iterative basis.
As we develop something, we sort of release it.
A lot of the first ZK prover,
And Verifier is on mainnet and Bitcoin already.
It's open source.
We're about to release a newer, better version.
Today, for the first time, we demonstrated actual bridging of assets and using ZK proofs in a trustless way between Bitcoin and Merlin.
And at the same time, we were thinking, how are we going to solve some of the problems that we saw needed a token?
And we wanted to build a system where you didn't need a token, where you could sort of have something which we thought was kind of new.
And I still think is a new approach, which is sort of like a freemium model, where anyone can use the technology, anyone can use the OS, but there's certain things that we couldn't make work as well without the token.
And so there, power users or projects or whatever,
can use the token.
And if we do our job well, no user ever actually knows that they're using BitcoinOS.
Everything just sort of works seamlessly.
It disappears into the background.
And so one of the things that we wanted to do was distribute this token in a healthy and decentralized fashion.
So we've mostly been self-funding this project and we wanted to actually avoid going down the route of taking VC capital.
We wanted to avoid the route of sort of launching the token at a very, very expensive price, which was probably not justified.
And we wanted to give people who were super excited and interested about the project and wanted to use it, the ability to get access to the token so that as the system went live, they would have a way to use it.
And so we've been trying to figure out if we can do that and how we can do it.
And so we've actually been talking about the token for a long time.
I think the last time we tweeted about it was November,
early November, November 4th.
But, you know, we've been talking about it in our forums, we've been talking about it on Twitter, we've been talking about it everywhere.
It just hasn't gotten the level of attention that, for whatever reason, the tweet yesterday got.
Yeah, I mean, that's really not too long ago, November 4th.
You know, you're kind of getting to some of the questions that I have, and I kind of want to rewind just a little bit.
You know, why Cardano, right?
You mentioned kind of the same vision.
Obviously, the community here is a sleeping giant, and there's been a narrative that kind of keeps that
You know thought away from the rest of the industry but let's let's get into like you know the technicals right obviously they're both utxo you mention this upgrade to bitcoin taproot you know what what on cardano side is making you guys choose cardano as the first block chain with btc os.
So we're not it's it's not the first block chain there are other block chains as well.
But it is a very, very special blockchain and it does have very, very significant advantages.
And we've been getting more and more excited about Cardano, the more we've interacted with the community, but in particular, the more we've learned about Cardano.
The two primary things that Cardano has that really make it stand out, actually there are three things.
One is it is a UTXO based smart contract platform.
And not only is it a UTXO based smart contract platform, it is the biggest UTXO smart contract platform.
And that allows the transaction mapping to be much easier.
It allows the ZK proofs to be much easier.
It just works so much better with Bitcoin than an account-based model.
The other thing is that part of the people working on the project actually have a background in Cardano.
And we never really discussed it as a team until this started to arise.
Like they're people working on building programmable tokens for Bitcoin and they've got experience.
Their previous experience is actually working on Cardano.
And this is just part of a bigger story, which is that I think the biggest pool of developers in the world who know how to build smart contracts and build programmable systems for UTXO, in other words, also for Bitcoin as it becomes programmable, are Cardano developers.
And so just those two things,
mean that Cardano is an extremely powerful system.
It's an extremely sort of well-positioned system for the world that we're trying to bring into reality, where you get programmable Bitcoin that is able to integrate with all of crypto.
So the way that this was sold to me, and I may be incorrect here, is that because Cardano is UTXO, that it actually has the ability to be the first trustless bridge of Bitcoin.
I mean, if you look at Ethereum, there's over $10 billion of value, probably more now, in Bitcoin and WBTC, and that's all held by a multi-sig wallet.
Right.
So what is the first chain that you guys are going to build this Bitcoin integration on?
And also, does Cardano have that added security benefit as being able to have a trustless way of owning BTC on Cardano?
So I don't think Cardano is necessarily the first.
As we've been building the system, we've actually been building for many, since January, we've been building the system actually to work with account based models and to work with EVM.
And we've been dealing with the many, many challenges of trying to do that.
So I don't necessarily think Cardano is going to be the first.
A lot of this depends on how quickly we can get it integrated into Cardano.
And to a great extent, that depends on the Cardano devs, not on us.
And I hope- What are you guys missing?
Like Cardano dev wise, right?
Are we talking about a hard fork here?
Are we talking about, you know, a front end?
I'll get to that in a second.
So let me just finish my thought.
So again, I don't know if Cardano is going to be the first, but I do think that Cardano can be one of the best, if not the best, and can definitely carve out an extremely important position for itself.
Now, as for what's missing, no fork is required on Cardano.
Cardano today for the first time demonstrated ZK proofs with Halo 2.
Cardano has BLS.
So there's nothing sort of like on the base level of the consensus or the chain that is missing.
What is missing is a light client.
And a light client, we can do this without a light client, but a light client makes it much, much easier because we can integrate a light client into a Bitcoin OS node.
And then through that, basically give Bitcoin the ability to see what's happening in Cardano.
Without a light client, the whole thing becomes much more complicated.
But we had a conversation with Charles and a bunch of other developers yesterday, and they are racing to get this kind of light client constructed.
And so we don't know exactly how long that's going to take, but it feels close.
And once that's available, then the only other component that really needs to be built out is the smart contract.
side that needs to exist on Cardano.
So there needs to be a smart contract that is able to both read and produce ZK proofs of state changes on both Bitcoin and Cardano.
Okay.
I really appreciate that clarification.
I saw a tweet from you a couple of weeks ago and, um, you know, I, I think it was smart, right?
You know, we've been trying to bring USDC to Cardano.
And one thing that we've mentioned is, you know, and I'm working with Sheldon on this, actually.
One thing that we've mentioned is we have to incentivize people to use USDC.
And I saw a tweet where, you know, you, you kind of mentioned should Cardano kind of incentivize people to bring Bitcoin over.
And I, I kind of think, you know, if it's trustless, I think that we should, we probably should incentivize people to bring over, you know,
Are you going to use the BTC-OS token to incentivize Bitcoin liquidity on Cardano?
So the Bitcoin-OS, so the BOS token is not designed or expected to be used for, you know, incentivizing liquidity.
It can be, potentially.
You know, it's being distributed to different projects.
Like, for example, you mentioned Sovryn, which has played a major role in creating Bitcoin OS.
We'll have part of the tokens and there's a bunch of other companies and DAOs that are involved in building Bitcoin OS.
And so a decision could definitely be taken to incentivize us.
I think the tweets that I put out, whenever it is, a couple of days ago, about, I think it was on Sunday,
I tweeted that the Cardano community might want to consider creating some kind of short-term incentive for bringing Bitcoin over into Cardano once Bosco is live.
I personally think that, you know, and of course you've been building this forever, you know, who am I to speak to you, right?
But what you've seen is how strong the Cardano community is, how we've all, you know, shown up to support you guys, right?
We've been tweeting about you since the Dubai summit.
I think that you should consider incentivizing Bitcoin liquidity
on cardinal and i think that that would you know make a lot of us happy you know i think that there are a lot of people you know complaining today that really shouldn't be about certain things and then there also some valid claims right but i think that if you're giving ten percent of the token supply to Sovryn right i think it's because you know they've helped you in some way i can just guarantee you that cardinal is gonna help you a lot more than the ten percent that you get the software.
So i'm not against.
providing some kind of incentive.
And I just want to clarify, I didn't ask for Cardano or, you know, Catalyst or whatever to give any funds to BitcoinOS.
But I do want to clarify one thing.
We're not giving any tokens to Sovryn.
We don't have any tokens to give.
The system and the token, when it launches, is going to launch in a decentralized fashion.
The tokens that
Sovryn has come from Sovryn, right?
So basically, when the system gets launched, it's going to get launched by Sovryn.
And Sovryn has decided that it's going to retain 10% of the tokens.
So they're not coming from me or, you know, my company, there is no company behind Bitcoin OS.
Bill?
Sorry?
Yeah, just a few things.
Right.
One, some clarification regarding the relationship with Sovryn.
In public tweets, it was referenced that they're an incubator.
Is that the case?
Are they an investor in your team, etc.?
So, no.
I've set up a company to build some parts of Bitcoin OS.
That's utilizing my own funds and some other investor funds.
There has been no transfer of any capital to me or really to anyone else from Sovryn, right?
But Sovryn itself has been dedicating resources to building Bitcoin OS.
Okay, so they have no equity.
And then if you guys chose to launch the token, you know, through a different mechanism, right, then they wouldn't be getting any percent, right?
The reason that they're getting a percent is because there was the decision to launch the token through them, because they're going to help facilitate the process, etc.
And they're assisting in development, etc.
Is this correct?
Sort of.
It's not like there was a decision by someone else to give tokens to Sovryn.
Sovryn took the decision to retain 10% of the tokens and to launch the system.
Now, I could potentially try and compete with Sovryn and try and launch my own system or try and launch the system before Sovryn launches and distribute tokens however I wanted, but that's not my intention.
And there's several companies
and sort of independent developers and Sovryn and another DAO being set up that are all working on Bitcoin OS.
In some ways, this is actually quite similar to Cardano.
So I've learned about sort of EMURGO and the foundation and IOHK or IOG, right?
And the various different organizations that work on Cardano.
This has a big disadvantage, right?
I think there's a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of confusion and a lot of different opinions, but it also means that the system is more decentralized.
And in many ways, through parallel construction, we didn't really take the inspiration from Cardano because we didn't know enough about Cardano at the time.
But for similar reasons, we sort of ended up in a similar sort of structure.
So I, I saw a post earlier and we'll move past, um, you know, Sovryn after this, but, you know, I essentially saw this forum post of this guy complaining that, you know, Sovryn was supposed to get 40% and now they're only getting 10%.
So I just, I struggle to understand like kind of how Sovryn can decide for themselves what they're going to get when there is a community of people complaining about it.
And then after that, uh, let's talk about kind of the token, uh, you know, where, where it's launching.
Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of people on the Internet who say all kinds of things and sometimes they're wrong.
So there was never any discussion on any serious level of Sovryn retaining 40% of the tokens.
And also Sovryn has a very, very clear way in which it makes decisions in much the same way that Cardano is now sort of introducing its own constitution and its own governance system.
Sovryn has had a governance system from the beginning.
In fact, the very, very core of Sovryn is what we call the bitocracy.
And it's, I think, an extremely elegant and powerful and robust governance system, not just in terms of participation, but also in terms of the way it incentivizes long-term holding, it incentivizes long-term thinking, and it really has proven itself over the last four and a half years.
And I think it's something which could be replicated more widely because it also protects the system
and protects the community against any kinds of malicious attacks, governance attacks.
So the way that Sovryn makes decisions is that the Sovryn bitocracy will vote on a decision and people have different voting weights based on sort of how long they're staking for.
And what we saw was with this particular vote, it was a very sort of clear vote.
There was like 99% consensus to maintain 10% and the participation rate
was more than 30% of the people who were eligible to participate.
OK, that makes sense.
So with the launch of the BOS token, what blockchain is it launching on?
I've seen a lot of questions today around that.
Yeah, so let me say a few things about the BOS token, and I'll address your specific question.
because I've just seen a lot of sort of questions around the BOS token and I'm happy to jump into any of these.
But one of the things that I've been seeing a lot is like the BOS token came out of nowhere.
But sort of, as I've mentioned, we've been talking about BOS having a token, the BOS token, for a long time now, for, you know, almost a year.
And we've tweeted about it and we've posted about it, et cetera.
The other thing that I've seen people say is the BOS token is going to be a governance token.
That's not the case.
BitcoinOS is designed with no governance at all.
It's designed to be an ungovernable system.
The other thing that I've seen people say is that the BOS token sort of is going to, it centralizes the thing, right?
But actually BOS token has no impact on the security of the system.
The security of the system is completely guaranteed by Bitcoin, by ZK proofs, and to a lesser degree, when you're interacting with another chain, with the security of assumptions of that chain.
And then I've also seen people say that BOS token is going to be an ERC20 token.
And I think this comes to the question that you're asking.
So BOS token is designed.
So one of the cool things about Bitcoin OS is that for the first time ever, it will provide a way for us to have programmable tokens on Bitcoin, right?
We already have tokens on Bitcoin, obviously BTC, but also runes and ERC20s and ordinals, but all of them are limited in exactly the same way, right?
You can only transfer them.
or hold them.
There's nothing else really that you can do with them.
And they have serious issues with how you can issue them, right?
You issue them all at once or not at all.
And you can't control their issuance.
You can't make them non-transferable.
You can't do anything interesting with them.
So, for example, one thing that you can't build on Bitcoin is a true decentralized stablecoin.
Another thing you can't build on Bitcoin is a true DAO.
And with programmable tokens, all of that becomes possible.
So the goal with BOS is for it to be a programmable token that lives on Bitcoin, that its canonical ledger is Bitcoin.
And maybe it would be the first of its kind, and certainly one of the first tokens, probably the first programmable token on Bitcoin.
So when we're talking about token programmability, essentially you're using ZK rollups and another blockchain to bring this programmability to Bitcoin.
With that, you've mentioned that you've investigated all of these different blockchains and there's gonna be integrations on multiple layer ones that are existing in the ecosystem.
What set of blockchains stand out to you as the most secure, right?
We've seen bridge hacks in the past before.
You know i think i i got a dm for somebody in this could be in a more fake internet news but you know they mentioned that there was a pretty.
Big bridge hack you know in the past you know that you were kind of you know working with and you know with this you know new upgrade to the system is he can roll ups you know what block chain stand out as okay these are actually gonna be more secure and push the entire space forward and there are other block chains that you know aren't as secure.
You know where people essentially have to make trade offs you know i said i know that you mentioned that you know these users are gonna have to even know what's happening in the background but if you're adding all these blockchains you there has to be trade offs and the user probably shouldn't have to know about those trade offs.
Well, first of all, with regards to sort of like the thing that someone on the internet said, I've never been involved in any bridge hack or anything even similar to that.
Appreciate you clarifying that.
I get a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the internet's got a lot of theories.
I think you disconnected for a bit.
I think you did, Phil.
Yago's good.
Or are you saying I disconnected for a bit?
Well, I can hear both of you, so.
So we're good.
You can you can respond then you go about the second point you know when you're looking at these blockchains to integrate with you have this vision and I think it's the proper vision of you know users not needing to know which blockchain they're on if they're on Bitcoin and they have five Bitcoin then they can you know use this this programmability.
within Bitcoin, but, you know, BOS is planning on integrating all of these different blockchains, right?
So what blockchains actually stand out for you as, you know, the most secure blockchains, uh, and you know, how, how can the user really decide that?
Like who is going to decide that for the user, if they can't really see, you know, kind of what's happening in the backend, you know, this ability is being added to Bitcoin because of this second chain, because Bitcoin doesn't have that programmability.
Right.
So, you know, if you're integrating EVM chains, you know, we've seen a lot of hacks on EVM-based smart contracts in the past, right?
So how are you kind of balancing that, you know, security, you know, between the different blockchains and which blockchains stand out?
How are you kind of balancing security between the different blockchains and which blockchains stand out?
Okay.
This is a very complicated question and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to even give you close to a satisfactory answer because there's just so many different trade-offs and so many different questions around this.
Let's take Ethereum as an example.
Ethereum in many ways is very robust.
It's got a huge validator set and the validator set is secured by a huge amount of value just because ETH is very valuable.
And so in that respect, Ethereum can make the claim that it is one of the more decentralized, one of the more secure chains.
But at the same time, it, you know, like you said, has had a lot of hacks.
Solidity in many ways is a suboptimal
programming language.
But on the other hand, because so many people have been building on Solidity, they really have developed a lot of best practices and tools to make Solidity more secure.
So, you know, those are all sorts of questions, like, and you know, it's like kind of choose your own adventure.
But from our perspective, actually, none of those things are particularly crucial.
What's crucial for us is that
Ethereum forks all the time.
And this is a huge security flaw and makes building to Ethereum much more complicated.
And the reason is that when you get a ZK proof, right?
So our entire system relies on the ability to consume from the other chain, a ZK proof.
But if the chain forks, now you have a totally new chain.
And so the ZK proofs no longer work, or if they work,
they're no longer secure because they no longer refer to the same kind of system.
ZK proofs are extremely fragile, but they need the system to be stable.
And so Cardano in that respect has a huge advantage, not just in terms of the UTXOs, which also provide a security advantage, but I won't go into that again.
We can if you want, because we haven't like delved deeply into why it provides a security advantage, but just the fact that Cardano doesn't,
fork in a way which is not backwards compatible provides it with a huge advantage.
And so in many ways it sort of depends on your use case and that is part of the reason that we're building Bitcoin OS to be agnostic effectively to every single chain except Bitcoin.
And then Bitcoin can sort of be the canonical ledger of truth and then when you exit the Bitcoin system
you are taking on certain risks.
And, you know, if you go to BNB or you go to Ethereum, you're taking on probably a lot more risks than you are when you go to Cardano, but there are trade-offs everywhere you look.
Right, so just to clarify our discussion from before, I looked into it a bit more and now I'm understanding what you were saying.
BitOS, right, is an open source framework with open IP, and Sovryn doesn't own this IP,
And this token isn't like the canonical bit OS token, right?
It's just they're using the open source framework.
It's their prerogative to do so.
And they're launching a token with this framework.
Right?
Is this correct?
I think that that is I've never thought of it that way.
But I think that's a fair way of describing it.
Because you don't need like all of the technology and all of the tools of Bitcoin OS really
you don't need to use the BOS token to utilize them.
Where the BOS token is important is the whole system.
So here's one of the challenges, right?
I'll just give you an example.
I'll give you two examples to try and illustrate this.
So one is the way BitcoinOS works is it doesn't create like a single bridge between let's say Bitcoin and Cardano.
But any group of people,
can go and bridge assets.
They can go, they pre-sign a set of transactions or commitments to Bitcoin.
They create this like new smart contract, UTXO.
And now it is, that becomes a UTXO that you can deposit Bitcoin in and start depositing funds to Cardano.
All right, so that's great.
Anyone, right?
For example, full can go and create your own bridge.
It can be the full bridge.
You do it with pay and a bunch of other friends, and that's your bridge.
You don't need the BOS token for that at all.
The problem is that that system is very, very limited.
First of all, it's not going to be connected to anything else.
It is much less robust.
Right.
It's got a much smaller number of provers, a much smaller number of verifiers.
So it has a much lower level of security.
Maybe for you, it's got a high level of security, but for anyone else who's trying to use it, potentially a much lower level of security and a bunch of other problems.
But basically what happens is that the whole system, if we were to just initialize it the way I've just described, the whole system would fragment.
into basically.
I understand here you're arguing you know the utility of the token in terms of like productizing and making this public infrastructure that works at scale.
Right.
And that makes sense to me.
Right.
Every major bridge sort of has this every major infrastructure product that works on chain and crypto has this.
In general, I don't see issues with projects releasing tokens.
Almost every project in crypto across any chain releases tokens.
The question, and I think you've clarified it for me, is just that Bitcoin.OS itself is an open source framework.
that can be used independently, right?
And this is an instance of using it and the token exists to sort of productize it or at least to make it work at scale, right?
Because it requires infrastructure across many different chains.
Otherwise, you know, an individual use case would be limited in scope.
Like if we did what you said and, you know, us four decided to set this up and, you know, co-sign on both chains,
we would need first value on Bitcoin, then value on Cardano, and then value on all the other chains that we would want to swap through.
And we need to set up all this complex ZK, heavy compute infrastructure on machinery.
But what they're doing is doing this.
I think you describe it even better than I do.
I think that's a great explanation.
Yes.
OK.
So one thing I'm curious about, Yago.
The second thing is, earlier we said that Cardano might not be the first
Um, bridge, um, to me, I have, you know, from my perspective, I have some trouble understanding how this would be feasible, right?
Um, because what essentially is happening, uh, and the reason we're talking about like clients before is because to make this bridge work, you know, we, uh, bid OS provides ZK proofs, right?
It allows Bitcoin to verify ZK proofs, but, um,
what we need beyond that.
Right.
That's a powerful primitive but it's a very small part of the whole story.
Right.
What you need are the contracts that are capable of verifying consensus on both sides.
Right.
So like for instance on Cardano you have a smart contract that is able to verify the consensus of Bitcoin.
Right.
See if a transaction was made on Bitcoin and on the Bitcoin side you need
a way to verify that the transaction happened on Cardano.
And in local state models like UTXO models, the consensus is relatively simple.
You can do this
It's at least feasible.
Right.
But when you're dealing with like, you know, verifying that an event happened in Ethereum, this is an incredibly complex topic.
And like even the most cutting edge, you know, ZK research, like, for instance, Mina, right, which is like at the forefront of ZK technology, that's the chain that everyone else looks to is like, they're at the cutting edge of cutting edge in terms of what's possible with practical ZK.
Right.
They've been working on a bridge from Mina to Ethereum, a trustless bridge for four years as part of their core blockchain roadmap.
Right.
That's like as fundamental to them as consensus is.
And they still haven't achieved this.
So to me, it's difficult to comprehend that, you know, we would see a bridge from Bitcoin to Ethereum before we see it from Bitcoin to a UTXO chain.
Right.
Which has more familiar architecture and simpler consensus.
I think it's a very good question.
So, um, we've spent most of our time trying to figure out how we do this to EVM.
And actually just today for the first time ever, we demonstrated, um, this, um, ZK transaction on, um, Bitcoin to an EVM chain to, to Merman.
Now, um, there are
a lot of complexities that around, um, uh, ZK bridging, um, that I don't think I'm the best person to talk about, uh, talk, uh, about that.
Right.
So this has not been my focus within the project, but what I, what we have done is we've built a ZK light client for EVM.
And, um, we've also, um,
taken advantage of the fact that we have one side, which is UTXO, so that we have at least one side of the bridge which is not using sort of these mutable accounts.
And we've used that as an anchoring system.
Now, the reality is that there are certain trade-offs that we make here.
And so I do think that the, the ability to bridge between UTXO to UTXO model is going to provide ultimately a better, uh, a higher degree of security because you don't have the challenge of dealing with immutability, but the majority of the challenge with dealing with immutability is actually based on the challenge of dealing with these forking situations.
Um,
And I think that that's one of the challenges that Mina have been dealing with.
And so there we are looking at a workaround.
And basically the workaround is that we do need to introduce a trust assumption.
And so there's an effort to sort of integrate probably through eigenlayer into the utilize the Ethereum stakers themselves
as an additional layer of sort of semi-governance, semi-security.
This is a compromise.
Without that compromise to the EVM, this kind of bridging is not possible.
And so that is something that it's the kind of compromise that we wouldn't need to make with Cardano.
So, and I think also important to mention is that this was done with a light client, right?
It's not full consensus, which means it's not a trustless bridge.
It's a trust minimized bridge, right?
Because it's still a light client and not validating, you know, full consensus.
Well, yeah.
So I think in terms of bridging, it would be trust minimized, but it's trustless in that there
With Ethereum, it's not really trustless at all, because like I said, it would be this additional party of validators who would be required, right?
So we wouldn't use the term trustless for an Ethereum bridge.
So one thing I'm curious about, and I think it really is- Right, but I mean that EVM in general, like what you've achieved with Merlin, for instance, it was using a light client, not a full consensus verification.
That's true.
But with Merlin, where we're able to go is that Merlin's goal is to roll up to Bitcoin directly, which means that Merlin's transaction ordering will be determined by Bitcoin.
And so the reliance on a light client becomes irrelevant, effectively.
I mean, it's not irrelevant, it's still required, but the
the Lite client is just providing the change in state since the last Bitcoin block provided transaction ordering.
So I think we're getting a little bit into the weeds here.
And I don't know if you guys want, we can dive, continue the more technical discussion, but I think it would be proper to say that with Merlin, as they start using Bitcoin and for transaction ordering, they would actually become trustless.
Right.
But currently that hasn't been achieved yet.
That's my point.
Yes, that's correct.
And in general, I understand what you're coming from here, right, that a Bitcoin side chain, right, like Merlin isn't an independent EVM chain.
The goal is, you know, its ordering is based on Bitcoin, right?
That's why it's like merge mining or similar things, right?
In which case it's already inheriting some
inheriting some properties of Bitcoin.
And in that case, the bridge, right, can be possible.
But my point is that more generally, right, when we're talking about blockchain layer one interoperability, we're much more likely to see Cardano to Bitcoin than we are to see, at least trustless Cardano to Bitcoin, than we are to see trustless Cardano to Ethereum, I mean, Bitcoin to Ethereum or Bitcoin to Solana, or Bitcoin to SUI, right?
Bill, can you hear me?
I can hear both of you.
So can you tell Phil to do a lap, Iago?
I think he can't hear me.
Phil, I think Pei is asking that you drop off and come back on because one of you can't hear the other.
For everybody just tuning in, there's over 500 people in the space.
I want to thank you all so much for coming.
Big thank you to Iago and, you know, BOS.
I know we're getting a little bit into the weeds here, but it's kind of what I'm curious about.
You know, you guys are coming out with something that is kind of revolutionary to the space, just the idea of having this trustless bridge.
So kind of understanding how these ZK Rollups works and the trade-off between different blockchains is
important and kind of the the narrative that's been going around in the card on a community is that we actually have an advantage with a bridge to bitcoin right and that's kind of you know what my questions were trying to lead to earlier is i'm curious if we truly do have that advantage and if you you guys think that.
Ultimately one thing.
That's what I was saying is that although it was possible to, you know, it's possible to see a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Merlin, which is EVM based in a relatively trustless manner.
This is only possible because Merlin is specifically designed to inherit security properties from Bitcoin using things like merge mining, et cetera.
Right.
Whereas to bridge from Bitcoin to Ethereum,
or Bitcoin to Solana is a much more difficult challenge than to bridge from Bitcoin to Cardano.
And my point is that we will likely see a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Cardano long before we see a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Ethereum or Bitcoin to Solana.
I think you're right.
I think we're likely to see, I mean,
I don't know if we're ever going to see a bridge to Ethereum, but certainly to EVM chains, we will see bridges.
They could be potentially as trustless or even more trustless than the bridge to Cardano.
But in terms of layer ones, I think Cardano is uniquely positioned for trustless bridging with Bitcoin.
So, you know, with that, I'm curious, you know, you talked to Charles yesterday and the team and, you know, you mentioned that there's work that needs to be done on the Cardano development side.
And in my opinion,
You shouldn't just talk to founding entities.
There's a lot of great developers here that maybe have more time and maybe more excitement and passion to get this done.
There's also other like clients, you know, there's somebody else building an entirely new full node for Cardano as well.
So, you know, I think that a lot of us would like to get together to make this happen quicker rather than later, you know, given that the, you know, tokenomics are fair and the bridge is truly trustless.
Well, I think, uh, you know, where we've had the opportunity to meet, um, people, either smaller projects like fluid tokens or maestro, or even individual developers are interested in working with us.
We're very happy to try and, and, and, and, and, and figure out how we can work with it.
Um, we don't particularly want to rely on, you know, uh, EMURGO or IOHK to develop this.
Um, and yes, definitely.
Like, thank you.
because if anyone is listening, my DMs are open and please reach out and we would like nothing more than to try and accelerate this process.
Because looking at Cardano, I mean, it really stands out, you know, one, because it's UTXO, and two, because of the smart contracts, right?
I mean, with ICANN now, they're a lot easier to write, and because they're, you know, built on Plutus, you know, they're more secure.
You know, we haven't seen any major smart contract hacks in history.
You know, I'm sure we'll see one eventually, but if you get some good developers together and a good auditor, you know, your odds of success are much higher.
than other chains, right?
And I think that trade-off would be exciting for Bitcoin users, right?
You have this Bitcoin maximalist opinion that all other chains are, you know, the smart contracts are hacked, they're scam coins, they're not decentralized, and, you know, that maximalist feeling is probably 30 or 40% true.
Ultimately right so it's like if you have all of these different blockchains you know i kind of want to come back to that question a little bit it's like how do you explain these trade-offs to the user and you know is there really a benefit to having all of these different blockchains especially if a few of them are more insecure than the others.
I actually don't think there is.
I think we have way too many blockchains and I think the blockchains are way too heavy and are trying to do too many things and are focused on the wrong kind of development.
I think this is true about Ethereum.
I think this is true about Solana.
I also think it's true about most rollups.
I think a lot of use cases are going to migrate to being actually single app applications.
So one of the things that
BitcoinOS allows and sort of opens the door to is an entirely new way of thinking about how you build, right?
So you can go, you can build.
Let's take as an example, an exchange, right?
Let's say you wanted to have an exchange which felt like a centralized exchange.
It was just as fast.
The UX is just as slick.
The way you would want to do that is you would basically want to have a centralized party that is doing, that is running the servers, right?
the centralized party that is providing the UI, because then they can be sort of on par with centralized exchanges.
So then what way is it a DEX?
Well, we now have the tools that you can take the compute that that server is performing and turn it into verifiable compute.
So you can take all of that compute, you can turn it into a ZK proof, you can post that ZK proof to another chain.
In this particular case, you can post it
to Bitcoin and get it verified on Bitcoin.
And if you do that, then that also allows you to move assets into the exchange and perform all of your transactions on the exchange by signing from your wallet, your private key.
And if anything happens to the exchange, then you're able to withdraw your funds.
You basically get unilateral exit of your funds.
So that's an entirely new way of thinking about what we can do.
We can basically build centralized-like services that don't actually need to live on a blockchain at all, and they can be interoperable.
And this starts to look a lot more like the Web2 world, where you have many, many different services, many, many different websites.
They're all interoperating.
They have APIs to each other.
That's one path to the future.
Another path to the future is Cardano.
So with Cardano,
What you get is in some ways a compromise to that.
You'll never have an order book on Cardano that's as fast as a centralized exchange, that looks or feels like a Binance.
But you get shared state in a way that you'll never be able to get without a blockchain.
You get the ability to have
much, much tighter composability, for example, between DeFi applications.
And so what we're doing with Bitcoin OS, I think, is on the one hand, opening new avenues to what we can do with crypto and what developers can do with crypto, what developers can do with Bitcoin.
But that can go in multiple different directions.
And so I think we have way too many blockchains.
Coming back to your original question, we have way too many blockchains.
Most of them don't make sense.
A few standouts, I think are going to be huge winners.
And I think Cardano is extremely well positioned to be one of those.
So just to clarify on something you said earlier, and then we're going to start letting people up.
So if you guys have any questions, request speaker, I'll let you on up here.
You're open sourcing all of the work that you guys have done so far with us.
No, we haven't open sourced all the work that we've done, but our intention is to open source everything.
Yes.
Okay.
But you know, how much, what, what percentage would you say has been open source so far?
You know, just to kind of clarify with you, you know, I'm also a founder that's planning on open sourcing things.
So I, you know, I'm happy to bear with you, but at least from, from my opinion, if you guys are open sourcing all of this work and then productizing it and then launching your own token, I personally don't have a problem with that as long as it's fair to users.
Well, you know, I'm glad you're saying that, but, you know, and I think that was, that was our expectation, right?
I mean, this is, it seems to us that we're operating in the, you know, the best of good faith.
But I think a lot of people do have, may still have problems, or maybe they just misunderstood various things.
And so I'm glad, you know, if we can get closer to, if you want to like start bringing people up, or if you want to try and
raise some of the questions that people have or concerns that people have.
I'd love to try and address them and also try and understand sort of where these concerns are coming from.
Because, you know, the worst case scenario, let's say you hate the fact that we have a token.
You think it's totally useless.
Okay, fine.
So you don't have to buy it.
You don't have to participate in it.
You don't have to use it.
It in no way, sort of like there's nothing, it doesn't change what you can do with Babel fees.
It doesn't change the importance of ADA.
And I think Bitcoin OS,
because it's good for Cardano can also be good for ADA.
So I really want to try and understand whether this is all just a misunderstanding or like they're more fundamental concerns.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Don't be nervous.
Start requesting speaker.
I haven't gotten any requests yet.
You can also post questions, but I'd also like you to come up.
I'd like to hear your voice and really get your thoughts other than just some text there.
You know there's one thing I wanted to comment on specifically around the Babel fees thing right you know we've.
You know, Cardano, it takes its time.
You know, it's more secure.
It's got a strong community.
It's decentralized.
But, you know, we've been waiting on Babel fees for, you know, a couple of years now.
So when someone's telling me that I'm going to be able to use ADA as a fee, or I'm going to be able to use Bitcoin as a fee when this BOS token's coming out, to me, it sounds like classic, like founder, future thinking.
And I'm a visionary too, man.
It's kind of hard not to talk with your vision.
Is it more likely that we're going to be paying in BOS token until Babel fees or something like it is available?
I think there's basically zero chance you'll be playing with BOS token.
I think the most likely thing you'll be paying with is ADA.
So until Babel fees are not just available, but also integrated into the system and integrated into the dApps so that the dApps can use them.
And this is probably going to take several months.
I think the easiest, lowest path of resistance is that people will simply be paying with ADA on Cardano.
OK.
David, thank you so much for coming up.
Make sure if you guys are liking the space, leave a little comment down there, share it out there, and feel free to request speaker.
David, what do you have for us today?
Yeah, hey, thanks for bringing me up, man.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, I guess hopefully this isn't too dumb of a question, but someone who's been in Bitcoin for a couple of years now, I just really hold Bitcoin for more as a savings
vehicle than anything else.
And so why would I why would I be interested?
I ask it from curiosity, right?
Like, why would I be interested in using this product?
Like, what would be the benefit to someone like me that's just using Bitcoin to store and like I said, as a savings instrument?
Well, maybe it's not right.
If you just are holding BTC passively, and you're happy to do that, then
Awesome.
And I think that's a perfectly legitimate way to use Bitcoin.
I think the vast majority of BTC is being used in that way.
But the vast majority of BTC is a lot.
And the minority of BTC that wants to do more things with BTC is also a lot.
Right.
So if we're just as an example, the amount of BTC that was in Voyager, BlockFi and Celsius was 120,000 BTC.
At today's value, that's about 120 billion dollars.
Now I wanted to borrow against my Bitcoin because I don't want to sell my Bitcoin.
And like me, there are lots of other people who wanted to borrow against their Bitcoin, but they didn't put their Bitcoin into BlockFi or whatever, right?
So there's at least a market out there of 200, 300,000 BTC that is looking for the ability to borrow or lend or go into a stable coin.
So we're talking about a $300 billion market.
a big chunk of which potentially Cardano could capture, right?
And it's not going to be just Cardano, right?
So, you know, I think one of the things that maybe people misunderstood is that BOS is not a Cardano project.
There are going to be other Bitcoin roll-ups and there's stacks and there's, you know, other projects that are going to try and build on Bitcoin.
But right now there's something like a $300 billion opportunity, which is up for grabs.
because BlockFi and Celsius died.
No one's ever going to trust a system like that again.
People still want to be able to use that kind of service, but they want a more decentralized, more trustless, more incorruptible way of doing it.
I think where this becomes relevant for you is that at some point, you're going probably like you, or if you, you know, your children, someone is going to want to be able to capture some of the value in that BTC.
And so they're going to want to trade it, or they're going to want to lend it, or they're going to want to borrow it.
And at that point, you will join that pool.
And over time, we will see that pool go from 300,000 BTC to 500,000 BTC to a million BTC.
And beyond that, I think, you know, there's people also who are out there on the risk curve, right?
There's a whole other group of people who say, look, I know that Bitcoin's
almost definitely going to keep going up for the next six months, for the next 12 months, right?
It's probably going to double or triple or quadruple or more.
So let me, let me lever up my Bitcoin.
Let me try to earn some yield on my Bitcoin.
Let me, you know, do put options on my Bitcoin, but I don't want to go to a Deribit.
I don't want to go to a Binance, right?
I don't want to have to buy Michael Saylor's stock.
So how do I do it?
So there's,
especially in bull markets, this massive opportunity, which just really no one is even starting to answer yet.
Am I, am I rugging?
No, I can hear you.
It went quiet.
Oh, okay.
So I just wanted to add a little bit there.
Sorry, I think I was lagging out just a little bit.
But yeah, I agree with Iago on this one.
What ability is it or will there be for Bitcoin users?
I think the majority are going to keep most of their Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Let's say you know they need to make a purchase in their life and they don't want to pay a ridiculous amount of capital gains taxes they take the bitcoin they deposit into a smart contract on another block chain in a trustless way and then they pay an interest back to the pool of people providing the loan and now you can actually have financial instruments for bitcoin in a completely trustless way.
Right the only trust that you're adopting is the other block chain right so it's important to you know the other block chain you're using also has to be decentralized and have secure smart contracts but i don't really see this integration as you know all bitcoin in the world is gonna go to card on another block chain
It really is just increasing the utility of Bitcoin for those users that maybe want to pull a little bit out in a trustless way without, you know, they want to go into a stable coin, for example, or maybe they want to use a smart contract because they're worried about dying in the next 10 years.
And, you know, they want to make sure that the blockchain facilitates where that money should actually go.
Right.
So it's really an extra ability for Bitcoin users.
But my, you know, my first recommendation is not like, oh, everybody all start using this now and take out loans, et cetera.
It's just an extra ability, maybe for a small percent of your portfolio.
I think you've brought up a really interesting use case, which I don't usually mention.
But, you know, my my wife and I, we put some Bitcoin into a smart contract that we created using some of the tools in Sovryn.
We didn't even use like the official Sovryn thing.
We just created our own thing.
And so sort of like that's how we are managing some of our shared finances.
But yeah, I think like inheritance is such an underappreciated need.
It's not just inheritance.
It's also just like the ability to, you know, one thing that you can't do with Bitcoin today is protect it from the violent attack, right?
If someone bursts into your house now and forces you to make a transaction, there's nothing you can do with BTC.
But if you build a vault, right, you can use BitcoinOS to build a vault where part of the rules are that you can make that transaction.
And if you put in another transaction later from a different address or whatever rule you decide to set up, you can actually reverse the transaction.
So no one's written that kind of thing yet, but BitcoinOS opens the opportunity to write that kind of contract, that kind of sort of more secure vault for your Bitcoin.
So, uh, you know, my, my advice for people that are worried about that happening to them always have a, there is someone at my house wallet and then have your real stuff in another wallet, you know, make it enough for them to be happy.
Uh, but don't give them the whole amount.
You TXO bro.
Do you have a question for us?
Hey, thank you.
Um, not a question, just a comment.
Um, I just want to say, you know, the keys were burned and.
It's time.
It's time for us to run.
You know, we can't fumble this deal and have Iago go somewhere else.
It's like.
We got to go, we got to nut up.
Well, thank you, but I also want to say that from our perspective and from my perspective personally.
I've learned a great deal about Cardano, which has made me way more bullish on Cardano than I ever was before.
I mean, honestly, I wasn't really thinking about Cardano at all, but also, you know, despite sort of the last, let's say 12 or 24 hours or whatever it was, you know, communities, they get riled up and there's drama and that's part of the, I don't know, the tragedy and the fun of it, right?
But ultimately the level of support that we've received from the Cardano community has been,
you know, really heartwarming.
It's been, it's been exciting.
It's been, it's been amazing to see.
And, um, you know, uh, we're not, uh, just because a bunch of people on the internet said some things which weren't true or, you know, asked hard questions.
We're here to stay.
We want to build, um, we want to build not just on Cardano, but we particularly want to build on Cardano.
So I'm going to get to some of the questions in the comments here, because we aren't getting too many requests of speakers, but we have over 69 questions.
You know, this was kind of touched on a little bit earlier, but maybe you guys didn't say this at all, or maybe you did, but someone asked, you know, I thought Cardano was supposed to be the first blockchain that you guys launched this on.
Did you guys kind of spread that narrative or was that somebody from the Cardano community?
I don't know that anyone was spreading that narrative.
I think just a bunch of people assumed.
I mean, look, part of what happens, I think, is you see a lot of, like, a lot of people get most of their information, let's say, from probably Twitter or whatever, and there's relatively thin information that is provided on Twitter, and you sort of see a headline, and you sort of interpret it in whichever way makes most sense to you and sort of is most flattering to your beliefs or interests.
And then you sort of see something which is incongruent with that and it takes you by surprise.
But actually no one ever promised you anything.
It's just sort of in your own mind you decided that.
And that's, it's not even a terrible thing.
It's not even like an indictment of someone.
It's just that there's so much information going on.
How can you possibly keep track of everything?
So I think that's just the way most people get most of their information.
Yeah.
Another question.
I think it's a good one.
You know, realistically, how far are we away from having Bitcoin using BOS on Cardano?
I cannot say.
I think we are getting weak.
We're racing to make sure that we have a system which is stable enough that it can go through a full audit by the end of the year, which would position us in
late January or sometime between late January and early March to really provide a full fledged sort of view 0.1 of BOS.
Then the question becomes, how long does it take to integrate?
Now, the integration doesn't have to wait for that.
It can start now.
And the conversations have started now.
And if devs want to start working with us now, it can all happen now.
And so it can happen in parallel.
But like I said, like the big unknown to me
is how quickly can we overcome the challenges of integrating with Cardano, which the two primary ones are writing the smart contract.
So if anyone in particular has experience with both Solidity and Cardano, then definitely reach out to me because we've already got a reference implementation written in Solidity that you could just sort of refactor and rewrite.
And then also the question of the light client, which there might be some workarounds or something that we could do
on an interim basis, which might speed us up, but, um, the best and cleanest and sort of, if we can go straight to, you know, light clients and not pass go, that would be, that would allow us to integrate the light client into the BOS node.
And then, um, you know, we're ready to go.
Awesome.
Iago, are you seeing requests on your screen?
I'm seeing some people mention that they are requesting, but they're not showing up for me.
Yes, I'm seeing a bunch of requests.
Go ahead and accept all of them.
Yeah, go ahead.
It's not showing for me.
Let me see.
How do I do that?
Requests.
All right.
I'm going to do three at a time, because otherwise things might get a bit crazy.
Hey, that's fair.
So let's start with Angry.
I think you came up first.
Yeah, sorry, I think I'm lagging.
Can you guys hear me?
Yep, you sound beautiful, my brown hair.
Yeah, no, I just want to say thank you for hosting this space and I see a lot of different questions.
Like you said, I think sometimes people, they get up in their emotion.
I don't think BitcoinOS ever said Cardano was the first.
I know they said the first L1.
I know that in the past they were mentioning Merlin and stuff like that.
I guess the community, like I see a lot of people talking about the Vaporware comment.
Can you comment on that, like maybe statements they made in the past, like what you think, what you thought of Cardano then?
Maybe that will help to calm down some of the emotional backlash people had earlier today.
Sure.
About three years ago, I was on a podcast.
Someone asked me about Cardano on the podcast, and I said to me, it looked like Vaporware.
The reason I said to me it looked like Vaporware is because at the time, the UTXO...the eUTXO smart contracts were not working or to the extent that they were working, they were so slow as they would be too painful to actually use.
There's basically no TVL is what looked like an extremely sort of small developer community.
And, um, I, I didn't see a lot there that sort of got me excited.
Um, part of the issue also was that Cardano
for a long time made really, really big promises and had been building for years.
And those promises didn't look any closer to coming to fruition.
I think a lot has changed since then.
And I think I've updated my views on Cardano.
And I think it takes a long time to build significant things very frequently.
And so there's always the temptation to call something sort of vaporware or a scam.
I try to do that less frequently and reserve judgment much more now.
Partly because I just, you know, I just don't think that there's much benefit in sort of the toxicity or whatever.
It just doesn't, it's not, it's not important.
And it's not, it's not useful.
But,
The challenge, I think, is every single significant project starts out as a delusion, right?
If we were, like, I'll give you Bitcoin OS as an example, or Sovryn as an example, right?
Four years ago, when we started saying, okay, we're gonna try and build roll-ups on Bitcoin, and ZK on Bitcoin, we had no idea how we were going to do it.
It was a mission statement that we were saying we were going to make a reality.
We were delusional.
13 or 14 years ago when I started getting into Bitcoin and saying, you know, this is going to be like the reserve currency of the world, right?
I was delusional.
I couldn't know if I was delusional or not.
But sometimes, you know, the thing that gave me the greatest amount of optimism about Gen Z was when I discovered that they had actually invented a word for this.
a word for a delusion that is required in order to make great things happen.
And the word they have is delulu.
I love that word.
So I think it's fair to call BOS a delulu.
And it's fair to say that even right now, in many ways, Cardano is still a delulu, right?
It's improved so much, but there's still way less activity than I think any of you would like to see in Cardano.
But at the same time, I think we've also demonstrated a commitment to a long-term development plan.
We've demonstrated that the basics of what we're saying we can build, we can actually build.
And I think that's true for Cardano.
I think it's true for BOS.
I think it's true for Sovryn.
And so I think the heroes of innovation are always the people who are willing to take the guts to embarrass themselves by sticking to a Delulu.
I think that's honestly a very fair response.
Looking back at 2022, it was a very common narrative that Cardano was vaporware.
And I've definitely had some bad opinions in the past, too.
We all kind of grow with time, and Cardano has obviously shown up in the past few years.
Esko.
What up, what up?
Excuse me.
Can you hear me just fine?
Loud and clear.
Cool.
I wrote a thread once the token was announced, and then I went and looked at the whole, kind of the umbrella of what Sovryn is, and when you guys raise funds, and how much, and all sorts of things.
And I see that you guys kind of got all the ingredients for sort of an ecosystem from
stablecoin to all of these things.
So congrats on all the progress that you guys have made.
But one thing that I don't think has been answered yet, and it was in my thread, and I made an assumption, which for that I apologize.
I made the assumption that because the word staking was used in the forum regarding the distribution of the BOS token,
that to me, from my experience, obviously, in hindsight, I wish I would have thought more about how I, not to speak in absolutes, but that ultimately that staking would be correlated to being in the very same chain.
So again, for that, I apologize that the assumption stated on my thread that it was an ERC-20.
But with that, I follow up with the proper question, because earlier it was asked, and I think it was kind of like skipped over.
regarding where the token will be actually issued in the simplest form.
I know that you mentioned that it was going to be a programmable token, something one-of-a-kind and all of that, but it would be really awesome to know where it would be issued.
Ultimately, just like that.
Sure.
The goal is for BOS token not to be one-of-a-kind, but to be the first of many.
The first of many tokens that live canonically on Bitcoin.
the ability to create for the first time programmable tokens that use the Bitcoin ledger.
Now, um, it, we, we've played with some ideas about how to distribute this, right?
So we might need to distribute the token before, uh, it becomes available because the idea is you distribute the token before bus launches so that when bus launches, people can actually use bus, right?
Otherwise, um,
sort of no one can use BOS.
So one of the ideas actually was even to maybe think about trying to distribute it in Cardano.
I think one of the challenges with that is a lot of exchanges seem to sort of be skeptical or have trouble with Cardano tokens.
But yeah, I don't know.
It could be, we could use like maybe a Bitcoin rollup.
We could maybe use Cardano, maybe a mixture of those, or maybe we'll be able to just
go straight to deploying it on Bitcoin mainnet without having to use any other system.
Okay, so now to wrap my head around it for the people in the audience.
When you mean that the token would live in Bitcoin canonically, meaning
Would this be like in a smart contract that can be referenced of its existence so therefore it can transcend into other chains and be represented into all of those chains?
Like, I mean, it's been kind of like difficult to get this answer because it has to be issued somewhere, right?
Yeah, so we haven't published the specs yet for the programmable tokens on Bitcoin OS.
But actually the way it would work is it would live inside of a Bitcoin inscription or a Bitcoin up return, right?
So there's, there's, there's, um, with every Bitcoin transaction, you can get some free data that like a space that you can put in any kind of data.
And so you're able to put tokens into that data.
So what you do is you create a smart contract and this smart contract generates a ZK proof and that
And you write that ZK proof to Bitcoin with some additional metadata.
And that can be now read as a token.
And actually it's sort of like read as the seed of a token because that sort of becomes the smart contract of the token.
And then additional ZK proofs can then control issuance of new tokens.
Those tokens can then be distributed and transferred.
using Bitcoin transactions.
So it literally exists on the Bitcoin network and is transferred using a Bitcoin wallet.
You just, instead of transferring BTC, you're transferring some other kind of token.
And we can actually go a step further than that.
And for the first time we can take, you know, how on Ethereum, for example, they have wrapped Ether, right?
So anytime you want to use ETH,
With a smart contract, you actually don't use raw ETH, you wrap it into an ERC20 token.
So we can take BTC and turn BTC into wrapped BTC, which now can start being used in ways that standard BTC can't be used.
We can actually turn BTC itself into a programmable token.
Ah, it kind of makes sense.
It makes more sense with a little bit of technical understanding that I have.
So it would be kind of borrowing the concept of how assets are.
So they wouldn't necessarily be a native asset.
Kind of, but not really.
It wouldn't be a fully native asset.
In other words, you would need more than just a Bitcoin node.
You would also need Bitcoin OS in order to read it.
There would be the seed and via ZK, then it can be issued and all this other, I get it.
It's very similar to like the Ethereum smart contract based issuance of NFTs and this whole concept.
No, it's not similar to Ethereum NFTs.
I think of the thing it's most similar to is runes, actually.
So it's very, very similar to a rune.
I get it.
Yeah.
Right, so it's like the semi-native ZK type, more complex.
I get it.
Okay, sounds cool.
Thanks.
Awesome.
So that smart contract is going to be written in BTC or BOS, right?
That node?
Where is that contract written?
The smart contract actually doesn't live on Bitcoin itself.
So the smart contract is split.
In fact, everything that you're doing with Bitcoin OS, the smart contract is split.
You have a tiny amount of smart contract on Bitcoin, because Bitcoin can't have much more than a tiny amount.
So you have just very, very simple instructions that you have on Bitcoin.
And then all of the complexity has to be put somewhere else.
In the case of the programmable tokens, that complexity lives in Bitcoin OS nodes.
Okay.
Yeah, you know, my kind of thought pattern here, because I'm learning a lot, and I just wanted to say thank you for that, Iago.
This is really how I learn, is just asking questions and bringing a bunch of people up here.
You know, my next kind of logical thought is, you know, can that brain be a Cardano smart contract?
And then we'll go to PyRing.
My guess is that it probably wouldn't be designed that way, because then it would only work with Cardano.
But for a lot of the, for, for, for, so, okay.
So programmable tokens are programmable, but that doesn't actually make them do anything.
You now need to have a program that is going to run.
So the part, enough of the program to create a programmable token lives in the Bitcoin OS node.
And then you need to lock,
those tokens basically into a smart contract to make them do like much more sophisticated things like DeFi or Dow voting or anything.
And that kind of stuff could probably would live on Cardano.
Okay.
If you see Samuel Leathers requesting, let him up.
He's been kind of DMing me and asking if you see him still in the requesting.
Pyro, what question do you have today?
You there, Pyro?
Can you hear me?
Let me sneak this question in until Pyro pops up.
I thought I was going to have one question, but I'm going to have one question.
Pyro, we can hear you now.
It's just now I have 100.
Yeah, can you hear me?
Can you guys hear me?
We can hear you now.
You're cutting in and out.
Go for it.
So I, like I said, I had one question, but now I have a hundred, but thanks Esco for asking that awesome question.
So it looks to me that this token was initially created for, because it was a surprise and you guys are like two, three, four months into launching, that this was more of a token to raise capital.
um and so i wanted to know if you guys are healthy financially um to you know to pursue your pursuits and that was my question um is this token actually to raise capital or is it you know is it this utility smart contract that references an off chain nice try sec um no of course not if it was to raise capital it would be a security
And we don't do that.
So it's a product.
It's a product that we sell.
And in the same way that Apple don't sell phones to raise capital, they sell phones to have a business, you can think of the BOS token as being part of the product of Bitcoin OS and something that people can purchase in order to use the system.
I don't know if that's fair to say that it wouldn't be.
Let me, let me, let me answer a different part of your question, right?
So you asked whether or not we're healthy financially.
And the answer is yes.
There is no current capital constraint, um, which is stopping us from achieving our goals and launching BitcoinOS.
Lucky founder, Samuel Leathers, you're next up.
And then we can get to angry and ask, Oh,
Hello, Iago.
So I'm a head of product for Cardano at Input Output Global.
Your comments about a light client basically being a requirement for you guys launching.
What in particular are you querying from the Cardano blockchain that you need to access?
Is it just the existing UTXO set for a specific
set of smart contracts, or is there something else you need?
Like, for example, when I talked to the Midnight guys and the PartnerChain guys about it, they basically said they needed the entire stake distribution over Epoch.
Is there anything other than the UTXO set that you guys are interested in?
I think it very much depends on the use case.
Broadly speaking, what we would be looking for is being able to get a snapshot
of the state at any given time.
And so that's what a light client should be able to provide us with.
But more simple use cases have better defined requirements.
So for example, just a simple bridging transaction, right, where you just are able to move BTC into Cardano and then you want to move the BTC out of Cardano.
Really all we need to know about that
is whether or not the token representing the BTC has been extinguished and what the address that the BTC on Bitcoin mainnet needs to be released to.
So that is a much, much narrower requirement.
But as you start to have more extensive use cases, then basically we need to see the whole state.
So one of the interesting things about Cardano is basically you can have these scripts basically doing minting and forging of native tokens on the Cardano side.
So I think that will heavily simplify your use case, where basically you can just do a zero-knowledge proof that this thing was minted or this thing was burned, basically, and then reflect it into the BTCOS side.
Samir, would you be willing to DM me so that we can take this offline?
And would you potentially be willing to help?
I would absolutely.
However, I am on vacation this week.
I got pulled in because of all the drama.
And I'm at the Cardano Constitution Convention next week.
But when I get back, absolutely.
Let's get together and let's talk.
Awesome.
Let's do it.
That's exciting.
Sam, one thing I'm curious about, you know, they mentioned they need these snapshots.
Do you think Mithril could be something to help facilitate that in a more secure way?
That is absolutely a possibility.
The biggest problem with Mithril is it only happens so frequently.
Um, so you're looking at a little bit of a lag between the latest state.
So you have a longer settlement time.
Um, but yeah, there, I mean, there's definitely some ideas there that basically might be able to help.
Um, yeah.
So I will definitely reach out to Iago and we will get this figured out here.
Based on what, um, Charles and others had, um, IOHK have, um, told me that basically what they're looking at is, um, improvements to DOLOS and Mithril.
which should be able to provide a functional light client that we could use for state.
And they're hoping to have that, I think, sometime around Q2.
OK.
So yeah, DOLOS is a really awesome data-only node.
It doesn't guarantee the consensus requirements.
But as long as it's connected to a Cardano node that's doing the full consensus, it's very secure.
But yeah, absolutely.
Let's take this offline from there.
I can stay up here if you have any questions about the architecture that come up through other people's questions that you need answered too.
Sure, please feel free to stay.
I wouldn't want you to do anything else with your vacation.
We'll get to Angry, I think he's next up and Iago, feel free to cut us off here at a certain point as well.
Cool, yeah, appreciate it.
Noah, thank you for elaborating about it being on Bitcoin and just from my own experience too.
I know you guys were saying in the past also that Cardano is the first L1.
I did see Merlin and whatnot.
And I'm pretty sure, I've seen communication about the token in the past on different outlets.
Maybe it just wasn't as popular, so now it's a talking point.
And I think it's very sensitive for people, but I definitely recommend people to just be as kind and as meek as possible and just ask questions.
Yeah, to Eden Yago, I just wanted to ask you like Charles today live, he was saying that, you know, just what your thoughts are regarding this, he said, whatever bridge and hybrid application for Bitcoin DeFi must include an option where you always pay with your BTC full stop.
And he was mentioning how, you know, he doesn't like the secondary token or another token.
So I'm wondering what you think about that.
And then my follow up is like, what necessitates the BOS token?
What do you think about Charles saying that whatever bridge and hybrid application for Bitcoin DeFi must include an option where you always pay with your BTC
So
You can definitely pay with BTC.
First of all, you never have to use the BOS token.
It's very important that you... So there are things that you can do which get better with the BOS token, but there's no requirement for any activity that you use the BOS token.
So for example, the security assumptions that you'll be using will always be the same.
Really what the BOS token does is it coordinates across multiple different sort of applications on the same chain.
So if there could be multiple different bridges on Cardano, there can be multiple different applications.
BOS token helps coordinate that.
It helps coordinate market makers and helps make sure that you can outsource the verification and the proving because most people are not going to win to do their own proving and their own verification.
And then it does the same thing across the entire ecosystem.
And it also becomes extremely important and probably sort of where the BOS token is likely to be most important is with the programmable tokens that live on Bitcoin itself.
But in all of those circumstances, you can pay with BTC because Bitcoin OS itself has a sort of equivalent to Babel fees as they exist on Ardent Cardano.
I also go further and say, you know, we have no expectation that we will be some kind of exclusive, like the Bitcoin OS will be some kind of exclusive integration with Cardano, right?
We're happy for as many projects that want to, you know, try and build bridging or whatever it is, any kind of integration they want to build with Cardano and Bitcoin to do it.
Maestro is a company that is already doing it.
Fluid Tokens is a company which is already doing it.
I think the thing about BitcoinOS is it's just going to be the best, far and away more powerful than anything else that we've seen or that anyone else is close to.
And so people are going to try and steal our technology and we're still going to be better than them.
And part of the reason that we're going to be better than them is because of the ability to integrate a large network and ecosystem using the BOS token.
So, you know, I actually agree with everything that Charles said.
The Cardano community should explore all of the options, should encourage as much innovation, should encourage as much competition as possible, and users should never have to be forced into any particular token.
Thank you Yago.
You know that's just kind of makes me think of like what we were saying earlier you know.
And I really do think that a lot of this would be smoothed over because there is value you know being brought to BOS from the Cardinal community.
And if some of that value is somehow brought back in a decentralized way I think it would be good.
I don't know if it's a Treasury vote on either side.
But I think in the same way that you're incentivizing other ecosystems, if you incentivize ours, I think that you'll have a lot more growth, at least on this side of things.
Next up is, or I'll let you respond to that, next up is going to be, I think, RZA?
Oh, no, I don't have any further feedback.
I mean,
I guess perhaps maybe just to play the devil's advocate, I guess like what about the users who are like, I guess there are going to be users who say like, oh, there shouldn't be a token at all.
But at the end of the day, you know, there's going to be there's going to be a variety of reasons.
You already mentioned some market making and a variety of utility to take things to the next level.
I think at least, like you said, if it if it's not a necessity, then at least people have the quote unquote option.
So no, that's all good.
I appreciate the feedback.
Yeah.
Hey, can you guys hear me there?
Guys, I got a question.
Adele.
I think Adele's actually next up ER.
Oh, thanks.
A question for the Bitcoin OS.
Usually in software, when you actually build a bridge or whatever software that you work on, you would actually do one thing well first.
So, of course, the narrative is building a bridge between Bitcoin and Cardano through Bitcoin OS.
I'm just thinking, instead of splitting the focus with Ethereum and other blockchains, why not just focus on this one blockchain, which is Cardano, and make it perfect, then move on to the next one?
I think that's a fair question, and I think we are doing that.
So we are focused on just doing one thing really, really well, which is the Bitcoin side.
We're not planning to build the Cardano side.
What we're working on is building a system which allows other systems to integrate into Bitcoin.
But our focus is very much on the Bitcoin side.
And so what we're trying, you know, one of the complexities right now that I think is slowing down the development on Cardano is there's so many different actors, right?
There's different companies, there's different foundations, there's different individual developers.
And so
whole bunch of people have gotten excited about Bitcoin OS and are building in a fairly uncoordinated, first of all, they're not 100% building some of them because it is fairly uncoordinated.
I think really, ideally for us, we would have
one partner who is dedicated to building out the Cardano side of this.
And we're very happy to provide any kind of support and prioritize the work in Cardano because we think it's particularly powerful and particularly valuable.
But it is not our intention to do the work ourselves, right?
We don't want to own this end to end.
Um, we're, uh, and we're, we're not, we don't want to put ourselves in a position where sort of every single integration is like BOS goes somewhere and integrates.
And so actually the language that we typically use is that things are integrating into Bitcoin or integrating into BOS rather than BOSes going and doing an integration.
Um, yeah.
So, so our focus is being just the best on the Bitcoin side.
Thanks for that, but still that actually triggers more questions because usually when you have a project and you integrate to a blockchain, it actually takes a little bit of time to learn all of its flows or all of its advantages or disadvantages.
And isn't that to be more logical way to actually have a Cardano, it's a dedicated blockchain to learn all of the flows in Bitcoin OS and then slowly scale to other blockchain.
Wouldn't that be more logical way to scaling instead of scaling all at once and potentially creating a mess later?
I actually think that in that particular sense, Cardano is a really bad choice because Cardano is so unique that anything that we would learn on Cardano would be applicable only to Cardano.
It wouldn't be applicable anywhere else.
And so what we really want to learn is how can we make our technology as easy to consume, as self-service possible,
so that anyone can integrate with Bitcoin.
Look, I haven't made a secret of what my sort of personal mission is here.
I want to integrate the world into Bitcoin.
That's sort of my mission.
And now there's like submissions, right?
I want to get tokens onto Bitcoin.
I want to drag the Bitcoin maxis kicking and screaming into not even the future, just the present, right?
I want to be able myself to make use of my Bitcoin in ways that today I can't.
So I've got a lot of interests, but my mission is I want to integrate the world into Bitcoin.
And actually in terms of that, right, like if my mission was different, like maybe if I'd grown up in the Cardano ecosystem, I'd be coming at this with a different, I almost certainly would be sort of like saying, wow, okay, fuck, the way to do this is to start with Cardano.
That's not where I started.
For me, the Cardano community is like a new community.
sort of glad that I'm now part of it and becoming more part of it.
But I don't want to put all of my eggs into the Cardano community.
I mean, look just what's happened over the last 24 hours.
We were best friends and then we were the worst of enemies.
So, you know, I would love to see a success in Cardano.
I'll do everything I can to make it a success and to help people.
And that's why I'm so excited by people like Samuel who are saying, look, I have skills, I have understanding and I have interest and I want to come and help.
Because I don't have the expertise.
And for me now to go and learn or anyone, you know, for the BitcoinOS Now team to go and learn how to do Cardano, that would be way, way slower than people from Cardano figuring out how to do it themselves.
the fed
I did come up originally to sort of tell you about Cardano devs and, you know, which ones to be, not which ones to be wary of, but to make sure you do a good job getting the right ones, because there is, you know, some that aren't very good, that a lot of people think are good and stuff like that.
But now I realize that that's not even the case.
So I'm going to sort of veer off and say, are you in talks with any of the founding entities?
Like obviously, you know, Mergo and Sheldon you have contacts with.
I think Sheldon's recently stood down to go and do his own thing.
Ewan, talk to any of the founding entities to actually, you know, build out the Cardano side.
I think I've spoken to all.
So I don't know who you consider the founding entities, but in my mind, it's EMURGO, it's the foundation and IOHK or IOG.
And we've spoken to everyone to one degree or another.
I'm really trying to push, you know, so Sheldon's got a project now, which he's been cooking for
I think, basically, since we started talking, which, you know, he'll need to tell the world more about, but he's very, very focused, I think, on this.
And then I think there's a lot of the dev resources are actually sort of like the core dev resources are in IOHK, and they seem to have a strong sense of how they want to go about it.
I don't know if it's the best to leave it to one of the founding entities.
It might be faster.
I'm a big fan of doing things fast and dirty, which is not the Cardano way, or at least not always the Cardano way.
But I think iterating, doing something minimal and then iterating on that, rather than trying to get the perfect thing done at the beginning, might be the better way to move forward.
And we've done that with BOS.
built something, released it.
We're now building something more, released that.
We're now building something more and releasing that.
So yeah, look, I think if we can get a small number of developers who are enthusiastic about working on this, we can get a first working version of sort of like a minimal system, a minimal bridging system quite quickly.
JP, you're next up and then we'll get to ER and then Sean.
Yeah, thanks for the mic, hello guys.
So, I've got a couple of succinct questions.
So, Iago, is this the project that you're working on with Bob Bodley?
So, I'm not working with Bob on anything directly.
Bob is just very interested in the space and, you know, he's a prolific sort of
technical thinker, not so much a dev, but like a technical thinker in the Bitcoin space.
And so he's been interested in BOS and just generally interested in ZKs and Bitcoin, but we're not working directly with Bob.
He's mostly working on ICP.
Right, that's what I was going to say next.
But wasn't he, yeah, the ICP based project, wasn't he, I could have sworn it was named BOS though.
I don't know of a BOS project on ICP.
I see.
Okay, so on a different note, you mentioned the ability to create tokens.
So how do you plan to index them?
That's always the Achilles heel.
We're not entirely sure, but we expect, I would say we're 80% sure that the indexing will be built into a
into what we're calling the BOS node, which is basically the BOS operator, which does verification, proving, and will also have an indexer, as well as light clients, which will, you know, each operator will be able to choose their own light clients, but we'll also bundle in the light clients.
I see.
Okay, that actually folds right into my next question, which was, where exactly is that going to run?
Where is that going to live?
Is that going to be on?
That runs client side.
So it's not, there is no blockchain, right?
And a big part of what we're trying to do is get away from this idea that every time you want to build something, you need to build a blockchain.
No, no, but where's the bridge going to go to?
What's on the other side of the bridge?
So the other side of the bridge would have to be another chain or at least another execution environment.
So for example, a Cardano would be, uh, BitcoinOS doesn't, BitcoinOS is not a bridge and isn't
built just for bridges.
Bridging is just like the most sort of like the use case that we've seen the most very, very fast and sort of obvious traction around.
But Bitcoin OS is designed to provide programmability to Bitcoin.
The fact that sort of as a side effect, we can also do ZK powered bridging.
It's not a side effect, but it's like it's a very powerful additional tool.
And it's what allows us to take a system like
Cardano and turn Cardano into a external compute resource for Bitcoin.
Well, kind of on JP's point there, doesn't there have to be another chain to have that programmability?
Or does the client, centralized client, act as the intermediary point to join the two?
Yes.
So someone who's running a node
will be one of the committee, right?
Who sign a transaction that creates like a smart contract.
So each time you're creating a bridging UTXO, you need pre-signers to sign it so that they can pre-commit to the rules of things like in this case of a bridge, for example, deposits and withdrawals,
on the basis of ZK, because without that pre, and basically that pre-commitment is like any smart contract.
So any smart contract is a pre-commitment to a set of rules.
But in the case of Bitcoin, that pre-commitment requires, you can't have like a centralized issuer.
You need to have at least two parties and ideally many, many more pre-committing to a set of rules.
So is the client going to run on a centralized service like on an AWS or are you talking about having this run on a BTC validated node for instance?
I think a lot of people probably initially choose to do something like an AWS but
Because this is so ZK heavy, you're probably going to see a quick migration to sort of hardware optimized, like basically systems which are optimized for ZK compute, what are called today hardware accelerated ZK compute.
ASIC or GPU based, yeah.
Yeah.
Great questions, JP.
I really appreciate it.
We'll go on to ER.
It's been waiting for a while.
Thank you.
Can you guys hear me okay there?
Yep.
Awesome.
So first off, uh, appreciate you, uh, coming on here.
Yeah.
Um, after all the heat of, uh, today, uh, so appreciate that coming and facing the community.
Uh, so I'll tell you my, my experience, right from when the news came out, I'm a, I'm not a coder, but I'm pretty technical and I'm heavily invested in Cardano.
So the news came out, there wasn't that much technical explanation of what was happening, how it was gonna happen other than, hey, with ZK Rollups, we can have this brain that now allows Bitcoin and Cardano to integrate.
I spent probably an hour to two hours going on your website, searching on X, searching everywhere I could to try to find some technical thing
that would tell me, hey, this is not just another pipe dream, fake news thing that shows up and then just disappears because people are trying to pump their bags or whatever.
So I really was trying to find the meat of this thing, I couldn't.
So then some of us started speculating here on X of what it could be like trying to draw some diagrams that maybe it should be like this, maybe it's worse like that.
And the expectation was that it was gonna get cleared out pretty soon.
So one of the things we were told there is no bridging direct to BTC to Cardano smart contracts.
So that's where my mind kind of left off.
And since then, that expectation has always been there that eventually we're going to get more details on it.
Maybe it's my lack of additional research to find that information, but I'm sure there's other people
I think what you're saying is very, very true and legitimate.
We haven't released that much documentation.
We've only released a small part of the code that we've written.
And we've been pretty selective about who we sort of give access to more code.
And really the reason is we just know so many
different people who want to just take our code and go and do their own thing.
And we think that that's not good for us.
We think it's not good for the ecosystem.
It won't be secure.
It will cause fragmentation.
And one of the big things that we want to avoid is what's happened with Ethereum, where just the entire ecosystem has fallen apart because of fragmentation.
And we also don't expect people to have to wait
too long.
I mean, we keep on releasing more and more stuff and we expect to have like a, you know, basically end to end system released by, uh, you know, we're targeting like late February, March, as I'd mentioned.
Uh, appreciate that.
Yeah.
So, so, so there's, there's a silver lining, I think, I think to it.
So, so I'm trying to, you know, give you a picture of kind of what a good part of the community might be feeling like.
So now we're, we're today.
Right.
And the news comes out.
So the first feeling is like, oh, hold on a second.
So there is a token when there was no information to be found except maybe on various security channels about a token when the news came out.
And since then, at least I haven't seen anything.
So it starts to be a little inconsistent with our initial idea.
So there starts to be a communication problem there.
I completely agree with you that sometimes things are better on the wrap.
so that you can actually deliver something of quality.
So agree there.
But nevertheless, the communication challenge is there.
So today, we've all heard about the bridge hacks in the Ethereum network.
And with the news of today, that's one of the first things that comes to mind, right?
Bridge hacks, if there's a token in the middle, are we exposed to that?
So I think
From the BitcoinOS side, it would help a lot in keeping the trust or gaining additional trust and helping the community make educated decisions to maybe provide some visuals of what's expected here and how things are expected to work when using BitcoinOS and when not using it at all.
And for example, another one is
what differentiations would there be between a regular bridge that we know from Ethereum versus how it would work here and with zero knowledge things and all of that.
I think it would help a lot with the skepticism and to gain the trust.
I think that the current situation that we find ourselves is that, you know, that the news is a little shocking based on the expectations that were created when the initial announcement was made.
I really appreciate your feedback.
So first of all, what we did was we created a page where you can put in an email or a telegram or whatever, just to get more information and just to be informed about any ability to buy the token and to learn more about it.
And we wouldn't expect anyone to purchase anything with the amount of information that we've released so far.
That would be, I think, insane.
uh... maybe some people would do it uh... i don't think that's serious so uh... right now all we've done is uh... you know let people register learn more and to participate in the future you're absolutely right we have to put up more information we will be putting out more information we actually only recently brought on for the first time uh... graphic designer to help sort of communicate some of these ideas uh...
And so it's part of our goal and part of our responsibility to provide easier.
And it's not just graphics.
It's also there's other code.
Our first responsibility is to release more code.
And we have some white papers that we're writing that we plan to release with additional components of the system.
It's a lot of work, and mostly,
because we're racing to get the product that is workable as soon as possible, we've actually, as pretty much everyone does, right?
You sort of complete the system, do the code, and then you sort of do the documentation.
So we're trying to do that as in parallel as much as possible.
Dev resources are extremely precious.
And sort of we're actually, you know, purposefully saying to the devs, look,
Don't spend too much time with a technical writer now.
And just make sure that you get the systems complete.
Understood.
Makes sense.
I appreciate the time, though.
That was awesome.
And thank you guys again for showing up.
I just want to say, if we could maybe do, let's say, two more questions, because it's getting very, very late for me where I am.
And I think I'm going to have to turn in in a bit.
I was thinking the same thing, Iago.
Right on the dot, two questions.
Sean, and then we'll get to JP and we'll head out of here.
Thank you, BigPay.
Happy to be here.
And it's nice to meet you, Iago.
And this is an amazing project.
It sounds very exciting.
My big question is, we mentioned this Ethereum to Bitcoin.
a problem with the bridge and Solana to Bitcoin.
Has there been, and there may very well have been, but has there been any research into Ergo and the Rosen bridge as a potential processing layer to help alleviate those bridging problems between those chains?
No, not really.
I don't know very much of anything about those bridges.
It's kind of like what I said earlier.
I'm really not an expert on Cardano.
I think the best thing we can do is sort of like take
You know, try and provide the tools and provide access to our systems so that people who are experts in Cardano can, you know, look around, figure out what the best tooling is and build.
Sean, this is a unique way of actually accomplishing this.
It isn't similar to other bridges that have built in the past on Cardano.
I was mentioning Ergo because it is a different layer one proof-of-work coin.
They do work hand-in-hand with Cardano on a number of fronts, but I was just mentioning that.
I think you might be correct, Sean.
I didn't hear the Ergo part.
I just assumed EVM and I ignored the Ergo part.
But yes, you are actually correct.
I think that the way this integration could be handled is very similar to how they've done Rosenbridge in the past between Ergo and Cardano.
Okay, great.
I just wanted to bring that up as a potential example or maybe a potential partnership that could develop over time.
What would be the best way to connect with, like who should I connect with there?
Does anyone know?
I'll send you a link to an account of somebody who's, you know, very knowledgeable about that and connect you with the team.
And Dan Armino, of course, would be definitely one to talk to with more too.
Uh, you said Dan Armino.
I was thinking Daniel Friedman.
Go ahead and send him that account as well.
And I'll send Daniel Friedman.
Excellent.
Well, happy to help.
Thank you.
JP.
Yeah, guys on, on a, on a different note, very briefly.
Um, you mentioned you spoke to Charles the other day.
Did, did by any chance that he mentioned anything or did anybody query him about his meeting with Elon?
Uh, I didn't so I don't know anything about that.
Sorry Yeah, because uh, did did you guys catch the news that he met with elon and discussed?
A project I saw something about it on twitter, but I don't believe 80% of what I see on twitter Yeah Yeah, briefly it was um, um
Okay, so SpaceX announced some sort of a collaboration with Lehman Baird of Swirls, HBAR, Hedera.
And Elon said he was going to actually put it in a satellite.
And there was some talk that he discussed also putting Ada with, he discussed with Charles to put also Ada in space.
Did anyone catch any of that?
Nope.
Share it to me in a DM and I'll make sure everybody knows about it if it's true, JP.
Yeah.
It was quite fascinating.
And just lastly, I suspect Elon might have... Okay.
All right.
Just one thing.
NASA published a paper that discussed having an economy in space.
Elon latched onto it.
and got his guys working on it.
And they're actually going to put it into a separate satellite.
They didn't actually say if it was going to be an independent separate satellite or he's going to incorporate it into each of the Starlink satellites going forward.
That was the last piece.
But anyway, he might have an ulterior motive of actually building some sort of a secure voting system using the satellites for it, is my personal suspicion.
But anyway, I just want to throw that out there.
But I'll show you info.
Thanks.
Jp my knowledge on this unfortunately is exactly zero.
So i'm sorry, but it sounds exciting Yeah Anything he does is exciting Awesome.
Well if you guys enjoyed Uh, nope, no more.
We're done two more questions.
I'm gonna chill for one second.
I just want to say thank you and
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
Time constraints.
Appreciate everybody tuning in.
It was a great space.
Iago, thank you so much for responding back this morning.
We had over 600 people in here, so people obviously care about what you guys are doing, and people obviously care about Cardano.
It's exciting to see.
You did take the time to answer all the questions today.
I did make a post above that says, are you excited for BTC OS?
It's a poll.
You guys can go ahead and give your comments there.
There's a need more information option and a show results if you guys want to see them.
Also, at Atrium Lab, we're doing a little airdrop.
We're trying out our testnet product.
No money's involved.
You can delegate to over 100 different pools at the same time.
You can profile NFT right now and start leveling it up by engaging with your favorite projects on Twitter, Discord,
and on-chain.
The higher level that you get on the test net, the larger airdrop you're going to get once main net launches in Q1.
We're doing one large update about two or three weeks from now, and then main net's coming baby, two years in the making.
So if you guys want to own a piece of the Atma DAO for free, this is your time.
And I'll share the link at the top, and then I'll also let you do your departing here, Iago.
Thanks again so much.
I do think that
You were very fair with everybody, genuine, transparent.
I think people are going to have some more questions, but there's a lot more time in the world to get to them.
Well, thank you very much, Big Pay.
I really appreciate what you've done here and putting this together.
I think you've really ran an awesome space.
And in particular, I'd like to thank everyone who joined for caring so much, for taking the time, for asking the questions, for listening.
Some of you have taken time out of your vacations to come here.
A lot of you have had great advice and great thoughts.
I think you've been extremely thoughtful.
I don't expect that one space is just going to change the mind of, I don't know how many people on Twitter, but I'm hoping that this does something and maybe you guys can help sort of communicate what we've discussed here further.
But whatever happens, we want to continue to work
with the Cardano community to build something cool.
We've really sort of learned everything we know about Cardano for probably the last six weeks, and it's been awesome.
And we hope it continues.
And thank you all very, very much.
You know, we mentioned that.
You know, earlier we have the same vision, right?
Bitcoin and Cardano.
And I think the more time that you spend here and the more time you, you know, have to recognize how strong this community is.
I hope that you guys at BOS, you know, have more of a focus on Cardano and see the true potential that bringing these two blockchains together can have.
And, you know, I don't think EVM fits in this and you may disagree with me, but we'll close it there.
Thank you everybody for tuning in.
Thank you, Iago.
I hope you guys have a good day.