1. Thermal management is the defining engineering bottleneck for orbital compute at every scale.
2. Space is cold, but it does not cool things, and the physics of heat rejection in vacuum are fundamentally different from anything used in terrestrial data centers.
3. At megawatt scale, radiator mass and area are hypothesized to dominate the entire spacecraft, but the constraint may be more tractable than it first appears.
4. At the 10W to 500W per-node range, the thermal problem is largely solved with flight-proven technology that has decades of heritage in LEO.
5. Hardware refresh cycles driven by radiation degradation are routine for a smallsat and difficult for a computing megastructure.

The Bottleneck

The orbital compute race entered a new phase in early 2026. SpaceX filed FCC applications for up to one million data center satellites. Google's Project Suncatcher is preparing to launch TPU-equipped prototypes by early 2027. Starcloud flew an unmodified NVIDIA H100 in orbit and trained an LLM in space for the first time. Axiom Space launched its first orbital data center nodes in January 2026.

Every one of these efforts confronts the same engineering bottleneck: thermal management in the vacuum of space.

Voyager Technologies CEO Dylan Taylor put it plainly in an interview this past month: "It's counterintuitive, but it's hard to actually cool things in space because there's no medium to transmit hot to cold." NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made the same observation: "It's cold in space, but there's no airflow, and so the only way to dissipate is through conduction."

The cooling conversation tends to collapse everything into one problem. Everything from a 1 GW orbital data center to a 50-watt edge compute node needs to reject heat through radiation. But the engineering required, and the maturity of available solutions, could not be more different at the different ends of that scale.

This is a breakdown of where radiative cooling technology stands in 2026, organized by the scale at which it must operate.

Bring on the Heat

There are three principles define thermal management in orbit.

1. Radiation is the only way out. 

On Earth, data centers use convection (moving air or liquid past hot surfaces) to carry heat away. Convective systems remove heat at 2,000+ W/m² with minimal mass penalty. In the vacuum of space, there is no fluid medium. The only available mechanism is thermal radiation: emitting energy as infrared electromagnetic waves. Everything else in orbital thermal design is built around this constraint.

2. Radiative output is governed by temperature. 

The Stefan-Boltzmann law dictates how much heat a surface can radiate per square meter, and the relationship is steep. A 1 m² surface at 20°C radiates roughly 418 W to deep space (one side) or approximately 770-838 W from both sides. 

At 80°C, typical GPU operating temperature, that rises to approximately 850 W per side. At 127°C, the practical upper limit for most electronics, it reaches approximately 1,450 W/m². SemiEngineering's March 2026 analysis offered a useful rule of thumb: rejecting 1 kW of heat takes approximately 2.5 m² of radiator.

3. The sun is the enemy. 

A radiator needs a clear view of cold space (2.7 Kelvin (K), the cosmic microwave background). But orbital hardware faces approximately 1,361 W/m² of direct solar radiation, plus Earth albedo and infrared (IR) emission. As the Chinese aerospace publication Xianzao Ketang detailed in February 2026: "On the sun-facing side, the heat radiator may not be able to dissipate heat but may instead become a 'heat absorber.'" This is why radiator orientation, sun-synchronous orbit selection, and spectral-selective coatings (surfaces that reflect solar wavelengths while emitting strongly in mid-infrared) matter as much as raw radiator area.

Megawatt Scale Cooling

At the power levels envisioned by the largest orbital data center concepts (hundreds of kilowatts to gigawatts), radiators risk becoming the dominant mass and area driver of the entire spacecraft.

The International Space Station provides the most mature benchmark. Its External Active Thermal Control System rejects up to 70 kW using 422 m² of ammonia-loop radiators, achieving roughly 166 W/m² in practice, well below theoretical maximums because of solar exposure, Earth IR loading, and system inefficiencies. Scaling that to a 1 GW facility (the scale SpaceX and Google are discussing) would require approximately 3,950 m² of radiator at optimistic operating temperatures, with a mass of 19,750 to 39,500 kg at 5-10 kg/m². One first-principles analysis calculated that at this scale, the thermal management system mass alone exceeds the combined mass of computing equipment, power systems, and structural components.

Mach33 Research challenged this framing in their "Debunking the Cooling Constraint" analysis, using Starlink V3 as a reference platform. Their finding: when scaling a Starlink-class spacecraft from approximately 20 kW (its current communications payload) to approximately 100 kW (compute-optimized), radiators represent only 10-20% of total mass and roughly 7% of total planform area. Solar arrays, not radiators, dominate the spacecraft footprint. At 100 kW, if a platform can accommodate the solar area required for power generation, the additional radiator area is comparatively modest. Their conclusion: radiative cooling at this scale behaves more like an engineering trade-off than a hard physics blocker.

The distinction matters. At individual satellite level (100 kW class), cooling is tractable. At constellation-aggregated levels (100 MW to GW), the radiator mass compounds across thousands of spacecraft, but not to the point of becoming a constraint in contrast to area budget.

Several approaches are being developed for radiator cooling for larger compute satellites:

Passive flat-form-factor designs
Sophia Space's TILE architecture takes a geometry-first approach. Each module is a flat, one-meter-square, few-centimeters-deep compute slab. Processors sit directly against a proprietary passive heat spreader, and the high surface-area-to-volume ratio turns the entire structure into a radiator. A software layer dynamically balances workloads across processors to prevent localized hotspots. The company claims 92% of generated power goes directly to computation. Sophia plans to flight-test on an Apex Space satellite bus by late 2027.

Distributed satellite clusters with optical interconnects
Google's Project Suncatcher envisions constellations of approximately 81 TPU-equipped satellites at approximately 650 km altitude, connected by free-space optical links (1.6 Tbps demonstrated in lab). Google's published research calls for "advanced thermal interface materials and heat transport mechanisms, preferably passive to maximize reliability." Their Trillium TPU v6e was radiation-tested under a 67 MeV proton beam with 10 mm aluminum shielding and survived the radiation levels expected over a five-year LEO mission.

Pumped fluid loops and active thermal control
For individual satellites running tens of kilowatts and above, mechanically pumped fluid loops (MPFLs) circulate coolant through cold plates to collect heat and transport it to external radiators. This is proven, flight-heritage technology. China's Shenzhou spacecraft and Chang'e 3 lander both used MPFL systems. The trade-off is mechanical complexity: pumps can fail, fluid loops can leak (the ISS has experienced ammonia leaks), and every component adds mass.

Liquid Droplet Radiators (LDRs)
This is the most promising advanced concept for high-power thermal rejection. Instead of solid panel radiators, an LDR generates a controlled sheet of microscopic droplets (approximately 100 micron diameter) that radiate heat as they travel through vacuum, then recollects them. NASA research dating to the 1980s showed LDRs can be up to seven times lighter than conventional radiators. A November 2025 study in Applied Thermal Engineering demonstrated heat dissipation rates of up to 450 W/kg. LDRs remain developmental, with ongoing research from Chinese, Russian, and U.S. groups on droplet collection in microgravity, fluid contamination, and solar back-loading.

ESA's ASCEND program validated the thermal feasibility of orbital data centers in its June 2024 study results and added a footnote: lifecycle carbon accounting only works if launcher emissions drop by approximately ten times. Their roadmap targets a 50 kW proof of concept by 2031, scaling to 1 GW by 2050.

Cooling Edge Computing

Below approximately 500 watts per node, the thermal picture shifts fundamentally. The radiator mass problem that dominates megawatt-scale discussions effectively disappears, and the available solutions are proven technologies with decades of operational data.

Body-mounted passive radiation
For payloads dissipating under approximately 100 W, the spacecraft's own structural surfaces serve as the radiator. No deployable panels, no fluid loops, or moving parts required. A 3U CubeSat (approximately 10 cm x 10 cm x 30 cm) has roughly 0.17 m² of external surface area. With appropriate thermal coatings (high emissivity in infrared, low absorptivity in solar wavelengths), that surface can passively reject approximately 70 W. For edge compute payloads running AI inference or cryptographic operations at 10-50 W, body-mounted radiation is often sufficient. NASA's state-of-the-art SmallSat thermal control survey confirms this as a baseline capability for LEO missions.

Heat pipes for moderate loads
When compute loads push into the 50-500 W range, heat pipes and loop heat pipes (LHPs) transfer heat from the processor to the best-positioned radiating surface through phase change of a working fluid, commonly ammonia. SpaceComputer, for example, uses passive cooling with radiators mounted on its processors and cooling pipes that transfer heat to the satellite structure itself, which then radiates to space. The Air Force Research Laboratory developed a scalable thermal management system for CubeSats-to-ESPA-class spacecraft that handles up to 1 kW of waste heat, combining additive-manufactured heat pipes, phase change material accumulators, and roll-out deployable radiators. Georgia Tech's Low-Gravity Science and Technology Lab is pushing further with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) liquid-metal loops for CubeSats that require no moving parts at all, demonstrating heat-transfer rates of 13.8 W/K in lab prototypes.

Phase change materials as thermal batteries
PCMs (typically paraffin waxes for space applications) absorb heat during peak compute loads and release it during eclipse or idle periods. A 2025 study demonstrated a hybrid PCM plus AI-tuned controller approach that reduced peak-to-peak thermal variation by approximately 25% in CubeSat applications. This matters for architectures that process workloads in bursts across a constellation rather than running sustained loads on every satellite node like orbital data centers.

The Thermal Management Spectrum

Thermal Managment Is an Architectural Divide

TLDR: the thermal challenge in orbital compute scales non-linearly with power. 

At the megawatt-to-gigawatt end, radiative cooling remains an active area of engineering development. The question, as Mach33 framed it, is not whether cooling is physically possible (and it is) but what the optimal operating point is.

At the edge end, the thermal problem is largely solved by passive radiation, heat pipes, and phase change materials are proven technologies with decades of testing. Adding compute nodes to a distributed constellation scales compute capacity without proportionally scaling thermal infrastructure. 

The companies that define orbital compute between now and 2030 will be the ones that match their thermal architecture to their compute architecture and ship working systems at the scale where the physics already works. But the landscape will not stand still.

By the end of the decade, many of these will carry flight experience, and a new generation of thermal innovations will have taken their place on the R&D horizon. The thermal constraints that shape orbital compute in 2026 are real, but are not permanent, and the pace of progress suggests the hardest problems in orbital cooling are closer to solved than they appear.

Looking to read deeper on Orbital Data Centers? Get a comprehensive breakdown.

Space-Based Data Centers: The Moonshot Worth Betting On

Space-based data centers went from science fiction to a serious investment thesis sometime around 2023. Google, Starcloud, Axiom Space, and SpaceComputer all announced orbital compute initiatives in the last few years. The race is on to scalability, with the finish line somewhere around 2030. One might say orbital compute is

SpaceComputerTara Jean

Make sure to follow us on Twitter (X) for more news, insights, and developments in the orbital computing sector.

Randomness is the invisible foundation of digital security. Every security key ever created, and every encrypted message ever sent depends on a random number that nobody could have predicted. 

In February 2025, North Korean hackers executed the largest cryptocurrency theft in history, stealing $1.5 billion in ETH from Bybit. They compromised a single developer's laptop at multi-signature wallet provider, injected malicious JavaScript code, and manipulated what Bybit's signers saw when approving a routine cold wallet transfer. This one infected device in the signing chain was enough to bypass every layer of multi-signature security protecting $1.5 billion in assets. That’s why security for cryptographic infrastructure is only as trustworthy as its weakest trust assumption.

What makes this so significant for the randomness layer is the economic structure of the industry responsible for producing that randomness. The global RNG market currently sits at over $4.8 billion. However, the security and verifiability of the randomness provided decreases as the market sectors become more niche. That dropoff tells a story about where cryptographic infrastructure is strong today, where it is fragile, and where the next generation of security-critical applications will demand something that does not exist yet.

The Randomness Stack

At the base of the stack sits in the hardware. True random number generators (TRNGs) are embedded in the processors and secure elements powering billions of devices. Intel's RDRAND, Qualcomm's SoC entropy modules, Infineon's automotive TRNGs, and ID Quantique's quantum random number generators all harvest physical phenomena like thermal noise, oscillator jitter, and photon behavior to produce entropy at the silicon level. This is a $3.3 to $4.8 billion market in 2024, growing steadily at 8 to 10% CAGR and dominated by semiconductor incumbents. Quantum RNG (QRNG) is the fastest-growing sub-segment. The limitation to this randomness source is structural: entropy generated on a chip stays local to that device and cannot prove anything to a remote verifier.

Moving one layer up, software pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) represent roughly $1 billion in commercially tracked value. These are the algorithmic defaults: OpenSSL, Linux's /dev/urandom, language-level RNG libraries. They are fast, free, and ubiquitous, but also deterministic. Given the seed, the output is predictable. For simulations and non-critical applications, this works. For high-stakes cryptographic operations where predictability becomes an attack vector, the risk must be minimized as much as possible.

The dropoff in market value is significant when reaching the cryptographic layer. Oracle-based on-chain randomness, led by Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function) is a secure, tamper-proof, and provably fair random number generator (RNG) for blockchain smart contracts. It works, and millions of requests have been fulfilled across dozens of blockchains. But VRF generates less than 1% of Chainlink's total revenue, which is overwhelmingly driven by price feed oracles. The entire on-chain randomness market produces an estimated $4 to $10 million annually. For oracle providers, randomness is a feature within a larger business, not a standalone product.

Then we reach zero.

Public randomness beacons, services that broadcast verifiable and unpredictable random values at regular intervals, are critical infrastructure with no commercial value. The most significant is Drand, operated by the League of Entropy: a consortium of over 20 organizations including Cloudflare, the Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Labs, and EPFL. Drand has produced approximately 32 million randomness rounds across its networks. Filecoin depends on it entirely for leader election. Yet Drand is free and generates no revenue. The NIST Randomness Beacon operates on the same model: government-funded, centralized, publicly available at no cost.

At the top of the stack, private randomness beacons, where true entropy is consumed confidentially rather than broadcast publicly, represent a formal market size of $0. The category is pre-commercial, and no established provider offers it at scale.

Counterintuitiveness and Economics

The pattern seems counterintuitive. As you move up each layer of the stack, a critical capability is added, whether that is verifiability or privacy, yet commercial value drops significantly. The market rewards raw entropy in silicon while the delivery and verification layers that make entropy useful in networked systems are not established or used at full capacity.

The explanation for this counterintuitiveness is straightforward. Hardware TRNGs are a semiconductor play where entropy is bundled into processors sold for different reasons. Nobody buys an Intel chip for the TRNG; the randomness is an additional capability, which is why the market appears large. Software PRNGs are open-source commodities. On-chain randomness is a minor product line within larger cryptographic ecosystems. Public beacons are maintained by organizations that view randomness as a civic responsibility rather than a revenue stream.

As Daniel Bar, SpaceComputer co-founder, has put it:

"You don't build a new oracle or launch a blockchain in space for the sake of randomness alone. Cosmic entropy won’t make a market."

He is right. For most use cases today, the existing stack is adequate. PRNGs handle session tokens, Chainlink VRF services on-chain gaming and NFT mints reliably, and Drand serves Filecoin's consensus needs at the cost of volunteer node operators. The question is whether these services that are deemed adequate in the present is sufficient for what comes next.

Opening in the Market

We’ve established that public beacons solve for transparency and VRFs solve for on-demand verification. What neither of them solves is for private randomness delivery. A growing category of applications at the intersection of high-security cryptography and confidential computing needs all three properties simultaneously.

Use cases include:

• Key generation for MPC where no single party should observe the entropy used
• Sealed-bid auctions where the randomness driving commitment schemes must be both verifiable and confidential
• Authentication nonces where predictability is a direct exploit vector
• Defense and classified communications where the entropy source itself is a security concern

A private beacon worth trusting requires:

• True randomness (physical entropy, not algorithmic)
• Tamper-proof generation
• Verifiable delivery
• Privacy (the operator cannot observe consumed values)

These requirements are not hypothetical. The adjacent markets that serve them are among the fastest-growing in technology infrastructure. Confidential computing is valued at $5.5 to $9 billion in 2024 and growing at 34 to 64% CAGR. In-orbit computing is projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2029 at 67% CAGR. Post-quantum cryptography sits at $0.3 to $1.2 billion, growing at 37 to 46% CAGR. Each of these domains either consumes or depends on high-grade entropy, and each is pushing toward delivery models that the current randomness stack cannot support.

The dropoff from $4.8 billion to $0 does not reflect a lack of demand for the upper layers. It reflects the fact that a credible commercial product has not yet been built there.

A New Type of TRNG

SpaceComputer sits at this intersection. Our Cosmic True Random Number Generator, cTRNG, harvests cosmic entropy from radiation detected by secure hardware aboard satellites in low Earth orbit. The physical properties of space provide what terrestrial infrastructure cannot: an entropy source that operates above atmospheric shielding, beyond physical access, and outside the reach of electromagnetic interference or nation-state coercion. The randomness is physical, not algorithmic. The generation environment is tamper-resistant by the laws of physics, not by policy.

The public cTRNG beacon is live today, available through our Orbitport API and published to IPFS. Developers can access verifiable randomness from orbit now.

By end of Q1 2026, we are targeting private beacon capabilities through orbital computing infrastructure: true entropy consumed confidentially within a trust-minimized TEE environment, where the values a consumer receives remain unobservable to anyone, including SpaceComputer.

The randomness stack has a $4.8 billion foundation and a $0 ceiling. We intend to build above it.

If you are working on applications where the source, the delivery, and the privacy of your entropy all matter, we would like to hear from you at [email protected].

Request API access here.

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Randomness is a foundational primitive in cryptographic protocols. It underpins security properties such as unpredictability, fairness, privacy, and resistance to adversarial manipulation. Key generation, nonces, salts, signatures, leader election, lotteries, and many consensus mechanisms all rely on randomness behaving as assumed. When randomness is weak, biased, predictable, or manipulable, entire protocols can fail.

These failures motivate a closer look at how randomness is generated. In practice, systems rely on different sources and constructions with very different security guarantees. PseudoRandom Number Generators (PRNGs) are deterministic algorithms that expand a short seed into long sequences that appear random but are fully predictable if the seed is known. True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) extract entropy from physical processes, such as CPU noise, space radiation, and other sources, providing non-deterministic outputs but often at the cost of lower throughput, greater complexity, and more difficult verification. Cryptographically Secure PseudoRandom Number Generators (CSPRNGs) aim to combine strong entropy sources with robust algorithms to ensure unpredictability even in adversarial environments. When evaluating TRNGs, an important aspect is that the randomness-generating process is sound. 

At SpaceComputer, we provide a cosmic True Random Number Generator (cTRNG) based on physical measurements collected by sensors deployed in space. By observing space radiation, a fundamentally unpredictable physical phenomenon, we extract entropy that is independent of local software, hardware, or operating system assumptions on Earth.

This approach aims to mitigate common weaknesses of conventional randomness sources, such as environmental bias, insufficient entropy at startup, or partial adversarial control over local systems. The resulting randomness can be used directly as a high-quality entropy source, or combined with cryptographic post-processing to produce cryptographically secure randomness suitable for demanding cryptographic protocols.

However, claiming high-quality or “true” randomness is not sufficient on its own. Users and protocol designers cannot directly observe the physical entropy source in space; they only interact with its outputs and the information published alongside them. This creates a fundamental verification problem: how can one gain confidence that the randomness is genuinely unpredictable, correctly generated, and not degraded, biased, or manipulated at any stage of the pipeline? Addressing this requires a clear separation between what can be verified by external observers, and what must be validated internally by the system designers. For that, we consider two types of verification: first, the randomness's quality, and second, binding the randomness to its origin (space!) for accountability, using attestations. 

First, external verification: what you can realistically check from public outputs and metadata. This includes statistical testing of outputs, as well as cryptographic mechanisms such as attestations and verifiable CSPRNG generation, which let you audit the process, not just the bitstream.

Second, internal verification: what we, as designers, must validate to justify strong claims about entropy and security. This is where entropy source validation comes in, and where standards like NIST SP 800-90B give a useful framework: raw data collection, IID vs non-IID modelling, min-entropy estimation, health tests, and conditioning.

The idea is simple: external checks help detect obvious failures and provide accountability, but they do not replace internal validation. Internal validation makes the claims real, external verification makes them auditable.

This can be viewed as a randomness supply chain, where different stages have different trust and accountability requirements: from physical entropy generation, through processing and transport, to consumption by cryptographic protocols.

Preliminaries

How do we verify that what we produce is actually correct to use for cryptography, both from our point of view as system designers, and from the user's point of view?

There are two very different perspectives here.

On one side, we have the internal view. As designers, we can see the full pipeline: the physical noise source, the sampling and digitization chain, the firmware and software, and the operational parameters. We can collect raw datasets, reproduce edge conditions, and run validation procedures that are simply not available to external users.

On the other side, external users mostly see what is public: documentation, any proofs or attestations we publish, and the random values they receive through the API. They cannot “open the box”, and they should not be asked to trust internal claims blindly.

1) External verification

There are two families of tools in external verification: statistical verification and cryptographic verification.

A) Statistical verification

Statistical verification asks a single thing: does this output behave like independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) uniform randomness under standard tests?

It is a sanity check, not a proof of security. A generator can pass a lot of tests and still be predictable to an attacker who knows or can influence its internal state.

In practice you run established batteries like TestU01 and PractRand. The workflow is straightforward: collect a large stream, run the battery, inspect the results and failure patterns.

Under the null hypothesis “outputs are i.i.d. uniform,” each test computes a statistic and reports how extreme your observation is, as a p-value. The p-value is the probability of observing data at least as extreme as what you saw, assuming the null hypothesis is true. 

What matters is not one p-value. With enough tests you will always see something slightly odd. What matters is repetition: the same tests failing across multiple runs, failures that only appear at scale, or failures that show up only in specific projections (low bits vs high bits, bit-reversed variants, byte order). Such structured patterns provide stronger evidence for rejecting the null hypothesis that the outputs are independent and identically distributed uniform variables.

What it cannot tell you is just as important. From outputs alone, you cannot quantify the entropy of the physical source, you cannot rule out operator influence, and you cannot detect side channels. Statistical verification can detect when something is wrong. It cannot prove that everything is secure.

B) Cryptographic verification

Cryptographic verification is not about “looking random.” It is about the integrity of the randomness supply chain: can the user verify that the output is tied to a specific, auditable procedure?

One approach is attestation. The service signs metadata and, depending on the setup, can provide remote attestation that binds outputs to a specific implementation, configuration, and device state. This does not prove unpredictability, but it makes operational claims checkable rather than trust-based.

Another approach is verifiable deterministic generation, typically with commit and replay. The provider commits to a seed first, then produces outputs from a CSPRNG, and reveals the seed later so anyone can replay the CSPRNG and verify the sequence was fixed in advance. If needed, the effective seed can be derived as H(seed || public_value), where public_value is something the provider cannot control, like a block hash at a predetermined time. This reduces the risk of adaptive manipulation in public randomness scenarios.

External verification can give you confidence that nothing is obviously broken, and that the generation process is accountable. Statistical tests help detect failures and regressions. Cryptographic mechanisms help users verify that outputs are bound to a stable implementation and a fixed procedure.

What it cannot give you is a defensible entropy claim. If you want to argue “this source provides at least X bits of entropy per sample under these conditions,” that is internal verification, and it requires access to the source, raw data collection, modelling, and validation. That is what we cover next.

2) Internal verification

Internal verification is what the system designers do to justify a concrete claim about their entropy source: how much unpredictability it provides, under which conditions, and what happens when it degrades. From a supply-chain perspective, this corresponds to validating the upstream part of the randomness supply chain, where entropy is physically generated, sampled, and conditioned, before any outputs are exposed to users.

A good reference for this work is NIST SP 800-90B. NIST is the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the 800-90 documents are widely used as a baseline in security products. SP 800-90B is specifically about entropy sources: how to evaluate them, how to estimate entropy, and what monitoring is expected in a deployed system.

You can think of internal verification as validating the upstream randomness pipeline (the generation side of the supply chain) rather than a single output stream:

The point is not “these bits look random.” The point is we understand and control where the unpredictability comes from.

a) Sampling & Digitization

Sampling and digitization define how the physical entropy source is converted into digital samples. The sampling rate determines when and how often the source is observed, while digitization specifies how continuous measurements are mapped to discrete values.

These choices directly impact entropy and independence. Oversampling can introduce correlations, while insufficient resolution or poor quantization can reduce effective entropy. All later steps, raw data collection, entropy modelling, health tests, and conditioning, rely on the assumptions introduced here. For this reason, the sampling and digitization scheme must be explicitly defined and stable under the expected operating conditions.

b) Raw data collection.

The first step is to collect raw data from the entropy source, before any post-processing. This is the dataset you use to evaluate the source. Internal verification is stronger when raw data is collected across the operating conditions you actually expect in production.

c) Entropy estimation: quantify unpredictability

Entropy estimation requires choosing an explicit model for the source. SP 800-90B asks you to be explicit about whether the source can be treated as IID (independent and identically distributed) or not.

IID is the simplest case: samples behave like independent draws from a stable distribution.

Non-IID is the most common case, because of drift, correlations, and slow changes over time. SP 800-90B provides methods for both cases, but the non-IID track is more conservative.

Given this model, unpredictability can be quantified, typically using min-entropy. The outcome of this step is a lower bound on “entropy per sample” under stated assumptions.

This is different from statistical test suites on final outputs. Output tests are useful diagnostics, but entropy estimation is where you make the core claim: how much uncertainty an attacker faces, in the worst case.

d) Health tests: keep the source in the validated regime

Even a good entropy source can fail. That is why SP 800-90B includes health testing requirements.

Health tests run at startup and continuously while the system operates. They are designed to catch basic failure modes, like a source getting stuck or drifting away from its expected behaviour. When health tests trigger, the system should treat that as “stop trusting this source” and react accordingly (discard outputs, reseed, or enter an error state depending on the design).

e) Conditioning: making raw noise usable

Raw noise is often biased or messy. Conditioning is the step that turns raw samples into a cleaner stream suitable for seeding an RNG or being consumed directly.

Conditioning helps, but it does not create entropy. That is why internal verification estimates entropy at the source and then explains how conditioning is applied on top of that.

What internal verification produces:

At the end of the internal process, you want a simple set of deliverables:

• A defensible lower bound on entropy per sample, under stated assumptions and conditions
• A monitoring strategy (health tests) to detect when those assumptions stop holding
• A clear description of how raw data is conditioned and then used (seeding, reseeding, output)

With that in place, external users can still run their own checks, but your security claims no longer rely on trust or “it passed some tests”. They rely on a validation method that is designed specifically for entropy sources. However, NIST should be treated as a baseline, and complemented with current research and real-world incident learnings, because many RNG failures come from operational and implementation details rather than the high-level design.

External verification helps users detect obvious failures and audit how outputs were produced. Internal verification, following a framework like NIST SP 800-90B, is what supports real entropy and security claims: measure the source, state the assumptions, monitor it in production, and document how the bits are conditioned and used.

SpaceComputer Solution

SpaceComputer generates randomness in space by running TEEs on low Earth orbit satellite hardware that measures space radiation to extract entropy. Orbitport acts as the gateway that transports this randomness from the orbital environment to users and applications on Earth. 

To ensure trust, each stage of the randomness supply chain is verifiable. Cryptographic attestations provide provenance, allowing users to verify where the randomness was generated, how it was handled, and that it remained secure and unaltered from space to Earth. In addition, our library provides statistical verification methods that users can apply to the outputs themselves. Together, this provides both supply-chain-level accountability (attestations) and output-level validation (statistical verification).

Application of our findings 

We provide cTRNG-lib, a library that exposes this space-deployed true random number generator through a clean, developer-friendly API. From the user’s point of view, cTRNG-lib offers two main paths: request raw true random bits directly, or use those bits to seed a CSPRNG.

We use cTRNG-lib in threshold signature systems, where randomness quality directly impacts private key security and protocol robustness. In ECDSA, the signature nonce is a single point of catastrophic failure: if it is reused, biased, or even partially predictable, the private key can be recovered. Even in threshold ECDSA, there is still some risk.

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Key management services (KMSs) are foundational to modern cryptographic infrastructure. KMSs provide secure ways to create, store, manage, and handle access to cryptographic keys for encrypting and decrypting data. As the sensitivity and scope of key material continues to grow across Web3 and beyond, so does the need for key infrastructure that offers verifiability by design, and security guarantees beyond the walls of a data center.

We are building SpaceComputer’s key management services to meet this need. We’re offering custodial KMS grounded in hardware-attested trusted execution, designed with a clear architectural path from centralized to distributed threshold cryptography, and ultimately space-native key infrastructure.

Technical Foundation

In the early phase, SpaceComputer KMS executes all ‘key’ operations inside Intel TDX Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) or a hardware secure module (HSM). In general, key material is generated, stored, and processed within hardware-attested and isolated computers. In case of TEEs, remote attestation enables any integrating parties to independently verify the integrity of the environment handling their keys, establishing trust via cryptographic proofs instead of contractual agreements. Our unique architecture can operate not only in on-Earth environments, but can also be migrated to a space-based KMS. This guides our design choices and requires us to build our unique approach. 

The service exposes an API fully compatible with established KMS solutions, with incoming GCP compatibility planned alongside our participation in the Google for Startups Cloud Program. 

Organizations currently relying on, e.g., AWS KMS, can migrate to SpaceComputer with minimal integration efforts. Our goal is to make the transition as close to a drop-in replacement as possible, removing friction for teams evaluating stronger trust guarantees for their key material.

Initial supported cryptographic primitives will include broad support for elliptic curve schemes, commonly used in industry. A full specification table covering supported signing and encryption schemes will be published alongside our developer documentation.

Architectural Roadmap

SpaceComputer KMS is designed for progressive decentralization: each phase of the roadmap builds stronger trust guarantees through a stable API for integration.

Currently, SpaceComputer operates KMS as an Earth-based service, secured by an Intel TDX TEE and works with integration partners through a secure API. Partners interface with our infrastructure without managing the underlying key operations. All cryptographic processing occurs on SpaceComputer's infrastructure, with hardware attestation providing verifiability from the outset. A similar KMS solution will be enabled by our first satellite, which will be launched later this year. Stay tuned for more! 

In the next phase, we will distribute KMS operations across multiple selected parties using Threshold Cryptography. Each party will run a partial signer inside their own TEE. Under this model, no single participant, including SpaceComputer, holds sufficient key material to sign or decrypt unilaterally. SpaceComputer orchestrates the protocol while cryptographic control is shared across all signers. TEE attestation at every node ensures that verifiability is preserved throughout the distributed signing process.

Space-Native Infrastructure. Looking further ahead, SpaceComputer is laying the groundwork for hybrid earth/space key storage, progressing toward a fully space-native KMS. With a satellite launch destined for later this year, we are preparing key infrastructure that extends beyond terrestrial boundaries. Initial orbital deployment will operate as a hardened proof-of-concept, with production readiness contingent on extended testing and validation in orbit.

DataHaven, The First Integration Partner

DataHaven is the first platform integrating SpaceComputer KMS into its stack. DataHaven users who store encrypted data on the platform will be able to select SpaceComputer KMS as their key storage provider alongside existing options.

All KMS operations are executed on SpaceComputer's side, with DataHaven interfacing exclusively through the API. This separation ensures that storage and key security remain architecturally distinct.

Testing is underway, with initial integration workflows expected in the coming weeks.

Looking Ahead for KMS

We are finalizing integration partnerships with a few more   infrastructure providers who will participate as distributed signers in the threshold cryptography phase. These partnerships will mark an important step in removing single-operator trust assumptions from the KMS architecture.

Developer documentation and a complete API reference are in progress and will be released in March 2025, ahead of broader integration availability.

For teams requiring verifiable, sovereign key management, or for organizations interested in integration, we welcome you to reach out at [email protected]. 

SpaceComputer KMS is one component of a broader vision: a cryptographic infrastructure that is verifiable and built to operate beyond the constraints of terrestrial trust models. Stay tuned, more is coming soon.

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For most of the Space Age, orbit was reserved for those who could write billion-dollar checks. Satellites were limited in functionality, clunky, and launched on rockets controlled by a handful of governments. Even GPS started as a U.S. military project. Early communications satellites like those operated by the legacy company Intelsat were built to serve sovereign and corporate interests.

That era is ending.

Over the past decade, the cost of reaching orbit has collapsed. SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 drove launch prices down by an order of magnitude. CubeSat standards turned satellite design from a nation-state endeavour into something a university lab or a startup can pull off. Today, thousands of small satellites (Smallsats) circle the Earth in low earth orbit (LEO), and the pace is only accelerating.

What makes this significant is more than just the cost. As launch prices fall, space is becoming more composable. Instead of one monolithic satellite for everything, teams can now deploy dozens of small, specialized nodes in orbit. That shift from monolithic to distributed is more than an engineering choice, it’s an architectural choice similar to the evolvement of blockchain networks.

This is the world SpaceComputer is building for. Space as a platform for permissionless, verifiable computation, with smallsats as the hardware foundation that makes it all possible.

Thesis for Decentralization in Orbit

If you've spent any time in crypto, you already understand why a distributed networks beats a centralized one. More nodes = more resilience, no single point of failure, and no single entity with absolute control.

Now apply that logic to space.

Today's orbital infrastructure is very similar to Earth’s: overwhelmingly centralized. 

Starlink is the most visible example: over 7,000 satellites in orbit, all owned and operated by a single company. SpaceX decides who gets access, what the terms are, and can shut off service to entire regions if it sees fit. Legacy operators like Intelsat and SES run the same playbook from geostationary orbit, serving governments and telcos through tightly controlled networks. Even GPS, the system the entire world relies on for positioning and timing, is ultimately run by the U.S. Space Force.

Centralization concerns aside, current dominating LEO constellations are truly impressive systems. They're also single points of trust in a world that's learning to be skeptical of exactly that.

That's where smallsats have the capability to flip the model. They're cheap to build and launch, and you can deploy many of them.

Because you can deploy many smallsats, you can distribute ownership, operation, and validation across independent nodes.

The parallels to blockchain architecture in smallsats are hard to miss: many small, resilient nodes working in coordination beats a few massive central servers every time.

This is where the decentralization 'vision' enters orbit. A constellation of smallsats can do what a single large satellite does, with the added benefit that no single operator, government, or corporate entity holds the keys. The network becomes the infrastructure, and the infrastructure becomes permissionless.

What to do with SmallSats? 

So if smallsats are the hardware that makes decentralized space infrastructure possible, what do you actually do with them?

The most compelling answer is to turn them into compute nodes. Satellites in low Earth orbit are physically isolated from every government, corporation, and bad actor on Earth. No one can walk up and tamper with them. That physical isolation creates something incredibly valuable: a tamper-proof execution environment that doesn't depend on trusting any single party on the ground.

Now picture a whole constellation of these nodes running cryptographic services. Verifiable randomness sourced from cosmic entropy, secure key management, threshold signing, and confidential computation. Consensus that is anchored in orbit rather than in a data center somewhere, or worse: someone's garage. A trust layer that exists beyond the reach of terrestrial jurisdictions, available to anyone.

Secure Compute Smallsats in Orbit

The project's satellites run as SpaceTEEs (Space Trusted Execution Environments), and the first service already live is cTRNG, a cosmic True Random Number Generator. Randomness sounds niche until you realize it is the secure cryptographic force behind key generation, consensus mechanisms, fair NFT mints, governance systems, and beyond.

The SpaceComputer Blue Paper lays out the full architecture: a Celestial blockchain acting as a compute platform across the satellite constellation, while Earth-based Layer 2s handle throughput and data availability. The most critical trust layer lives in the most tamper-proof environment imaginable, and everything else anchors to it.

The constellation is the network, the smallsats are the validators, and the whole system is designed to be permissionless from the core. .

Building in the Expanse of Space

For decades, space was a domain of empires. Expensive, centralized, and gatekept by the few who could afford it. Smallsats are rewriting that story. Orbit is becoming accessible, composable, and for the first time, compatible with the principles that decentralized networks were built on. Permissionless computation, verifiable trust, cryptographic services beyond the control of any single entity. The building blocks are already up there.

Sign up for email updates to be first to hear about SpaceComputer's upcoming hardware and software architecture paper. This one is going to be big.

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📄 Read the Blue Paper for the full technical vision: Blue Paper

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Space is the hottest emerging sector of 2026, that investors are describing as a blue ocean of opportunity to expand humanity beyond the bounds of Earth. The major players in the space economy now are building the orbital economy and for the multi-planetary future over next 10-20 years.

There is a big uptick in the launch providers (the charge being led by SpaceX), alongside hardware, logistics, communications and manufacturing companies. This is further delineated into in-orbit service providers, which includes space mining, Earth observations, scientific research, AI, imaging, and the emerging sector of compute platforms in orbit.

Space Economy Challenges

While the opportunities are huge, the space economy is still restrained by challenges of regulatory uncertainty, supply chain constraints, and launch costs; all major considerations in low Earth orbit (LEO) launches.

While innovation and increased market sector growth will overcome many these challenges, the challenge of space debris and safety concerns will continue to rise. LEO is becoming increasingly congested, with the number of satellites predicted to double from over 12000 that are already flying overhead. To address this challenge, it opens the market to a new sub-sector of providers and researchers using AI to analyze movement of space debris, and hardware solutions for removing debris from LEO.

A Global Marketplace in LEO

We can expect to see over the coming decade, a shift from space as a testbed for innovation to an orbital marketplace. Low Earth orbit (LEO) has already become prime real estate with an increase in investment going into LEO satellites and infrastructure, and dramatic incline of satellites orbiting Earth.

Emerging Opportunities in the Space Tech Economy

As new investment and technology trends emerge over the coming months and years, many opportunities will unlock across different sectors of the industry. Below are a few that will enable broader infrastructure for space:

1. Lunar operations, such as water deposit extraction
2. Orbital construction and manufacturing in space
3. AI and robotics for asteroid mining and maintenance in orbit
4. Launch ride-shares and space transport platforms
5. Space energy production (e.g., solar power, fusion, etc.)

Future of the Space Tech Economy

The future of the space tech economy is only set to expand. With the increase in revenue produced from the space tech economy projected to double from $613 Billion in 2024 to over $1.8 Trillion in 2035.

Below is a display and breakdown of major economic players by sector. While it is not an exhaustive list of the sector in its entirety, it does encapsulate global players beyond the US market, which is attributed to approximately 50% of the industry companies and revenue.

Main Space Economy Players by Sector

Launch Providers

Rocket Lab is providing end-to-end space services including the Electron small-lift launch vehicle, spacecraft manufacturing, and satellite components with 80+ successful launches.

SpaceX created Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship and the Starlink satellite constellation to make space access affordable and enable life on other planets.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin providing reliable launch services with Atlas V and Vulcan rockets, primarily serving national security and NASA missions.

Arianespace is Europe's leading launch service provider operating rockets for commercial, governmental, and scientific missions.

Firefly Aerospace is developing small and medium-lift launch vehicles (Alpha and MLV), lunar landers (Blue Ghost), and in-space transportation to increase access to orbit and beyond.

Relativity Space serves the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation market with Terran R to make access to space more reliable and routine.

NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) is India's commercial arm for space activities, providing launch services, satellite building, and technology transfer from ISRO to industry.

Space One is Japan's first private orbital launch company developing the Kairos small satellite launcher for responsive and affordable space access

Gilmour Space is the leading launch services company in Australia for global Commercial, Government and Defence customers.

Stoke Space is developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets with innovative heat-shielded second stage technology to dramatically reduce launch costs.

Astra is building launch and space services including small satellite rockets and spacecraft engines for responsive space access.

CGWIC is China's sole government-authorized commercial space organization providing international satellite launch services.

Logistics and Infrastructure

Loft Orbital is building space infrastructure with standardized satellite platforms that let customers deploy and operate missions to LEO without building their own satellites.

Spire is operating the world's largest multipurpose nano-satellite constellation to provide space-based data and analytics for maritime tracking, aviation monitoring, and weather forecasting.

Vast is developing Haven-1, the world's first commercial space station, and building next-generation habitats for long-term human presence in space.

Impulse Space is building orbital transfer vehicles to move payloads efficiently across and between orbits from LEO to GEO and beyond.

Blue Origin is developing reusable launch vehicles for orbital missions and suborbital tourism to make space accessible to all.

D-Orbit created proprietary cloud-based mission control software suite designed to control entire satellite constellations. Already developing and testing new technologies to extend the life of satellites in orbit, perform active debris removal, enable interplanetary space logistics, etc.

Axiom Space is building commercial space stations and providing crewed missions to LEO, including NASA's next-generation spacesuits.

Arlula is creating a marketplace platform that aggregates and delivers satellite imagery from multiple providers.

In-Orbit Services

AstroForge is mining and refining asteroid materials in space to produce metals for use in orbit and on Earth.

Gravitics is developing modular space station infrastructure and large-diameter habitats for commercial and government use.

HEO is providing non-Earth imaging services by capturing imagery of satellites and space objects for space situational awareness.

Astrobotic is developing lunar landers and rovers to deliver payloads to the Moon for NASA, commercial clients, and governments.

Skykraft is an Australian company building a constellation for space-based air traffic control and surveillance.

Astroscale is developing technologies and services for space debris removal and satellite life extension.

OrbitFab is building the first satellite refuelling infrastructure in space to extend satellite lifetimes.

Intuitive Machines is providing lunar access services with robotic landers, achieving the first commercial lunar landing in 2024.

Space Forge is manufacturing high-value materials in microgravity aboard returnable satellites for Earth-based applications.

Max Space is developing inflatable space habitats and structures to provide affordable volume in orbit.

Data and Earth Observation

Pixxel is building a constellation of hyperspectral Earth imaging satellites to detect and monitor environmental changes invisible to traditional cameras.

Planet is operating the largest constellation of Earth observation satellites to provide daily imagery of the entire planet for monitoring change.

Maxar is Leading space infrastructure and Earth intelligence company providing satellite imagery, geospatial data, and spacecraft manufacturing.

ICEYE, based in Finland, is operating the world's largest SAR satellite constellation for all-weather, day-and-night Earth observation and monitoring.

Satellogic is operating a constellation of high-resolution Earth observation satellites to remap the planet weekly.

Spiral Blue Developing edge computing and has launched 10 NVIDIA computers into orbit onboard customer and partner missions. Also developing LiDAR in space for Earth Observation for processing satellite imagery onboard spacecraft in orbit.

BlackSky is providing real-time geospatial intelligence with a constellation of high-revisit Earth observation satellites

Hardware Manufacturers

Reflect Orbital is deploying space mirrors to reflect sunlight to Earth for nighttime solar energy generation.

Aptos Orbital is providing satellite operations services and ground station networks.

Sierra Space is building the Dream Chaser spaceplane, space station modules, and in-space manufacturing platforms.

Mynaric is manufacturing laser communication terminals for aircraft, UAVs, and satellites to create high-speed data networks in space.

Dragonfly Aerospace is a South African company manufacturing small satellite platforms and providing imaging payloads.

Phase Four is developing radio frequency thrusters for satellite propulsion that are safer and more efficient than traditional systems.

iSpace is a Japanese company developing lunar landers and rovers for commercial Moon missions and resource utilization.

Spacemanic, based in Czech Republic, is the company developing nanosatellites and providing space engineering services.

Communications

Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet constellation providing global broadband connectivity from space.

AST SpaceMobile is building the first space-based cellular broadband network directly accessible by standard smartphones.

Viasat is providing global satellite communications and internet services for consumers, aviation, and maritime markets. If you've used wifi on a US airline, it's likely Viasat.

Amazon LEO, previously Project Kuiper, is Amazon's constellation of LEO satellites to provide global broadband internet.

Spacecoin is developing decentralized infrastructure for internet connectivity via LEO nano-satellite constellation.

Compute Platforms

SpaceComputer is building decentralized satellite compute infrastructure using physically tamper-resistant CubeSats as Trusted Execution Environments.

Starcloud is building Space data centers focused on training AI models, with proof of concept wit NVIDIA H100 in space.

ADA Space is the Chinese commercial space company developing satellites and launch services (Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology Co)

Sophia Space is building edge computing platforms for processing data in orbit before downlinking.

LoneStar Data Holdings provide secure data storage spacecraft at the Earth Moon L1 Lagrange Point, connecting line of sight to our the facilities of our data center partners on Earth.

Google Suncatcher is beginning research to explore how an interconnected network of solar-powered satellites, equipped with our Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI chips, could harness the full power of the Sun.

This breakdown of the space tech economy is brought to you by the team at SpaceComputer. Thoughtfully put together by yours truly, Tara Jean and Daniel Bar.

For more information, visit spacecomputer.io
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This is the transcript for the third episode of The Frontier Podcast with Rand Hindi, Founder of Zama and Unit VC, hosted by Tom Mitchelhill and SpaceComputer CoFounder Daniel Bar.

Welcome back to the Frontier Podcast, the show where we interview the pioneers pushing technology and humankind into the future and going deep on the original cypherpunk values of cryptography, digital sovereignty, and the limits of human ingenuity. I'm your host Tom Mitchell-Hill, and today I'll be joined by my co-host Daniel Barr, the co-founder of Space Computer. Thanks for joining me, Daniel.

Greetings, lovely to be here again. Oh, you can actually do that. I've always struggled.

Today we're speaking with Rand Hindi. Rand is an entrepreneur and deep tech investor. He is the CEO of Zama, a leading crypto privacy protocol and a general partner at UnitVC, where he's invested in over 70 companies across the cryptography, AI, blockchain, and biotech sectors. 

Rand has been coding from an extremely early age. He founded a social network at 14, a web agency at 15, before getting into machine learning at the age of 18, starting a PhD at 21. He went on to found Snips, an AI startup that was acquired by Sonos, and is now powering a voice assistant in over 20 million devices. 

Now he leads Zama. Rand, thanks so much for joining us on the Frontier Podcast. Thanks for having me, guys.

Awesome. I'd love to start off with your background and journey as a hacker and entrepreneur. This is a multi-part question, but can you share some details on the different perspectives of being an academic researcher background versus being an entrepreneur, and the benefits of having that technical depth as a founder? You know, when I was actually studying, maybe a little bit of a backstory here. 

Because I've been coding since such a young age, when I was graduating from high school and deciding what should I actually study, I kind of got lazy and decided to do computer science. I thought, well, how hard can it be if I'm already basically a developer? And unsurprisingly, I was kind of bored my first year in college, and so I decided to take some master's classes, including one in artificial intelligence. And I remember at the time thinking, oh my God, this is actually going to change everything. 

We're going to go from programming computers to teaching computers to do things. And so my first year in college, I knew that AI was going to be my thing. And so right after my bachelor's, I went straight from bachelor's to PhD, skipping master's, well, because I had done a master effectively during my bachelor's.

And that's when I actually started thinking that maybe there is something more than just pure AI. Maybe there is something interesting around using artificial intelligence for biology, for healthcare. And my PhD was actually in something called protein folding. 

So applying machine learning to learn how molecules are structured in space. Twenty years ago, to be clear, at the time, we could barely make any AI stuff work. But it was interesting because Demis Hassab, who is the founder of DeepMind, actually got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago specifically for solving protein folding with AI. 

I guess it just took 20 years and $20 billion to get there. But I guess the idea was not so bad at that time. That's just a long story short to say that I've usually always found interest in working in topics that were not yet very mainstream. 

And so for me, academia was not so much about becoming a researcher as it was about an opportunity to work on something that wasn't necessarily a business. And then I figured eventually as a founder that, well, everything can be turned into a business if you actually try to figure out what the product can be. And so I'm still kind of trying to do the same thing, trying to work on very frontier stuff, but now actually trying to turn that into a company instead of just a few papers.

It's interesting in academia that oftentimes the specific topic of a PhD student is like the niche of a niche, but the skill set is something that brings so much, right? Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, I think doing a PhD taught me two things. The first thing is it taught me how to actually research without any prior art in a way, right? So you're basically given a topic which is super big, super hard, and you're like, look, figure out something related to that topic. 

And when you're a founder, it's a little bit like that too. You're looking at blockchain. Blockchain is a huge space. 

You could be building 1,000 different products within the space. So how do you actually decide what to build? How do you conduct experiments to figure out that what you're building is actually meaningful? That's research. It's just instead of publishing a paper, you're basically making money. 

That's how you know that this is actually useful. Can you walk me through how you went from kind of like AI machine learning side into cryptography? What did that path look like? When you work in AI, you basically spend your time looking at data, right? And when you work specifically on biology, DNA-related stuff, you look at a lot of very personal data. So for me, it was very clear that the more we use AI, the more data we need to trust to those AI, and therefore, the more privacy becomes an issue. 

So when I started my company, Snips, we set out to actually build one of the first AI assistants that actually had privacy built in. The way we did that at the time was that we ran everything on device. So there was no data being sent to the cloud. 

But it was very limited because you couldn't really compute that much on a Raspberry Pi, right? I mean, it's okay for basic stuff, but clearly, things like LLMs today would never fit on a Raspberry Pi. So I started looking for other things. How could we potentially have privacy server-side? And that's where I came across FHE, fully homomorphic encryption.

And I remember it was back in 2015. I looked at that, and I was like, oh my god, this is clearly the future, not just of AI, but of potentially any kind of computation where sensitive data is involved. So it's been a decade getting to this point. 

And arguably, blockchain became the real product market fit for FHE, not AI. But I mean, from that point onwards, I just couldn't go back. It was just impossible for me to imagine that you could have a world where all your data is piped to companies and then not have any privacy around it. 

You were kind of building privacy tech before it was cool. What was the journey of Snips? And how did the kind of privacy by design influence your decisions? We could even talk about Zama directly, because to be fair, privacy got cool, what, three months ago? Zcash popped up and everyone's like, oh my goodness. Got mainstream, yeah. 

Privacy, yay. Talk about good timing and being lucky. You can't really make this up. 

People realizing suddenly that privacy is important. It's not that nobody cared about it. It's just that up until now, if you look at Web2 specifically, there was really no reason to force companies to adopt those privacy technologies. 

Because look, people trust OpenAI, they trust Google. And so far, at least Google has not messed up as bad as other companies have in terms of privacy. So the incentive for Google to put massive amount of efforts into doing everything private is just not there. 

In blockchain, however, it's completely different. Because on a blockchain, everything is public. If you want any level of privacy on a public blockchain like Ethereum, you have to use confidential computing technologies, FHR-wise, to do that.

There is no choice. You cannot just trust a company not to leak your data and keep it private. So I think that's a reason why people care about privacy suddenly in blockchain. 

It's not that they care about privacy. It's that they realize that without confidentiality, we're never going to build all those use cases where data has to be kept confidential. There is another industry that is obviously related to the financial industry. 

Also, privacy is super important. Is there any appetite or place where it's linked? It's linked. Because they're moving to blockchain.

So when we talk about blockchain going private, what's really driving that is finance moving on-chain. So the opportunity today in confidential compute on-chain is really just finance. I don't think it's necessary to go after financial use cases for not going to be on-chain because within a decade, all the finance will be blockchain-related anyways. 

So might as well just kind of catch that wave going. There are other industries long-term that I see outside of blockchain where this could be useful. For example, healthcare. 

This is always going to be an issue. And it's unlikely that that would benefit from blockchain in the same sense, because you typically have gigantic data sets with very few people that need to collaborate on it, as opposed to finance, which is very tiny data with 8 billion people involved. So it's kind of like a shared ledger. 

It's interesting, maybe, just like to your comment there, you're saying in a decade from now, blockchain will eat finance. Kind of like what Andreessen was calling software eats everything. So blockchain will eat finance rather than looking at TriFi becoming something that is auxiliary. 

It's going to be contained in on-chain finance, basically. And it won't even be TriFi versus DeFi. It'll just be finance.

Yeah. Kind of like online, right? Online became the default, so on-chain becomes the default. Yeah. 

Nobody today builds a website. You build a service. The fact that you're on the internet with a web presence is just part of what you're building. 

And I think all of fintech, all of finance is going to eventually use blockchain rails as opposed to TriFi rails, because it's just more effective. That's it. And it needs confidentiality, obviously.

Yeah. And it needs confidentiality. Actually, I did that. 

I went to the street the other day. I walked up to random people asking them to show me their bank account. Nobody said yes.

Like, there you go. People don't want other people to see how much money they have, period. You can brag with a nice car, but you're never going to show your real bank account to everybody else. 

For those who haven't heard about it yet, can you explain what Zama is and how it all works? Sure. So Zama is a confidentiality layer for public blockchains. So we add a layer of privacy on top of Ethereum, Solana, Base, so that any asset you have there can be converted to a confidential token, where balances and transfer amounts are encrypted. 

And now that they're encrypted, you can start staking them confidentially, you can swap them confidentially, you can trade them confidentially. So anything you can do with a token on a public chain today, you can now do confidentially with the same token on the same chain with Zama. How does that work with the regulation side in terms of confidentiality and privacy on that front? The same way as TradFi works, when you have a bank account, you see your bank account, but your bank also sees your bank account, so they can comply with whatever regulation they have.

The model we're proposing for compliance in the Zama protocol is the same. So the token issuer or the DeFi app basically can give themselves the right to see all the transactions going through their own contracts, which means that they can comply off-chain with any regulation they need. So the kind of privacy we think that you need to build if you want compliance is not as much as I would like to, but it's not end-to-end encryption. 

It's actually more of a a privacy with regards to your neighbor type of encryption. So I see my data, the service provider sees my data, but anybody else on chain in my neighbor doesn't. And I don't think there is a shortcut though, because if you really want blockchain to be used for a hundred trillion dollars of assets, you can't expect finance to change the rule of how it works. 

And so we want to make sure that whatever people want to do compliance-wise, they can do directly in the protocol. Okay. Before we mentioned the term FHE a fair bit, and I do want to get into a slight semi-non-technical breakdown of those terms in a sec, but FHE itself was considered kind of like borderline sci-fi, the frontier of privacy.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on like the early efforts of taking the academic concept of FHE and actually demonstrating confidential transactions and what that process looked like. So FHE as a technology is not new. It's been around since the seventies. 

The problem is that it didn't work that well. You could barely do anything. So you could add numbers, you could multiply numbers, but you couldn't do machine learning. 

You couldn't do smart contracts for things like that. So the first thing that Zama solved is making FHE applicable to any kind of use case. So now you can use it for anything that you want. 

The second problem is that it was very, very hard to use for developers. You needed to learn a new language. You needed to learn cryptography. 

If you wanted to compute privately on something, you needed to be a cryptographer. So we've also solved that by integrating FHE into existing developer workflows. So for example, if you want to build a confidential smart contract or DeFi app, you just write a solidity contract that you deploy to Ethereum that people interact with MetaMask. 

So we've removed all of kind of the complexity of integration. And finally, the third thing that was missing was performance. When we started a company, doing something like a confidential stablecoin transfer would take about one minute. 

It's not bad. It's better than Bitcoin, but it's hardly what people expect from blockchains today. So yeah, sure. 

Okay. Five years ago, we could have done encrypted Bitcoin, but you would not have been able to do encrypted Solana or global payments. So since then, we've actually improved the performance by 400,000x actually on some use cases. 

So we can now do about a thousand confidential transfers per second on GPUs. And we're working on building an ASIC, which will get us to 100,000 TPS in the next four years. So yeah, you have to at some point. 

So FHE is a done deal. It's no longer a math problem. It's just a compute problem, which fortunately is just a money problem.

So the more money we invest in making it faster, the bigger the addressable market for this technology. For the non-technical listeners, and I'll kind of put my hand up and include myself in that crew. Can you break down what's meant by FHE and how it differs from stuff like ZK, TEE, MPC, all the acronyms? Okay. 

So sorry, Daniel and my trash tease a little bit, but you're solving the reason I'm trashing them. So it's okay, right? You can talk about space computer. So there are typically four types of technologies when it comes to confidentiality for blockchain. 

So I'm going to talk about the blockchain use case specifically. So FHE, which means fully homomorphic encryption, which is a way for you to compute on encrypted data without decrypting it. So for example, imagine that you have a token, right? Your balance is on chain encrypted.

The amount you're sending is encrypted. The way that you've encrypted it still allows you to compute on the encrypted data itself. So you can have a smart contract that's manipulating this encrypted state on chain and transforming it into whatever you actually want. 

So the nice thing about FHE is that you can manipulate an encrypted state. And that's really the power of it is that you're not changing the way blockchains work. You're just basically doing it over encrypted data instead of public data. 

FHE is also post-quantum. So the data you're encrypting and putting on chain cannot be broken by quantum computers, which arguably I think is an important thing to keep in mind. Now, if you compare that to other technologies, let's take, for example, MPC. 

Multiparty computation, you take the secret key and you split it with a bunch of people who need to basically collaborate to do a computation. MPC is the best tool that exists for managing keys and for managing decryption. So we use it in the Zama protocol for decrypting, for example, the balance when a user wants to see how much tokens they have.

But when you want to use it for computation, it's very hard to scale because the scalability depends on how many people are basically participating. And importantly, it's hard to make it verifiable. You basically have to trust that people doing the computation have done it correctly. 

FHE is publicly verifiable. Anybody can recompute and see that the state is correct. ZK, great technology for scalability. 

However, when you're using ZK for privacy, it doesn't give you composability. I can send you Zcash privately, but I cannot stake my shielded Zcash. I cannot swap my shielded Zcash. 

I cannot do any of those things. FHE is composable. So your FHE tokens, you can stake them, swap them, lend them, anything you can do with a token, you can do with FHE. 

So you see, it gives you security, composability, and verifiability, which is really important. Now, TEEs, in theory, give you similar properties. The problem with TEEs is that there has been multiple papers published recently that show that if you have physical access to the machine running the trusted enclave, the hardware, you can basically break it. 

We can go into the detail how that works, but in practice, Intel fucked up. And so everybody using Intel TEEs, effectively, the attacker can run the machine direct. So the only way to make TEE secure is to somehow make it out of reach of people. 

If only someone was doing this. Physically isolated. If only. 

But I want to be very clear. There is always, in every cryptography protocol, there's always going to be, at some point, some hardware that is going to be used for holding secret keys. It's true in MPC. 

It's true in banks. And so someone has to figure out how to build secure hardware, at least for managing keys, that doesn't have this kind of side channel thing. And so that's why I'm an investor, by the way, in your company, Daniel. 

Because I think it's a very good solution. Just put it in space. Yeah, yeah. 

Absolutely. Absolutely. Basically, the highest security guarantee is physical isolation.

If it's truly physically isolated. Yeah. And highest, in your case, makes sense. 

It's literally high in space. Yeah. Out of this world. 

Yeah. Exactly. We talked about this a tiny bit before, but privacy has become a meta, if you will, particularly with traders in crypto now as well, because Zcash has put in an incredible gain over the last few months. 

What do you make of the state of privacy in crypto at the moment? And what are the flaws with Zcash in terms of privacy that you see? Because it's an older technology. So maybe flaws is the wrong way of putting it, but what's your read on Zcash as an asset protocol? So there's nothing wrong with Zcash. I mean, I've been holding Zcash for a while, by the way. 

Thank you is finally doing something, right? Same, since 2016. It's been a while. It's been a while. 

Yeah. No, look, Zcash is great. And I think for what it wants to be, encrypted Bitcoin, it makes total sense. 

So I do think generally that Zcash has an opportunity to be encrypted store of value, effectively encrypted Bitcoin. I would prefer if we actually encrypted Bitcoin, but I'll be happy with Zcash as well. It's a very different purpose than what companies like Zama are doing, because in our case, you know, we're not building a privacy coin or encrypted store of value. 

We're actually building an infrastructure that allows anybody to build confidential applications, whether it's confidential stable coins or confidential default confidential games on public chains. So if you wanted to build a Zcash like store value, you could technically bridge Bitcoin to Ethereum encrypted with Zama and you'll have like encrypted Bitcoin. Right. 

But again, you know, Bitcoin exists in parallel to Ethereum and Solana. So I do think Zcash is going to exist in parallel to confidential chains, you know, Ethereum plus Zama, for example. That's an interesting game theoretic angle there, because I remember in the early days of Ethereum, I used to always think there's no point in Bitcoin. 

It could just be a smart contract ultimately. Yeah. And similarly, like that line of thinking of you could hypothetically take something like Zcash or Bitcoin and encrypt it with FHE on Ethereum or on something else and ultimately circumvent the entire need. 

But I think that a part of the reason for these parallels to exist, as you said, it's because the network economics functions differently, not only from the 21 million finite coins as well. It's also proof of work that is different to proof of stake and all of that mechanism of it's creating a completely different economy. Right. 

So it's like these things will exist in parallel. I feel like you're 100 percent aligned on multi-chain. Right. 

Like, you know, I don't think Bitcoin would have value if it was proof of stake, because as you said, people would just use Ethereum and have just a random contract on So like, you know, what Bitcoin is really kind of giving you is security by just energy consumption. Right. And I think that's going to be hard to beat with a smart contract on any chain because of the amount of infrastructure that goes behind it.

Now, I also think that in the beginning, when we thought that we could just replicate Bitcoin is also because we used to think of Bitcoin as currency. The narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold is relatively new, I would say. So, you know, the narrative shifted a bit. 

My personal sort of thesis is I think one of the reasons why Bitcoin has so much value is because Bitcoin doesn't have a roadmap. And I think this is really important. The moment you have a product roadmap, like Ethereum has, like Solana has, like any company has. 

Right. You're taking the risk of being wrong and losing users and volume to other people who have the right strategy. Right. 

If you're not changing anything, you can't actually be wrong. Right. Like, you know, it's never going to change. 

And so I thought about it the other day. I was like, if I had to stash something for 20 years, which crypto would I feel almost 100 percent confident would still exist and not be worth zero in 20 years. I couldn't think of anything else in Bitcoin precisely because there is no roadmap and therefore there is no strategic mistake that can be made with Bitcoin.

It's in some respects the lowest risk of being disrupted, but it's not without risk because no, a lot of things can happen. Of course. Well, when a computer is for one, so you are going to have to upgrade Bitcoin to be post-quantum, you know, that's that's one. 

But you're not like Bitcoin is not trying to be something else than Bitcoin. That's what I'm trying to get to. Right. 

And I really understand that people pushing strongly against smart contracts on Bitcoin because it would denature it and it would make it just like another Ethereum or Solana. And we don't need that, you know. Yeah. 

Yeah. You mentioned before that you would almost like to encrypt Bitcoin. Yeah. 

Why can't we encrypt Bitcoin? Well, you could. I think Starknet is trying to do that. Right. 

So I think people are trying to do that. But would you actually want to encrypt Bitcoin or would you want to have like an encrypted Bitcoin stable coin, if that makes sense? Right. Like a wrapped Bitcoin. 

A wrapped Bitcoin. Exactly. And so if you have a wrapped Bitcoin, what's interesting is you can now have basically yield and you can basically have it like as part of DeFi. 

And that's where confidentiality comes in. I think, you know, the canonical Bitcoin chain like people don't, nobody sends Bitcoin to other people. Right. 

Like there is no, you don't really need confidentiality in the sense that there is nothing to track in the first place. Like people just buy and hold Bitcoin. That's it. 

Right. And if you only want to hide who you are when you deposit, it's easy to do that. What's difficult is hiding ongoing activity, daily payments, swaps, things like that. 

And again, that's not what people do with Bitcoin. Right. Look at the transaction volume. 

I don't think anybody's filling blocks anymore. At least not on Mainnet. I've had two Bitcoin transactions on Mainnet this past month.

But maybe I'm an anomaly. I actually try to do a few Bitcoin transactions, you know, during the whole, what is it called, like the NFTs on Bitcoin era and the Bitcoin tokens. Ordinals.

Sorry. Yeah. Ordinals. 

Yeah. So like I went in and bought a bunch of random ordinals. Right.

Yeah. I mean, I like to try early stuff. I mean, you know, we think Ethereum is slow.

Right. 12 second block times. Man, Bitcoin is, you know, I made a transaction. 

I went for coffee, came back and, you know, like it was still not done. It's not just that a block time is 10 minutes. It's that you need like 40 confirmations to make sure you have finality, which is by design and I get it, but. 

Not exactly something that you're going to be transacting on a daily basis, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Ruins meta was tough. 

I have a friend who is very, very involved in Ruins. And yeah, he was showing me how to do things. And yeah, stuff taking 40 minutes. 

I was like, did I? Yeah. Did I do the wrong transaction here? Yeah. No, no, you just have to wait now. 

And I was like, yeah. And again, like, I think that's a good thing. You know, like this is what you want from a store of value. 

You want something that's just not going to change. You know, that's it. And so so I'm I'm wholeheartedly on the camp of let's not change anything to Bitcoin. 

Yeah, I agree. I'm in the camp as well. Can you talk about your intuition about space compute, terrestrial compute, you know, seeing the growth? Oh, I mean, providers, satellite info providers, you know, rising interest in. 

I mean, I think it's one of those things, you know, when you think about it from first principles, it makes a ton of sense. You know, if you think about not just privacy, but if you think about compute in general, right, data centers cost a lot of money, right? It takes a lot of energy to run them to cool them. Well, you know, if you're basically facing the sun 24 seven all year long, right, without the atmosphere filtering anything, you've got a pretty efficient way of capturing and using energy.

Right. So for me, I think it's it's very obvious that the way that you're going to scale to the energy demands of Bitcoin or AI is not going to be on Earth is going to be in space. Even even with fusion on Earth, you know, it's never going to be as efficient of just putting stuff in space.

You literally have an infinite amount of volume, energy, free energy, free energy, free space, no pun intended. Right. And now we can send stuff in space more cheaply. 

Right. So it's becoming also easier to put stuff in space. So the the actual operating and kind of capex of building a space data center makes sense. 

So I'm a very big believer in space data centers. I think they make they make a ton of sense. And within, you know, the kind of space data center kind of metal, then obviously, you know, the thing I'm interested in is, OK, how do you actually do something securely? Right. 

You know, someone is still going to have root access to that server. So the question becomes, how do you build very strong software isolation for space servers? And the answer to that is unity. Like I look at these as software isolation solution more than hardware security. 

Right. It's basically a way it's a way to make sure that your software cannot be accessed by other software on the machine. And doing that is very, very good, to be honest. 

Right. It's much better than whatever, you know, OS kernel level process separation, because like it's actually encrypting the memory. So that's how I see this. 

I see this as put data centers in space. You're out of reach. You're reducing the security problem to basically a software problem. 

And for that, these are actually a very good solution. It's interesting you mentioned that you're looking.

Edit as a software isolation rather than pure hardware because and then that you also mentioned for Zama eventually you'll be looking at ASICs because for us originally we were thinking that we're only going to be focusing on protocol and software and going to be able to rely on various different kind of hardware providers but over time we realized that even though space is really booming and everything we actually do need to get into quite particular hardware integration to get what we want out of it and then ultimately also as you see the trend in not only space-based data centers just like the space compute in general there's most of it is going to be probably centralized providers and therefore what we believe is that there's going to be something that would be a settlement a smart contract layer a trust layer in orbit essentially to create that free market economy a marketplace for services in orbit.

Yeah I think you know you're replacing the trust assumption of having a man with a gun in front of your data center which is basically having it in space but once you've solved the physical access security problem you still need a very good isolation technology to avoid people you know just reading whatever is running on the computer itself and regarding the ASIC I totally agree with you. I think people for a long time were a little bit scared of building custom hardware you know? Bitcoin has done it very well from the beginning you know, bitcoin mining ASICs, I mean they've been around since 2013-2012.

I think like very quickly they've been around any kind of compute where you have hyper specialized math heavy kind of workflows you're always going to be better off building an ASIC than using off-the-shelf GPUs and CPUs and we see this with FHC as well. Every time we go from you know more general to more specific type of hardware we get a 10x improvement so going from CPU to GPU you get instantly 10x better latency but also 10x better throughput so it's 100x better cost like performance per dollar improvements right and moving from GPU to FPGAs.

We're starting to see the same and moving for FPGA to ASIC we're starting to see the same so if you're going to be running the exact same computation a billion times a minute or a billion times a second and you need that to go super fast you're never going to do better than building custom hardware yeah maybe over time like over time hardware manufacturing costs also goes down Eric and like it's it's still expensive to go and do like a microchip overall it's becoming more accessible it is not as expensive it used to be you know.

I mean today you can build an ASIC on a three nanometer TSMC node for 30 mil it's a lot of money 30 mil but like 30 mil is not you don't need to be NVIDIA to spend 30 mil building an ASIC right yeah. 10 years ago it wouldn't be like a realistic at all. No no impossible.

I want to take it back a little bit more to the kind of like founder frontier side for a sec when you were you know. When Snips was acquired by Sonos what was your experience founder POV what was the like 'aha moment' afterwards that kind of like led you as exited founder to take on kind of the ambitious goal of pioneering implementation of FHE specifically for crypto?

As I mentioned earlier I discovered FHE in 2015 when I was working on this company Snips before on confidential AI that's where I met my co-founder Pascal Payet was one of the inventors of FHE as well and it really struck me as the future technology but it didn't really work at the time so we couldn't do much with it.

When I was going through the acquisition process which by the way probably the hardest thing I've done as a founder well I don't know maybe launching a token is harder than selling a company. I would say it's equally complicated right lots of moving parts everything can go wrong. I would say I put out equal footing when I was going through the acquisition.

Pascal was a friend called me and say hey there are some new breakthroughs in FHE I think you know we can make this technology work you know do you want to start a company in FHE?

I was like I don't know man like I'm a little bit burnt out you know? I was gonna you know I want to go to Japan spend six months uh you know eating great sushi and going to all those amazing places. I love Japan that's why so my plan was to travel to Japan for six months and then figure out what my next move was going to be but then I thought about it I was like hold on I've been telling everyone for five years that this technology is going to be the future.

I'm super excited about privacy there's an opportunity for me to build a company with literally the number one researcher in the planet in that field. I can't really it's just my founder spirit just took over.

It was like 'fuck it let's do it.' So a week after I closed the acquisition my company we started. No break no traveling to Japan.

I mean it's it's honestly best decision I've made, because I think you know if you if you take too long of a break it's a little bit difficult to get back on the saddle full speed here.

I still was on super high energy from a previous company like there was no there was no downtime you know? I just went straight from high intensity to high intensity startup founder mode and I just like it I don't know maybe call me masochistic but I just like I don't if I take more than two weeks of holiday I just don't know what to do. I just you know I just I just go to my wife and I'm like you want to do something; like I just become like this very annoying very needy person that you know is looking for something to do with his day.

What's the obsession with Japan? Why Japan? I just love the culture. I think you know I think it's they're amongst some of the nicest people I've met. The food is out of this world, I love collecting Japanese art as well. France has a good culture but it's it looks like other European countries in some ways. Japan really has a unique culture like it's really a place that's out of space and time compared to the rest of the world and I just like that you know I like the dedication to being honest about who you are and to being like a unique craftsmanship like high very high craftsmanship yeah it's amazing. I mean you look at what they've been able to accomplish over the past millennia it's insane it's insane.

Talking about Zama, I know there was like some kind of like slight backlash recently around kind of like open source first license software with Zama and so I was wondering, oh no backlash is probably the wrong term for it, but what considerations kind of like guide those decisions how do you view striking the balance between kind of like fully open source software and like the need to be like commercially viable as an organization?

I think we have to define better so open source is different from free software right free software means that the license and the code allows you to do whatever you want open source just means the code is publicly accessible which is very different.

The reason why Zama open sources everything is not because we want it to be free it's because we want it to be publicly verifiable. We want people to know what's actually running to make sure that there is no bugs, there is no backdoor, there is no interference. Making your code open source is the only way that you can guarantee that so for us open source was primarily public verifiability driven I would say if you're a company your goal is to make money let's be clear about that.

A company is not a non-profit. A company's objective is not to build public good software. The goal of the company is to make money and so you have to think about how can you monetize and what's your best distribution strategy and for us you know we found that a dual licensing model where the software is free and open for research purposes but you have to pay if you want to use it commercially made sense.

The Zama protocol by the way you if you want to deploy on it you can just deploy on it.

It's a permissionless network, but if you want to use our technology outside of the Zama protocol you're going to have to pay a license fee to us which you know I mean seems reasonable doesn't it right but somehow a lot of people think that everything should be free. I disagree you know I think you know you if you want something to be free go and build it in a university if you're a company you have to make money.

Part of the distinction maybe is that Ethereum went the foundation direction which is kind of like Linux foundation or something whereas what you're describing is a bit more like Red Hat or something that essentially takes open source software but uses licensing in order to commercialize it which is there's no contradiction between it being open source. It's just a matter of commercialization exactly and I think you know you you really want both you want some I would say non-profit foundations who are really focused on long-term problems for which there is no business opportunity okay.

That's just not what Zama is.

Zama is a company and so you know as a company we you know we we're here because we want to build something meaningful that also generates revenue. You seem to have a pretty good appetite for risk clearly you know starting multiple startups constantly kind of like pushing the needle a bit when it comes to risk taking. What are the what are the mental models that you approach with with risk and and how you evaluate. Whether or not like a startup or a domain or a field is going to work? I don't think there is a formula to be honest.

I'm trying to think about it with my investor hat on a little bit when I look at a new kind of industry. So first usually I go out and I invest in things that I already am convinced are important to solve because you know maybe I come across it or maybe like I talk to a bunch of people and it's a recurring theme. I'm like okay interesting there is something around that.

Then what I try to look for are is what I call founder market fits right so in a way when you invest early stage in a company you don't really care about what the company is doing you care that the founders are the right people to solve that problem for that specific market. I think this founder market fit kind of angle is something not a lot of investors will basically talk about you know.

People like to have all kinds of like addressable market thesis and everything all that makes sense for a growth stage company for an early stage company. The only question is are the founders the right people to solve that problem that's it right and if the answer is yes and I think the problem you're solving is worth solving then I'm gonna be investing. 

With UnitVC what kind of inspired you to do like investing side because you know you're clearly like a talented founder, you know very technically proficient but what made you want to like invest in early stage stuff as well?

Frankly just because I didn't have time to build every company myself so I figured you know the second best thing I can do is at least invest in those. So what you'll see if you look at my portfolio on UnitVC is a lot of the companies I invested in are very kind of sci-fi deep tech related companies because that's you know all these things I'm like look this is an industry I'm interested in if I had time I could have built or would have built a company in that so you know I'm just going to find the people that are actually doing something in that and do whatever I can do to help them whether it's like you know money whether it's advisory introductions.

I'm not a VC to be clear. UnitVC - I call that like a fake fund in the sense that would pretend to be a fund it's really just my money. We try at least to kind of run it professionally with my partner Kyle who's kind of managing the portfolio but yeah. Look it's these are things I'm interested in personally that's it.

What's your advice to founders that are approaching like the really hard deep tech problems?

I think you need to find investors who understand how deep tech investing works. A lot of investors that have been used to SaaS FinTech consumer they assume that you can build a prototype in three months and start getting traction numbers very quickly.

So they look purely at numbers what's your growth rate what's your revenue what's your you know monthly active user base in deep tech it doesn't work like that because there is an incompressible period of time for you to actually build the thing. A FHE cannot be prototyped in three months, it takes years of research to get it to a point where it can be turned into a product.

A satellite probably take at least a year for you to build it and maybe another year to get the authorization to send it to space like there is no shortcut to those things. Because they fundamentally take time and if you understand that as an investor then what you understand is that deep tech is about step functions there is basically no market and there is five to ten companies with credible founders trying to be the first to solve a hard technical problem and when they do it creates a market overnight and that's what you're looking for right. You're looking for technologies and industries we're solving that hard science or engineering problem immediately opens up a hundred billion dollar kind of market opportunity.

Space is a good example for that right. Even if it took you 20 years to build like a spaceship it's worth it because the market you're opening is gigantic and that for me is I think is the is the number one thing is as a founder building a deep tech company. You do not waste your time raising money from investors whose first question is what's your revenue growth rate the first year like that's not the point yeah actually on on that I know you're saying that there is no uh clear SaaS style figures to to track. It's a bit of a research-y kind of atmosphere for a deep tech, but how do you communicate what are some of the things that that you would relay to to investors that even if they are like a patient or whatever like what would be the metrics of course right.

Those KPIs should be specific to what you're doing so for example, in your case i don't know exactly what KPIs are but I would imagine is something like speed and cost of you know every gigahertz of compute in space or something like that.

So some number that is easy to understand that you can show is getting improved quarter over quarter so for example for FHE is very simple. iIt's things like how many confidential token transfers can we do per second right uh what is the cost of a confidential token transfer what is the very basic metrics right and as long as you can show that these numbers are going the right direction.

So throughput has improved by 10x in a year right cost has gone down by 100x in a year then you see you're not talking about financial KPIs you're talking about fundamentally technical KPIs but those technical KPIs are related to I would say product readiness and market readiness of the technology and for us it was very clear.

We're like we know that our technology is going to be ready for production and mark for the market once we can at least run ethereum in FHE so as soon as we have more capacity than Ethereum mainnet can support that we can be like look 'we can run ethereum encrypted FHE.' That's a big enough kind of market to to start with and we achieved that this year.

Congrats yeah that's epic. Benchmarking basically you have a reference for something that's already huge and i've told my investors i was like look there's a goal the day that i could show you that we could process more stable coin transfers confidentially on ethereum than ethereum can process itself then we're in business.

You were talking before about deep tech being something that almost has this like kind of like long tail explosion that opens up a market somewhere down the line it's indefinite it's risky. If it works it it essentially is like it's its own it passes through that absorbing barrier and then it's its own kind of like investable you know. It opens up the door to other investment opportunities what are the deep tech stuff or sectors that you look at at the moment that are you know unnoticed now but that you think will have probably the most impact from either you know.

We could take it two directions but like an investable side but also just like a market opportunity side.

I mean so maybe i can give a couple of examples of things that have been early on that have played out nicely uh so five years ago more or less when i started actively investing. 

You know one thing for me that was very clear is that we needed a completely new class of mental health drugs right you know. You just look at the data people are getting more anxious whatever and the whatever pharmaceutical drugs we have are not working anymore so i was like okay big problem. 

One in three one in three person in the world in the developed world at least are taking antidepressants at some point so i was like okay that's like billions of people that are desperately looking for a better treatment. So i looked at the science i was like interesting so there are all those people who are kind of like niche researchers in the psychedelic which are showing you that oh wow you know if you're using psilocybin if you're using even LSD you're getting incredible remission rates for you know mental health. You look at this you're like interesting it's illegal but it's working so what bet are you making first you're making a bet that regulation will go in the right direction eventually if that science shows them that this is important and b you know you're looking for the founders who are basically pioneering a new class of pharmaceutical drugs based on those i would say uh existing psychedelic kind of understanding.

Five years ago crazy to say that you know you go to an investor you say i'm gonna invest in basically magic mushrooms as the cure for depression. I go back to burning man dude and like you know just what the fuck are you talking about. 

I invested in a company in 2020 at a 10 million dollar valuation that company got acquired by a large pharmaceutical lab a few months ago for 1.2 billion right. So yeah that's a big that's a big x right yes like in this this is what happens when you're right in deep tech because you're you invest in something nobody thinks is possible or is legal or is a market but when it does - boom. It becomes gigantic. So that's one example that was like very early and right another one that i've been very early on is longevity. 

So like i've been a competitive biohacker for nearly 20 years now and for me it's very obvious that at some point everybody was going to get into the whole longevity kind of space because i mean why not right like it's you know who doesn't want to live to 100 in perfect health. 

It's just that i think until covid most people didn't really didn't realize how far we were like medically wise from getting to 100 years old like i think covid was a very big turning point in people's understanding that medicine and healthcare needed like to leapfrog to something completely new and futuristic if we actually wanted to live to 100 years old and i kind of was expecting that there was there was going to be like a wake-up moment at some point. 

If you look at the past five years like longevity has become one of the biggest investable sector with one of the fastest growth of results scientifically of all of like medicine right and what used to be like a niche biohacker community on reddit type of thing you know. You now have multiple billion dollar companies effectively actively promoting these things so i think longevity is uh is going to be one of the biggest biggest opportunities; i think bigger than ai man. 

Look i mean you know like AI is great, blockchain is great, finance is great but not dying is arguably you know the biggest market of all. 

Yep no just look at the popularity of Bryan Johnson, Andrew Hubeman, anyone running protocols that makes people you know feel like they're getting education every everything everything. These guys are doing you can find on reddit 10 years ago like, I hang out on weird subreddits of people trying all kinds of weird biohacking shits. 

Everything is in it man everything is in there you mentioned the term competitive biohacker can you talk more about the competitive aspect of that yeah that's newer i guess. 

You know Bryan Johnson started this longevity leaderboard called rejuvenation olympics where basically you can compete based on how slowly you're aging at the moment. It's a way to measure your protocol versus others. Right now my aging pace is 0.68. So effectively i'm aging you know 60 percent per year instead of you know one percent per year. 

I'm aging effectively like whatever seven months eight months that puts me in the top 20 on that leaderboard at the moment globally which is nice. Top 20 is like it's like if you're like second or third in a competition you're not first right so my goal now is to be top five or top 10 on the leaderboard but that's a little bit harder. I think if you want to be in the top 10 you can't really do what i'm doing, which is this kind of 80/20 longevity protocol. I think you need to actually be like a longevity athlete like Bryan Johnson is and your life revolves around reducing about your age. 

I don't think you can you can be living in Europe sipping wine on weekends and hope to be in the top 10. 

Maybe that's the secret, it's part of it. 

Okay my take on longevity by the way is that there there's a lot of stuff that are maybe a bit more on the hacking. Indeed which is let's say like nad plus iv drip and then whatnot the things that are like somewhat synthetic and then there's stuff that are very basic which are actually much more foundational. Sleep right like the sleep is the number one clean air clean water the general like having your lifestyle just like time for yoga reflection whatever it is. There are six things if you don't do those six things well no amount of drugs or supplements or interventions will help you. 

1. Sleep well 
2. Eat well 
3. Exercise regularly 
4. Don't drink 
5. Don't smoke 
6. Have friends 

If you do those six things together right you're almost guaranteed to live to 100. Now if you want to go to 120 150 that's where you need to go advanced, that's where you start looking into you know modulating your metabolism and things like that or eventually you know organ replacement and whatever else will be available. 

If you don't do those six things nothing's going to work yeah. 

That's kind of like the blue zones, basics right. Yeah it sounds very obvious but most people don't do that you know. 

No it's crazy how much everyone goes looking for like the the silver bullet approach before they have just the most fundamental kind of layers of anything. Well i'm not saying it doesn't exist by the way. I mean you know if you look at weight loss for 40 years people told you it's a lifestyle thing you know you have to exercise, eat well and then you lose weight which is true. 

Then GLP-1 ozempic came about and now you actually have like a pill that makes you lose weight so it's not impossible that you might have a pill that makes you know muscular and healthy it's just right now that pill doesn't exist. So if your goal in 2025 is to optimize for longevity, lifestyle is going to be a big part of that. So the other side of it is also that longevity is not only about getting to 120 it's also getting there in a shape that is like every moment you're actually in a good state of mind and like having a good lifestyle. I'm pretty happy where I am today.

So if i can stay like that I'm good with that. I think you know being in your 30s is probably the optimal in terms of like you know the balance of everything so you know sticking to that would be the goal. I saw a comedian I can't remember where but it was talking about the idea of aging but without kind of doing it healthfully, 

It's a it's similar to adding crust to the pizza was his analogy that i thought was quite good. 

I get the point yeah.

Outside of the six outside of those six foundational things what are the protocols for you that move the needle the most i think for me one of the things that was like the most impactful was reducing i would say inflammation. 

So reducing inflammation it sounds like very obvious but people most people that live in cities today are very inflamed lots of allergies lots of you know like stress and everything so a lot of my protocol and a lot of supplements i take is just basically reducing inflammation. Super powerful flavonoid extracts so basically green tea extracts more or less or like citrus fruits extracts things like that so that's number one. 

Number two is improving blood flow. I think you know you can take any amount of supplements you want if your body cannot actually bring it to the cell well you know it's supplements to improve blood flow is a big part of my protocol.

Now the third one is energy metabolism. So making sure that your body has enough energy to work properly so whether you're taking you know an ad or supplements or whatever there are multiple things that you can try so i think that's important and all of that together. 

The kind of end game of what i'm trying to do is to maximize mitochondrial health and to maximize immune system health because those two things are sufficient to fix any problem in your body. 

A few people do but most people don't have cancer at 20, they don't have heart disease at 20, they don't have diabetes at 20; because your body can fix your own body so if you can keep your body fixing itself you can probably prevent most of the aging related diseases that people suffer from. 

Rand where do you want people to go after they finish listening to the Frontier Podcast? What do you want them to go check out? 

Well they should check out the Zama website zama.org of course and if you're a founder that's building in the deep tech space get in touch [email protected]; you know we'd like to invest.

My pitch to founders is that if they're pitching other investors and they don't get it they should come to me instead.

Okay wonderful Rand thanks much for coming on the show it's been a pleasure thank you guys thanks for having me.

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Space-based data centers went from science fiction to a serious investment thesis sometime around 2023. Google, Starcloud, Axiom Space, and SpaceComputer all announced orbital compute initiatives in the last few years. The race is on to scalability, with the finish line somewhere around 2030.

One might say orbital compute is a literal moonshot. And the physics check out:

• Launch costs are declining
• Solar power in space delivers 6x the energy of terrestrial arrays
• Cooling works through direct radiation to the cosmic microwave background.

Every technical objection is being met with a first-principles solution.

So what is stopping orbital compute market from hyper-scaling?

Economics and timelines. They pose a gap between what's technically possible and what's commercially viable. Technical capabilities are now waiting for the market to catch up, and for costs to lower.

We're examining what's real, what's hype, and why the companies positioning now are building for a market that will only take off once launch costs drop another order of magnitude.

What Is a Space-Based Data Center?

Space-based data centers (SBDCs) are orbital compute infrastructure designed to leverage advantages unavailable on Earth: continuous solar power, radiative cooling to deep space, and high security through physical isolation. The architecture varies between massive solar arrays for 24/7 power generation, and constellations for distributed computing. Each architecture offers different compute payload sizes (GPUs, TPUs, accelerators), radiator capabilities, and consensus or communication channels [1].

Dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits keep satellites in continuous sunlight by following Earth's terminator line. This results in no eclipse periods, battery cycling, or thermal stress from temperature changes.

Cooling happens through direct radiation. A radiator at 20°C emits about 770 watts per square meter to deep space, approximately 3x what solar panels generate per unit area.

Networking often uses free-space optical links between satellites. Light travels 35% faster in vacuum than through fiber, and there's no intermediate infrastructure to maintain [1]. Connect enough satellites in close formation and you have a mesh network with lower latency than terrestrial data centers for intra-cluster communication.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy captured the vision:

"In space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. The sun is 30% more intense, which results in six times more irradiance than on Earth. So you don't need a battery. Space cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum."

But first principles solutions for the software and hardware doesn't build the economic promise needed to scale these businesses.

Several assumptions need to hold:

• Launch costs continuing downward from current $1,500-3,000/kg to LEO toward $200/kg or lower [4]
• Commercial off-the-shelf components surviving long enough to finance launch costs [5]
• Thermal management scaling linearly
• Network latency to ground stations acceptable for target workloads
• Maintenance models based on module replacement rather than component-level repair [6]

None of these assumptions have been proven yet at operational scale...yet.

The Physics Reality Check

The cooling objection surfaces in every discussion about space data centers. Armchair engineers veto the entire concept because "you can't cool megawatt-scale compute in vacuum."

Aaron Burnett's research demolished this argument:

"If you're an investor and you've heard an armchair engineer 'veto' space data centers because of the radiator/cooling problem, you should read our research this week... Radiation is a tough engineering problem, but well within the physics constraints."

Following the same vein as Starcloud's ResearchThe Stefan-Boltzmann law governs radiative heat transfer:

P = εσT⁴

Where emitted power scales with the fourth power of temperature (T⁴ ) [8]. This means the hotter the radiator runs, the more heat it can release per square meter. Small increases in radiator operating temperature drive massive reductions in required area and mass.

Starlink V3 scaling provides the reference case for current centralized architectures [7]. Current Starlink satellites operate around 20 kW for communications payloads. Scaling to 100 kW compute-optimized platforms doesn't require proportional radiator growth. At 100 kW, radiators represent 10-20% of total mass and single-digit percentage of platform area. Solar arrays dominate the footprint.

A 1 m² radiator at 20°C emits 770 watts to space (both sides). That's three times the power density of solar generation. For a 100 MW data center, you need roughly 130,000 m² of radiator area, significantly less than the 200,000+ m² solar array required to generate that power. Starcloud's 5 GW concept renders this visually: their architecture design is dominated by a massive 4km × 4km solar array, with radiators as a secondary system [2].

Mass tells a more complex story. Radiators at 100 kW remain secondary to solar arrays in total mass budget. Pushing toward lighter radiator designs substantially increases cost due to advanced materials and manufacturing [7]. This becomes an architectural choice between mass optimization and cost optimization depending on launch provider economics.

Operating temperature provides the dominant optimization lever. Running radiators at 60°C instead of 20°C reduces required area by more than half due to that T⁴ relationship we mentioned earlier [8]. Heat pumps can boost radiator temperature at the cost of additional power consumption, creating another dimension in the design space.

Cooling is solvable. If you can launch the power generation capacity, you can launch the thermal management system [7].

What Costs The Big Bucks

Launch economics currently determine viability of SBDCs. Andrew McCalip's analysis shows current costs at $1,500-3,000/kg to LEO for commercial launches [4]. Even with optimistic mass allocation of 33% compute, 33% power systems, and 33% thermal management, you're looking at 100,000 kg/MW of deployed infrastructure.

At $2,000/kg, launching 1 MW costs $200 million before operational costs, ground infrastructure, or replacement cycles.

The 2030 projection assumes Starship-class vehicles achieve $200-500/kg through high reuse rates and manufacturing scale [9]. At $300/kg, that same 1 MW drops to $30 million launch cost. Still expensive, but approaching terrestrial data center construction costs when factoring in land acquisition, utility connections, and building infrastructure.

Mach 33 Frontier Group's research makes the bull case: orbital compute energy cheaper than Earth by 2030. Their calculation shows space solar generating equivalent energy at ~$0.002/kWh versus $0.04-0.25/kWh for terrestrial power. A solar array in sun-synchronous orbit achieves >95% capacity factor compared to 24% median for terrestrial solar farms in the US [2]. The sun delivers 40% more intensity above the atmosphere with no weather delays or seasonal variations.

Payed over 10 years with $5 million launch costs, a 40 MW cluster could offer energy equivalent to $0.002/kWh [2]. For comparison, wholesale electricity in the US, UK, and Japan averages $0.045/kWh, $0.06/kWh, and $0.17/kWh respectively [11].

Total cost of ownership extends beyond energy:

• Launch financing (dominant cost driver)
• Radiation shielding (1 kg per kW of compute at $30/kg = $1.2M for 40 MW) [2]
• Module replacement cycles driven by radiation degradation
• Ground link infrastructure and bandwidth costs
• Regulatory compliance and orbital debris mitigation
• Zero on-site maintenance capability

McCalip brings a highly relevant counterpoint: cuts to the core issue flexible terrestrial solar beats space until launch costs hit ~$50/kg [4]. Three geographically distributed solar farms eliminate the day/night cycle problem without leaving Earth's surface. You get grid connectivity, physical access for repairs, and the ability to upgrade individual components rather than entire modules.

This viral LinkedIn post laid out the math:

"Let's say you want to launch 1MW into space and you just crush the problems... Your final weight will be around 100,000kg/MW, generating a launch cost on the order of 20MM to 10B… or the same cost of one data center in space, you can build at least three flexible data centers on Earth."

Three terrestrial solar farms in different time zones deliver 24/7 deliver 3x the compute capacity for the same capital expenditure, plus existing grid infrastructure and physical repair access.

The crossover point depends entirely on workload characteristics and launch cost trajectory. Edge processing for satellite constellations makes economic sense today at smaller scales.

With these considerations in mind, general-purpose cloud compute will remain dominant on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Constraints Nobody Wants to Discuss

When you are hearing the hype cycle on orbital compute, there's a few challenges that are rarely discussed...that we've kindly listed below.

Data processing errors and unencrypted communications

What's great about optical links is their speed. What's not great is around 50% of communication happening with satellites is unencrypted. Anyone can easily listen by deploying their own antennas on Earth [24]. This brings forth the question of security of orbital compute data and storage, and how this is tackled in different architectures beyond being physically isolated and tamper-resistant.

Orbital debris

Orbital debris scales with deployment. A 100 MW data center might comprise 50+ separate modules in formation flight. Each module needs active collision avoidance, precision tracking, and coordination with space traffic management systems [6]. The large surface area of solar arrays creates vulnerability to micrometeorite impacts, though ISS data suggests this is manageable over mission lifetime [13].

Hard to access for hardware failures

There is no technician who shows up when hardware fails. The maintenance model relies on module replacement rather than component-level repair. Old modules either de-orbit for atmospheric reentry or get retrieved in launch vehicle payload bays [2]. This works for planned obsolescence but creates challenges for unexpected failures.

Increased Latency

Latency for interactive workloads remains a fundamental physical constraint. A satellite in 600 km sun-synchronous orbit has 4-8 ms round-trip time to ground stations, plus additional hops through inter-satellite links and ground infrastructure [6]. That's acceptable for batch processing and model training, but not scalable for real-time applications serving end users.

Keeping these challenges in mind, it's important to note that these restraints will be solved with time, as orbital comptue is generally a nascent technology, that will mature with the market.

Who's Actually Building This?

Four serious players have emerged over the last two years, each building different architectural solutions with the same set of constraints.

Starcloud

Starcloud is building massive scale, centralized architecture. Last year, they put the first NVIDIA H100 in orbit, and published detailed plans for a 5 GW cluster with a 4km × 4km solar array. Their architecture assumes launch costs will hit projections and that you can launch 40 MW of compute per Starship flight. At that scale, centralized control makes sense if you're operating a single coherent cluster.

The challenge is Starcloud needs everything to work in order to achieve economic feasiblity. Launch costs must hit $200-500/kg. Reusable heavy-lift launch vehicles must achieve routine cadence. Formation flight control must maintain kilometer-scale structures. Any of the assumptions failing or materializing late to the market when it hits commercial feasibility breaks the economics.

Sophia Space

Sophia targets a different use case: edge compute for satellite constellations. Their architecture optimizes for latency-sensitive applications: real-time satellite imagery analysis, sensor fusion, distributed processing of data before downlink.

The architecture uses smaller, distributed modules rather than monolithic clusters. Each module processes data from nearby satellites and forwards results through the constellation's existing inter-satellite links. No need for dedicated formation-flying clusters or massive solar arrays.

Google's Project Suncatcher

Suncatcher represents the most rigorous engineering analysis published to date. Their research explores 81-satellite formation-flying clusters with radiation-tested Trillium TPUs, high-bandwidth optical inter-satellite links, and detailed orbital dynamics [1].

They are doing preliminary research, not announcing a product. But it demonstrates that a tech giant with infinite resources sees orbital compute as technically feasible and worth serious engineering investment.

SpaceComputer

SpaceComputer is building distributed satellite compute platform and trust-minimized interface to connect Earth-based applications to space-based compute resources. Built on tamper-resistant CubeSats with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for high-security computations, these SpaceTEEs provide inherent protection from physical access, side-channel attacks, and tampering [15]. 

We use a novel two-tier blockchain architecture to best high security compute services in orbit: with a celestial Layer 1 and uncelestial Layer 2. The celestial L1 runs consensus adapted for sporadic satellite connectivity and low-bandwidth links through Iridium. The terrestrial L2 handles high-throughput processing with fast pre-finality, confirming transactions in seconds through Earth-based validators, then settling with hard finality when posted to the celestial chain [16].

What makes our architecture work: each satellite is a physically tamper-resistant hardware security module (HSM), and as a network distributed nodes can provide redundancy across independent administrative entities, and smart contracts enable transparent software updates while deterring rogue modifications [16]. 

The challenges are similar to larger architectures: thermal management, power distribution, latency, and state synchronization across satellites with sporadic connectivity requires novel protocols and specialized hardware for high-security computations. 

To combat these challenges, we are developing proprietary software and hardware, and specialized protocols (e.g., the Hotstuff Protocols) to reduce latency.

We will be releasing a paper on the first SpaceComputer-specific secure compute hardware called Space Fabric in the coming weeks.

At SpaceComputer, we are betting on scaling alongside the market and economic feasibility. By offering high security guarantees unachievable on Earth justify the constraints, and the architecture is built to scale over time with increasing constellation size and decentralized network ownership.

The 2030 Horizon

Elon Musk framed the constraint:

"We have silicon shortage today, a voltage step down transformer shortage probably in about a year, and then just electricity shortages in general in about two years." [19]

The energy bottleneck is real, as global data center power demand could triple by 2030 as AI scaling continues [20]. Utilities in Western countries, constrained by planning restrictions and grid infrastructure limitations, can't adapt at the required pace.

Orbital compute will not reach commercial scale by EoY 2026. The 3-5 year timeline for economic viability requires infrastructure that is in the process of being built, but still does not exist yet.

The TLDR on what is required for commercially scalable orbital compute:

1. Launch costs must continue declining.
2. First-generation systems and Commercial Off-The-Shelf hardware must prove operational longevity.
3. Ground link infrastructure must mature.

The opportunity in architectural development is massive, and companies such as SpaceComputer, Starcloud, Sophia Space, and Google are positioning for a market that fully materializes in the next 5 years. The timeline is longer than the hype suggests, which means the industry is on track to making the architecture scalable for commercial and economically feasible use.

This article is brought to you by SpaceComputer.

We are building the accessible distributed compute, storage layer, and the free market in orbit.

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References

 [1] Agüera y Arcas et al., "Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design," Google Research, 2025.

 [2] Feilden et al., "Why we should train AI in space," Starcloud White Paper, September 2024.

 [3] Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Twitter/X post, https://x.com/patrick_oshag/status/1998440819078898140

 [4] McCalip, Andrew, "Space Datacenters," https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

 [5] Bleier, N. et al., "Architecting space microdatacenters: A system-level approach," IEEE HPCA, March 2025.

 [6] Eason, Richard, "Mission Design Analysis Methodology for Space-Based Computational Data Centers," University of Illinois, 2025.

 [7] Aaron Burnett, Twitter/X post, https://x.com/aaronburnett/status/2001328671320134035

 [8] 33 Frontier Group, "Debunking the Cooling Constraint in Space Data Centers," https://research.33fg.com/analysis/debunking-the-cooling-constraint-in-space-data-centers

 [9] Liu et al., "Computing over Space: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities," Engineering 54, 2025.

 [10] 33 Frontier Group, "Orbital Compute Energy Will Be Cheaper Than Earth by 2030," https://research.33fg.com/analysis/orbital-compute-energy-will-be-cheaper-than-earth-by-2030

 [11] Energy cost data compiled from EIA, Grid UK, and Renewable Energy Institute Japan.

 [12] LinkedIn post, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rgfbmn_i-have-been-ignoring-the-buzz-around-space-based-activity-7406805411007430656-HkIZ/

 [13] ISS solar array impact data, NASA documentation.

 [14] SpaceComputer website, https://spacecomputer.io

 [15] Michalevsky, Y. and Winetraub, Y., "SpaceTEE: Secure and Tamper-Proof Computing in Space using CubeSats," arXiv:1710.01430, 2017.

 [16] Bar, D., Malkhi, D., Nemcek, M., and Rezabek, F., "SpaceComputer Blue Paper," November 2024.

 [17] Starcloud website, https://www.starcloud.com/

 [18] Sophia Space company website, https://sophia.space

 [19] Elon Musk Interview on Twitter/X, https://x.com/PeterDiamandis/status/2008645261791555859

 [20] Liu et al., "Computing over Space: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities," Engineering 54, 2025.

 [21] NASA TBIRD mission, 200 Gbps demonstration, 2023.

 [22] Vander Hook et al., "Nebulae: A Proposed Concept of Operation for Deep Space Computing Clouds," JPL, 2020.

 [23] Axiom Space orbital data center concept, 2025.

[24] Frontier Forum Opening Keynote: Daniel Bar & Filip Rezabek, CoFounders of SpaceComputer https://youtu.be/tZTlQLhnLLQ

2025 was a remarkable year for aerospace.

• SpaceX valuation at the beginning of the year was rumoured to be an already impressive figure of $400B, by the end of the same year estimates of close to $800B were circulating with a widely anticipated >$1T IPO in 2026.
• Space Data Centres emerged as a technology discussed in mainstream media with StarCloud’s launch of the Nvidia H100.
• Many smaller and bigger tech players are now either actively taking steps to start exploring space computing or following it closely with anticipation for the space sector to become a critical part of the modern internet and AI compute stack.

At SpaceComputer, we’re a team building secure space computing technologies. From the inside, the current atmosphere among space builders resembles a lot the exhilarating feeling I witnessed from peers building in AI in the year 2015: This tech will imminently become widely adopted.

So where does the aerospace renaissance place SpaceComputer?

The two defining characteristics of SpaceComputer are:

1. Secure Compute Platform
2. Space Native Decentralized Application Platform

What are the value propositions in these two pillars?

1. Secure Space Computing: While there is growing interest in Space-Based Data Centres and space technologies in general, much of the focus is on harvesting free solar energy, communicating with remote regions, or processing strategically valuable visual data. These unique benefits of space all merit the excitement, at the same time, space cybersecurity is somewhat overlooked in the heat of the enthusiasm.

At SpaceComputer, we design hardware and software that addresses the need to handle sensitive applications with a high degree of security.

• Hardware - Physical Security - In space, it is physically impossible to tamper with a satellite without being noticed. This makes the Space Fabric, with the TEE hardware we’re integrating a first of its kind Trusted Execution Environment integrated chipset.
• Software Isolation and Cryptographic Security - Compute execution on SpaceComputer’s satellites will be cryptographically secured. This is achieved by forming state consensus among satellites that together form a constellation of nodes. These are the very same principles that provide security to Bitcoin, Ethereum and other public blockchain networks.
• Attestation - Beyond executing the logic with SpaceComputer’s unique integrated hardware and software stack, it must be verifiable. For this, we have designed our own protocol, which can provide guarantees that our infrastructure truly runs in space without needing to rely on SpaceComputer completely.

Imagine this as the infrastructure that provides the “https for space compute.” With more and more applications getting deployed on space-based compute platforms in AI, communication, imaging and more, security is paramount.

2. Space Native Application Platform

As of today, the majority of the active satellites in orbit are part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. The user count of Starlink doubled from 4.5 to 9 million in 2025 alone and there are currently more than 20 constellation projects either in planning or in early deployment stages. Based on these figures alone, the projected satellite count is expected to increase from 10k to 500k!

The space sector is evidently in its early incubation phase of the exponential growth curve.

Looking at the projected satellite count, the space sector is anticipating a 15x growth in satellite count within a decade. Space computing is quickly becoming bedrock for modern digital economies. The early use cases that have demonstrated market appetites are communication and imaging; the notable examples are Starlink’s YoY growth at 2x and Planet Labs track record of serving gov and private sector critical data for supply chains or geopolitical strategy. However, the AI boom indicates space computing will be serving this sector sooner or later and more domains will emerge to be services as the industry develops.

SpaceComputer Vision - Layer 1 Blockchain Constellation

The rise of the internet pushed the world’s commerce into the interconnected digital realm. In recent years, archaic, fragmented and laggy financial systems of decades past is disrupted with tokenization technologies; DeFi and Stablecoins are prime use cases. The space sector is humanity’s literal frontier and we anticipate that the economy on the internet as we know it will become fully embedded into space based systems. 

As cryptography and security for the financial systems evolve, as do their unique needs and architectures. Part of this evolution is the migration of critical infrastructure to space, where they will enable accessibility by all people on earth and by space native systems.

With more critical infrastructure anticipated migration to space, settlement and smart contracts are going to become increasingly important for the space native economy. Whether it is for space based data centres running AI, satellites dedicated to imaging, communication or other satellite services. SpaceComputer is aiming to build a space native free market tokenization platform for satellite services and high security guarantees for Earth-based tokenization services through direct-to-satellite (D2S) connectivity.

Space Connectivity

Much like mobile internet connectivity, most modern electronic systems will incorporate space connectivity terminals. This will remove the dependency on localized network and compute providers such as telcos and ISPs, this will all inevitably turn into relics of the past like localized media did. 

The space native economy is the international economy.

A quick recap of what SpaceComputer achieved in 2025:

• Raised seed funding, bringing our total funds raised to $10m.
• Built a strong engineering team
• Ramped up R&D across both the hardware and software stacks
  • Satellite-based consensus research
  • TEE research and integration with the satellite architecture and software stack - Space Fabric
  • Satellite mission planning and hardware integration
  • Unique technical features of security services e.g., KMS, cTRNG, and others enabled by Orbitport. 
• Formed partnerships across hardware and software
  • EigenDA for L2 stack
  • Aptos Orbital
  • UCSB Center of Distributed Systems
• Started deploying core infrastructure and initial applications
  • Orbitport as a gateway to space computing
  • cTRNG as first application

SpaceComputer 2026 Forecast

Satellite hardware

The first SpaceComputer-specific secure compute hardware called Space Fabric is currently under final stages of integration and testing before proceeding to aerospace tests in prep for rocket launch, mission control, and operation.

→ More updates in Q1/Q2 2026.

Orbitport: trust-minimized space compute gateway

Over the past year, we’ve developed Orbitport to serve as a trust-minimized interface to connect Earth-based applications to space-based compute resources.

Orbitport serves as the interface for users on Earth to interact with available security services e.g., cosmic true random generator or KMS, and will be extended in the future for deployments by other parties. 

Current supporting solutions focus on randomness, where we provide random beacons for consumption and are integrating them with an oracle partner for smart contract usage. The next step is to extend the capabilities to private beacons. 

Overall, the design fits production use cases like secure keys generation, nonces, simulations, and blockchain oracles, with client-side verification.

In 2026, we will actively work on growing Orbitport’s capabilities, starting with running Orbitport in a TEE in early Q1. This will make it trust-minimized and enable new use cases, such as private beacons, which we aim to offer by the end of Q1. For the production usage, users can expend consumption of space randomness on-chain, too. Testnet of on-chain randomness will be available in Q1 and production ready plan is for Q2 once we go through required audits.

An important aspect for us is to ensure the user can verify the randomness source and randomness quality itself. For both, we are working on detailed documentation highlighting our approaches. In the future, Orbitport should be operated without exclusivity to us by other partners. Currently we are in contact with several partners who are good fit to run Orbitport in a permissioned setting and interact with the space infrastructure by the end of the year. 

Security Services: Space Grade Security Guarantees

There are unique primitives built using secure hardware in space. These primitives together will form the building blocks with which applications are built using the SpaceComputer.

1. Cosmic True Random Number Generator (cTRNG)
   Using secure hardware to harvest cosmic radiation as a source of entropy for a randomness beacon available on IPFS.
2. Confidential computing
   Key Management Systems (KMS) is an important part of financial stack and data security  critical applications, separation of sensitive compute instances from much of what is classified as standard operations (e.g. secure key storage and recovery vs data indexing to serve front ends). For the KMS, we will initially target single node deployment with a TEE, while expecting to expand from single node capabilities by multi-party computation protocols for mitigation of a single point of failure and solution centralization.
3. As we operate in space we observe communication constraints, for which we will focus on deployments of ZK proofs for succinctness features.

These fundamental security services will be offered as solutions to our partners and will be available already at the single satellite level. Moving forward and ideally already this year, we plan to run them between a number of satellites and in a hybrid setting of on-Earth and space deployments. Importantly, even though they serve as external facing solutions, we plan to dogfood them for SpaceComputer’s L1/L2 architecture stack, customized for the needs of space native deployments. 

This brings us to SpaceComputer’s blockchain architecture.

Two-tier architecture

Following the Blue Paper outline, through 2025, the team has been grinding R&D of the Blockchain stack components:

Orbital L1

The orbital layer serves as the orbital root of trust. It runs as a protocol client aboard our satellite Space Fabric nodes. This protection from the physical access threat model is unique to SpaceComputer: Physically isolated environment in space provides the highest security guarantees as required for finality, tamper-resistance primitives (e.g. security services), and external networks state checkpointing. All of this should be programmable using smart contract capabilities. 

As we’re approaching the Lunar Slingshot phase of development, the SpaceTEE testbed will be ready using HW components corresponding to actual satellites. Hands-on experience targeted for Q2 for private groups (reach out if you’re interested to enlist for access!). The hardware will be used in the future for Space Fabric, which details we plan to publish in Q1 along with initial devkit. Space Fabric components will be available in broader testing after October 2026, once our launch and orbital commissioning is completed. 

Uncelestial L2

SpaceComputer’s Uncelestial L2 is the high-performance execution layer for throughput-heavy tasks, bridged to the Celestial L1 for security,verifiability, and finality. The Uncelestial L2 is built to satisfy the performance required by modern blockchain applications on Earth. This provides similar utility as L2 on top of Ethereum or other networks: Greater performance on top of the Orbital L1 enabled by ZK/Optimistic rollup technology and DA offloading using our partnership with Eigen. The initial integration of consensus and execution should be available in Q2 for on-Earth devnet.  

In summary, 2025 was the year space turned from a distant backdrop into a part of the fabric of the internet and the global economy. SpaceComputer is building a secure, space-native infrastructure for everyone. As hundreds of thousands of satellites come online over the next decade, our mission is to turn space into a trustworthy commons where humanity can build the next generation of open, resilient systems that are not bound by borders!

Keep your antenna up for signals soon!

Join the public Telegram chat and get involved today!

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/spacecomputer
• X: @SpaceComputerIO
• YouTube: youtube.com/@SpaceComputerIO

SpaceComputer has entered a partnership with DataHaven, to integrate private, verifiable storage as the data layer for our satellite-based compute infrastructure. DataHaven will serve as the inital testnet for SpaceCompter's orbital services including our trusted execution environments (TEEs), cryptographic random number generation (cTRNG), and key management systems (KMS).

“In the post-Bitcoin world, “Don’t trust, verify” is the only option for a reliable compute system. DataHaven's verifiability of storage and compute integrity is very much inline with this and serves as a natural extension to SpaceComputer’s tamper resistant TEEs.”

~ Daniel Exponent, Cofounder, SpaceComputer

DataHaven is trusted to protect and verify our most valuable data, and in turn creates a secure mechanism for data flowing between these two systems that are immutable, private, and verifiable. Together, this partnership builds a censorship-resistant storage pipeline from Earth to beyond the atmosphere. 

SpaceComputer’s KMS generates and stores cryptographic keys in SpaceTEEs that are physically isolated from ground infrastructure. These keys require secure backup, rotation and archival. DataHaven will offer the option of Space KMS alongside their existing testnet storage options. They ensure that even if a satellite is decommissioned or a ground station goes offline, keys and data remain accessible and verifiable. 

Once reaching mainnet, SpaceComputer will operate Backup Storage Provider (BSP) nodes on satellites, further decentralizing DataHaven's network into orbit and creating a distributed storage topology spanning terrestrial and satellite infrastructure.

This partnership directly aligns with scaling SpaceComputer technical capacities during the Void Traverse phase outlined in the 𝕤𝕡/𝕒𝕔𝕔 roadmap, as SpaceComputer moves from foundational security services toward full L1/L2 architecture and ZK-based proof systems.

“SpaceComputer and DataHaven are closely aligned on delivering an end-to-end verifiability and privacy solution for sensitive data. People talk about space as the next frontier, and there are real advantages to running secure infrastructure on satellites, especially when it comes to isolation, physical security, and resilience. ”

~Ryan Levy, VP of Global BD & Partnerships, DataHaven

Together, SpaceComputer and DataHaven are extending private, verifiable systems beyond traditional terrestrial boundaries by combining satellite-based secure compute with tamper-proof, censorship-resistant storage.

For more information, visit spacecomputer.io and datahaven.xyz.
→ Join the SpaceComputer community on Telegram

As humanity pushes beyond terrestrial bounds, 2025 was the year SpaceComputer set its foundations in orbit. What began as an idea for extra-planetary sovereignty materialized into working satellites, radiation-powered cryptographic tools, and a growing community of builders focused on the space-native economy.

This is SpaceComputer’s year in review; an overview of what we’ve accomplished, and what is coming next.

Cosmic Randomness Goes Live

In April of 2025, we officially announced our proof of concept, cTRNG (Cosmic True Random Number Generator). cTRNG represents our first major leap from theory to deployed infrastructure. True randomness pulled from the cosmic entropy of solar flares created the basis for cryptographic security in low earth orbit (LEO), physically eliminating attacks that plague Earth-based systems.

Over the course of 2025, we shipped four production demonstrations of cTRNG in action:

• Randomness Beacon 
• Cosmic Randomness in Web3
• Cosmic Cipher Password Generator
• Generating Secure Cosmic Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) Nonces

You can read more about these demos and get started with our docs or follow the walkthroughs on YouTube. 

The 𝕤𝕡/𝕒𝕔𝕔 Roadmap: A Manifesto for Space Acceleration

In August 2025, we published the 𝕤𝕡/𝕒𝕔𝕔 roadmap: our technical and philosophical framework for accelerating humanity's transition to a multi-planetary, cryptographically sovereign future, and building infrastructure that transcends the limitations and attack surfaces of Earth-based systems.

The roadmap outlines our path from orbital proofs-of-concept to the fully deployed space-native settlement layer, detailing how our cryptographic primitives, consensus mechanisms, and physical advantages converge to create tamper-resistant infrastructure meant to last until long after humans have left the planet.

5,840 orbits around Earth

Three SpaceComputer satellites completed 5,840 orbits around Earth in 2025, collectively traversing our planet's circumference 17,520 times while collecting data that will power the next iteration of SpaceComputer software and hardware.

They're the first operational nodes in what will form the first decentralized compute network in LEO, and the data they collect informs how we can build for the future of real-world utility in orbit with security features like Key Management Systems (KMS), geolocation attestation, and other onchain services.

Growing the Movement

Raising a $10 Million Seed Round

SpaceComputer closed two fundraising rounds in 2025, bringing together capital from lead investors including Maven11, Lattice, and Primitive Ventures, alongside many prominent funds and angels. This seed investment will propel the development of space compute infrastructure forward, and begins setting the foundations for onchain space-native infrastructure.

Partnership with EigenDA

Our partnership with EigenDA announced in October of 2025 marks a critical integration point between terrestrial rollup infrastructure and orbital computation. By bridging Ethereum's data availability (DA) layer with space-native validators, we're building the first truly hybrid Earth-orbit consensus architecture. 

The Frontier Forum

At Devconnect in Buenos Aires, we held the inaugural Frontier Forum, a dedicated space for builders, researchers, and pioneers exploring the big questions and charting the next decade of innovation. With over 400 attendees, and several fantastic speakers including Dahlia Malkhi, Jens Groth, Jill Gunter, Andrew Miller, this event set the tone for years to come. 

Team Expansion

SpaceComputer has begun assembling the core team that will operate humanity's first orbital settlement layer. We expanded to ten more team members in 2025: engineers, cryptographers who understand that building space-native infrastructure requires expertise that spans aerospace, distributed systems, and cryptographic economics. 

The Frontier Podcast: Conversations from the Edge

We launched The Frontier Podcast with host Tom Mitchelhill, bringing deep conversations with the pioneers pushing technology and humanity into uncharted territory. From cypherpunk values to space economics to the philosophy of decentralization, the podcast explores the ideas that will define the next century of human expansion. 

This year we had Advisor Dahlia Malkhi, Founder of 0xbow Ameen Soleimani, and Founder of Primitive Ventures Dovey Wan join as primary sources of the present-day cypherpunk movement. 2026 will bring more voices from the movement, and insights into the logical next steps in the evolution of decentralized systems: heading to space.

Catch up before new releases in 2026 on Spotify or YouTube.

Many Conferences, One Message

We brought SpaceComputer's vision to more than 10 conferences around the world, including EthDenver, IC3 (Yale, Princeton, Cornell), EthPrague, EthCC, EDCON, and Devconnect. 

Each talk delivered the same core message: the frontier of cryptography and compute is in orbit. Ground-based systems will always be vulnerable to terrestrial interference. Space-native infrastructure offers something unprecedented: physical isolation with cryptographic guarantees, creating trust assumptions that no earthbound system can match.

We are not vapourware or speculative futurism. This is the next logical step as we’re turning SciFi into reality. 

Looking Ahead: 2026 and Beyond

We spent 2025 building the foundation for the orbital root of trust, and validating the SpaceComputer thesis. 

2026 is about scale, and building the future on top of it.

We plan to traverse the void and beyond to deeper research, more partnerships, and more applications built on space-native infrastructure.

To everyone who joined us this year as team members, investors, community members, and early believers in the space economy, thank you for joining us on the journey to humanity's next step for decentralized compute beyond Earth's terrestrial bounds.

Welcome to the next year in the frontier of space acceleration. 

𝕤𝕡/𝕒𝕔𝕔. 

Join the mission
Community | Blue Paper | Website | Twitter (X)

This is the transcript for the third episode of The Frontier Podcast with Dovey Wan, Founder of Primitive Ventures, hosted by Tom Mitchelhill and SpaceComputer CoFounder Daniel Bar.

Welcome back to the Frontier Podcast, the show where we interview the pioneers pushing technology and humankind into the future and going deep on the original cypherpunk values of cryptography, digital sovereignty, and the limits of human ingenuity. I'm your host, Tom Mitchell-Hill, and today I'll be joined by my co-host, Daniel Barr, the co-founder of Space Computer. Thanks for joining me, Daniel.

Cheers, Tom. Awesome to get on the pod again. Today we are speaking with Dovey Wan.

Dovey is a multi-cycle crypto pioneer, having been actively involved in the crypto space since 2017. She's the founder of Primitive Crypto, a frontier prop investment firm that is explicitly not a VC firm, but still cuts VC checks. Dovey has been standing at the frontier of crypto and tech for over a decade, working as the managing director of DHVC, or Danhua Capital, a VC firm focused on enterprise, consumer, health, and fintech sectors.

She boasts an extremely impressive record of investments in and contributions to the crypto and blockchain industry, featuring projects like the OG DeFi Kyber Network, Cosmos, Tendermint, Handshake, Blockfolio, Starkware, Optimism, GMX, Athena, just to name a few. Welcome to the Frontier Podcast, Dovey. We're extremely grateful to have you on the show.

Happy to be here. Yeah, so it definitely feels like a boomer in this space. So the mental aging is insane.

I think that's why probably I spend much more time just really caring about my own health and longevity and all that. And then the other thing is that every cycle I have seen pretty tragic, just a very, it's a very tragic death from friends around us. So I think that's why I think it is not about, because I know when it comes to crypto, people always talk about, oh, just getting rich and pre-rich and post-rich, this kind of vibe.

But at the end of the day, it's not about being ultra high net worth. So it is not about being ultra high net worth. And it's more about being ultra anti-fragility.

That's also what tying back to the original cyberpunk spirit. So it's about anti-fragility. It is not about having that much money in your bank account.

Yeah. That's interesting. Talk to me more about anti-fragility.

What do you mean by that? And how does that link in with the cyberpunk ethos in your eyes? Yeah. And when it comes to anti-fragility, right? And so I have been sharing this with a lot of my friends. And so you guys have seen what happened to Jack Ma.

And you have seen what happened, all this major attack on all of the publicly visible billionaires out there, right? And so I think being a very stealth mode billionaire has a much higher degree of freedom than being a publicly visible billionaire out there. And also imagine in the future, I have this mental model for many years. And imagine there will be a major scientific discovery that can probably invent the same level of nuclear weapon.

And so it can be whatever things out there. Or it can be the same level of CRISPR, right? And so that kind of things that can bioengineer your baby and all that. And so supposedly, the inventor of that thing, in order to just really keep that thing under stealth mode, or really just make it publicly open, but without revealing much of the inventor's identity.

And so I really think in the future, once Bitcoin hit $1 million US dollar, and then we should have this Nakamoto Award. And we should have the Nakamoto Award to really award that. So to really award anonymous inventors, and so the anonymous scientists, and then also all these anonymous social journalists.

And then so who can really dig into a very in-depth investigated, can really dig into this super dark investigation of certain social phenomena, right? And so that's how we can make sure these things can have the level of the, so that's how we can make sure the things that have the same level of the free. So the same level of the degree of freedom, then potentially we can also ensure the actual human liberty. So maybe to kind of try and paraphrase about the values of cypherpunk, a part of the anti-fragility is that someone can maintain their comfortable private life, rather than being under the scrutiny of constant attacks by haters or authorities, et cetera.

So like you kind of want to get that individual self-sovereignty, and that future is something that crypto definitely enables, whether it's like Nakamoto, the original inventor, or any other aspects of being self-sovereign. For me, for example, it's self-sufficiency on a farm, but basically any other aspect of taking care of your liberties. Is that kind of like the direction you're thinking you're taking it, Dovey? I think that's definitely a key part of that.

And then also, I think there's not a coincidence that many of us who are early in crypto are also very into longevity as well. Because the health thing was also among the pioneers in cryogenics, right? And then also, since the inception, the cypherpunk movement and crypto people, and we all have centered around two core beliefs. And one is to build these immutable ledgers to form the immutable truth.

And the other one is also to issue a matter-solving asset, so to really empower these individuals. So I think these are all interconnected with each other. And then also the muscle itself is like a human organ that has the best antifragility traits, right? Because the more we challenge it, the stronger it gets.

When people get wealthy, they seek for eternal life, which is longevity, and space, basically, that conquers more places. So that's maybe a part of the pursuit for immortality and the vastness of space, right? I feel like the space pursuit, I think it's... OK, so I probably hold a different opinion when it comes to the space and just get off the earth kind of pursuit. And I think just that the earth currently feels very, very zero-sum, right? And all the things that are happening out there just feel extremely zero-sum.

And the geopolitics environment currently is totally different than 50 years ago. And I think the politicians nowadays, their job is not to form consensus, right? And having a consensus has basically become contrarian. And then also the middle class is fading.

And the middle class is basically fading everywhere. And it's not just in the US. And you have seen what happened to Europe and the fertility rate.

Korea now is at 0.8%. So theoretically speaking, probably in 100 years, there won't be any Koreans out there, which is crazy. So that's why I think the earth feels pretty zero-sum. And we don't have the same aspiration than before, especially when it comes to Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I was just reading a paper, I think a few days ago, really shocked me. So the Gen Alpha, Gen Alpha is just like, they are not even hitting puberty, right? Like Gen Alpha goes, so they spend over 5 billion in Sephora That's extremely zero-sum to me.

And so why consumerism, so the consumerism has progressed so far that they basically just stuff all the kids down to the throat. I think the space pursuit is just like, the earth feels very, very zero-sum. And we just want to get out of it.

And then also that can set the aspiration value anchor for the next generation. And I think that's why many of us are very, very into the pursuit of space. I have a question there.

Do you think that we can kind of balance the pursuit of space with a non-zero-sum kind of planetary arc? Or do you think it's kind of like a, from your perspective, do you think that space is like the next frontier that we need to move into to fix things on earth? Or is space the next frontier that we go to because things on earth are cooked? I think the space pursuit, well, like the inspiration or the aspiration for many of the space entrepreneurs that I've known, and it's because why earth feels like zero-sum. And I think just practically speaking though, space, there's so many things that you can conquer in space because it's like a blue ocean, right? So it's like a blue ocean and there's not much competition. So for instance, the current international space station, there's no any competitor to the current international space station until just two years ago when China launched their own version, right? The Tianlong station was formally completed in, I think, in late 2022, right? And so operationally, the Chinese space agency right now is running their own regular six-month crew rotation, and which was never happened until just three years ago.

So there's no competition at all when it comes to the international space station. And then also what we have seen, just the whole trend is that, I think that founding space is something just extremely high-tech, so like extremely high capex. So many of this government and then trying to shift towards a more private version of the Leo destinations.

So things can have more commercial stations and then just a government-only asset. So from this perspective, I think this is a lot of parallel to the early stage of internet, right? Internet also started as a DARPA thing, as a government thing. So I think just purely from a market perspective, and then so we have seen the cracks has been opened up.

And then so the government is leaning towards funding, just being the customer of all the commercial company rather than just doing their own thing. So I think just both theoretically, just inspirationally, theoretically, and probably speaking, so the space is large enough for all the new entrepreneur, and especially from private sector to pursue. I would say though that with space, it's definitely booming, but it's still extremely early, and it's still extremely capital intensive, and there's a really long way to go.

It's super exciting, but I think that it's one of those things, like I've been in other technologies, whether it's quantum computing that is starting to get to commercialization or crypto that we're almost 20 years since Satoshi with space. Launches are getting more affordable, but still big structures, like you mentioned the space station or VAST that is building an alternative space station, and space tourism and other stuff. These are still things that are very, very early on, and then still we're looking at launching small satellites and things that service Earth are still quite relevant, and part of also what we're doing with space computer is that, and I think there's going to be quite a lot of foundational stages before we get to this multi-planetary species and stuff, which obviously is part of the sci-fi objective that inspires everyone.

I think what you said a few steps is, now we have SpaceX. SpaceX is a logistic company for the space, so once that Starship is there, and I think the payload cost is going to down probably 100x, and once we can lower down the true order of magnitude on the payload cost, and so we can potentially to build the real estate in the space, especially around Leo. Leo first, and then Moon, and then Mars, this is how the progression is going to be, but first we need to have the logistic company and also the real estate company out there.

I think when it comes to space computer, space computer is not a physical infrastructure company, and space computer, my mental model for space computer in the future, it's kind of like Starlink, but without a satellite, and also it's like a Starlink for the in-space computation. Daniel, do you think that analogy clicks? I would say maybe something like Starlink would be built with space computer, but I'm thinking about it more as a settlement and smart contract platform, so more like a Bitcoin slash Ethereum that is space-native, and then on top of which you can start having the space-native economy, some of which could be the communication layer, which is a Starlink equivalent, but interesting because initially we were not planning to do much hardware, but we realized that even though there's a lot of more offerings and solutions available, we still need to do some of the hardware specs, and it's now the missions that we're working on is hardware that we will ultimately be engaged on sending satellites to orbit, and we're looking at it as kind of like the boot node validator set that are initially there, but ultimately we would want to include more satellite providers, and whether it's a communication providers, imaging, other services, so I don't know if purely the Starlink, but maybe a Starlink layer two or something like this could be good. Yeah, so I remember in the early days, and we were talking about what is the position for space computer, and yeah, so like a very straightforward and can be a little bit lousy mental model is like DP in the sky, right? And it's like a DP in the sky and leveraging the existing onboard satellite, like to leverage the existing onboard satellite, so the onboard satellite compute for like, so either for security guarantee, because it can be far beyond what like, so like it can be far beyond what like the earth, like trust the hardware can offer, and then also like it can be a really good, like resilient, like hardware in the area of this rising geopolitics like tension, and so like that's basically the ultimate anti-fragility play.

Yeah, root of trust in space, so it's more secure than TEs on earth, and we've seen the TE fails a few times over recently, so yeah, like more and more that there's nuance in how the security model for having the physical isolation in space, it's becoming interesting for people to pick at space computer, yeah. As the kind of non-technical guy sitting here, I do have a question for both of you that I'm interested in. How, because Daniel, you were talking about the fact that, you know, we are still, it is still incredibly like early for space industry, we're seeing kind of launch costs be brought way down, which means that we can expect to see a lot more stuff get into space.

How quickly do you see like industry, commerce, and business being conducted in space, and to what size? It's kind of a general question, but directionally, how much stuff do you think we're going to start seeing like low earth orbit, but then also actually moving out to either the moon or to Mars? Just general broad kind of scope question here. So maybe we can look at the current status as a way to extrapolate. Today, on average, SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 mission, I think about every second day, roughly.

So last year they launched 7,500 satellites for Starlink alone, and then the excess capacity is typically sold to other missions, which is missions similar to what we're launching with. So if you're having today, so 90% of what you have currently in orbit, more than 90% is Starlink. This is something that I don't know, like some people out of space sector don't know, but majority of what actually orbits above us in the sky is Starlink.

Everything else is like small potatoes compared to that. And as Dovey mentioned, SpaceX is kind of like the logistics company in that way, but in some respects, I look at it a bit like Apple is the iPhone company. So SpaceX is the Starlink company that became like the product that is championed, and they have also the confidential equivalent for the government sector.

Blue Origin is getting into the launch business. The more the launch programs are going to be solved, the more you'll start seeing huge boost, probably like tenfold of where it is today in LEO. And then actually even before Moon, there's high Earth orbit, there's a mesospace.

So there's still quite a lot to uncover for things that are purely servicing Earth. I think that we're probably like multi-decades away from exhausting this. Like there's still plenty.

It's a blue ocean, like Dovey mentioned. When will we get to Moon and Mars? To be honest, I feel that it's one of those things that it's super fascinating and inspiring, but I'm not going to hold my breath on like, okay, we're going to solve it in the next couple of years. It's like this is going to be a pretty big effort to get a colony on Mars and all these things.

It's not clear yet how. It's like, of course, we're all excited about it, but it's going to take some time. But yeah, I mean, Dovey, you've been very interested recently in other space. 

I know that you've got into other space in your portfolio. So what's your take on the rate of development and kind of trajectory as a whole? Yeah, so I feel like that's one thing that people are very, probably just like the space is still very, like the industry is still tiny. And tiny in the sense of how many people are really paying attention to that, other than SpaceX and a few other space, other than a few big other space commercial companies.

And so no one is actually paying much attention to that. But just to give you like a number wise, right? And then the number wise, and we already, because the only unit economic metrics that we have to pay attention to is how much cost per kilogram, because you have to send stuff to the space. And so that's just like boils down to the single unit economic.

The single unit economic metrics. And so like the cost currently per kilogram when it comes to launch, it used to be around like 80,000 per kilogram. And now down to just like 2000 per kilogram.

So like the cost itself already like down more than like 90%. And then also some of these like very heavy lift vehicles and can probably down the cost down to 100,000 ish. And so for a heavy lift.

So I think we have already like progress a ton from there. And it's just like, it's basically like the shitcoin cost. So it's basically like a shitcoin price.

I have been just like joking with my space, Porco company founders that they're just like driving down the cost of like per kilogram, per like KOL. And then when it comes to like the shitcoin founders, the old coin founders or the new coin founders, they're basically driving down their own token price per like 80% every cycle. And it's kind of similar when it comes to the space industry.

It's like every four to five years. And then so like the payload cost like going down 80%. So that's why I'm very bullish on that, because that's like a good reduction.

It is not like my coins going down, right? And I think like when it comes to Starship, I'm not, I don't have like a number at the top of my head, but like what can drive further cost reduction, like when it comes to the payload cost? One is the reusability, like especially when it comes to booster, like stages. And then also the larger payload capacity, so we can have like economic scale. And then also like Daniel has mentioned, we can have a higher launch cadence, right? And then so then we can just like spreading out like all like the fixed cost and like some cost to just like a cohort of like clients.

And then also there's can be like mass production, which is like the manufacturing itself, because the problem with all this like government-founding rocket company or just a government-founding rocket or like space station initiative, the problem of that is like they just outsource everything. So they just outsource everything to everyone else, especially for the U.S. And like why China can launch like Tianlong, like China's own version like space station in such a short period of time is that China basically built everything in-house. So they just import like all the raw material and then just like build everything in-house.

I think that's what the competence, so like if we can try to make a market of it, right? Because that's like the beauty of like private sector. So like the private sector is always like down to like cost optimization, right? So it's a productivity-centric. So when it comes to this, all this public sector like funding projects, it's just like, it's bureaucracy-centric.

So that's why I'm pretty bullish on that when it comes to the next four years or like five years for the next space cycle, because we have the crypto cycle and we also have the space cycle. And like space cycle is usually like four to six years. So like six to eight years-ish, yeah.

And so it basically took like space that's like 20 years like to really ship their first like real human in the rocket. So yeah, so I think when it comes to like Starship in the future and like the Starship will probably cost as little as like 10 million per flight in the future. So it's extremely affordable, yeah.

Yeah, maybe Tom about your comment on when will we see a space native economy? I think we're starting to see the buds of it. Like for example, you have companies that are dealing with monitoring at a relatively high resolution of space objects. And these things are only possible today when you're able to launch a camera onto a satellite at a relatively cheaply price compared to what you'd be able to do 10 years ago.

You would already have these solutions 10 years ago but it was only for like government and low res and like low frequency. Now you have more and more things that are starting to service it. Also because data payloads from earth to space are actually still quite expensive.

So it's not only about launching the actual satellite, right? You also need to communicate with it. You have higher latency. If it's low earth orbit, it actually moves around.

So you need to connect either through ground station or alternative networks like what we're doing. And then if you need upgradability for the software or you need to download data to analyze it, process and then make some decision based on those data. So you do start seeing more and more solutions that are starting to be built natively for space like to build software that essentially runs edge compute and you can make decisions based on AI models deployed on the satellites without having to transport the data and make a decision and do it.

Talking about that, yeah. Daniel, have you seen like Jensen mentioned that he wants to send a data center in the space? Yeah, the space-based data center has been a hot meta for quite a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, yeah.

Actually, there's the first H100, I think with the star cloud guys recently launched, I think just a few days ago. Oh, cool. Yeah, so I think we are seeing a convergence of this amorphous law like coming from all different angles, right? Like we have the scaling law when it comes to AI and then we have, I think amorphous law is still in tech for probably for compute, but I'm not sure like up to like three nanometer.

And then we also have seen this amorphous law drop for payload cost when it comes to like space launch. And then so like if like Starship gonna be there, so like once we have like vehicles like Starship and like the payload cost gonna be probably like less than, like probably gonna be less 100 like US dollar per kilogram. And then so like that's another like 10x reduction.

Yeah, so we have seen like the amorphous law just say convergence, like there's a major convergence of amorphous law and this scaling law from all different angles. So that's why I'm extremely bullish for like all different kind of like space application. Bullish on the space economy and the multi-planetary future of our species.

Let's go. Dovey, I did wanna ask you, I wanted to zoom out a little bit and I wanted to talk a little bit about your background in crypto. And then also like, I don't know how you got kind of your interest peaked in space as well, but I'd love to start with like, what got you into crypto? I understand that you were like PM at eBay for a while and there's a bit of crossover with like Chris Dixon coming in when his company acquired eBay.

Can you run me through like your background, how you got started and why you decided to stay in the crypto space as well? Let me just try to recollect my memory. Okay, now it's 2025, right? Okay, yeah, so I finished my college, so I finished my master's school from Carnegie Mellon in 2011. And so like after that, so I moved to Bay Area and I started my career in eBay.

Yeah, so being like a PM there, like being like a product manager there and then just looking into all this, because I'm a huge fan of marketplace, so like marketplace, like you said, the whole design of marketplaces. And I remember there was like 2012, probably 2012. Yeah, so probably late 2012.

And then so that's when my manager back in the day, and then so he asked me to do this compact analysis on the other marketplaces. And that's when I discovered like Zucrow and I got so obsessed about it and because it's peer-to-peer, right? So it's basically like Craigslist, but with a, so it's kind of like Craigslist, but it's more than Craigslist. And so I got very obsessed with it and then like that's when I discovered Bitcoin and like all that.

And also the other coincidence, like the other coincidence is just my mom, like all the Asian parents. And then so she wanted me to buy property in Bay Area and like San Francisco, but it's extremely hard to get the money out of China. And because when it comes to mainland China and there's only like 50K US dollar capital, so there's only like Forex, so there's only like 50K Forex exchange, like quota per individual.

So it's extremely hard to get money out. Yeah, so- Is that 50K per year or like per month? It's like 50K per year per person. Yeah.

50 a year? Yeah, it is due to case and it's just like getting like more strict. And also like Korean has the same vote as well. Like if you guys think like Korean is a completely open capitalism, whatever, it's not a case.

It's like every-

Nations day, so they always have to control capital flag. And so like currently has this capital control as well. So that's why we can see all the country premium on the local current exchange, because, you know, like the liquidity is not it is not fluid.

Right. And this is a small interjection. This is a very interesting insight on the fact that some people think that in developed countries, crypto is not useful because the financial system already works.

And this is a great example for where Korea and China, which are sure, China has like more more like poverty in some faraway province. But generally, like quite advanced countries still has really interesting, unique utility for for crypto that is quite widely used. Yeah. 

And so like that's when like towards the end of like 2012 and then. Yeah. So me and my parents and we just use like Bitcoin for decide just like moving money out.

And and yeah, but I wish like I wish I didn't buy the house, to be honest. And then but like, who knows? Yeah. So like back in the day is that we so we bought a Bitcoin from like BTC, BTC, BTC, China, and then also on like Taobao.

It's I think like the fun thing about it. So like the so it's all this actual P2P is that the actual P2P market. So I have to test someone on Taobao because back in the day, Bitcoin was listed under this virtual is that do you remember back in the day? If you guys want to play some online game or some whatever, like you have to put up your phone charge, right? And then so Bitcoin was listed under the same category of all these virtual is that virtual things is that virtual digital goods on Taobao.

And then so we either have to do that or I would just buy BTC from BTC China. And then and then immediately we'll short a BTC and then move to like Bitstamp and then just exchange to like US dollar and then like Bitstamp back in the day. I remember that they can only do like banking wire.

And so, yeah, so like there were some 2012, like 2012, 2013. I forgot. And anyway, so fast forward.

And 2013 was my first cycle when it comes to this price plummet down. And yeah, just like anyone, I really got into this. I like because I like the dopamine is real, right? Because you can see things like just like freaking pump like reacting a day.

Yeah, just like any just like anybody else. And then like that's my first like crazy cycle. And then and also I remember that was in the day many, many engineers and just that early Bay Area crypto people around us.

And then so we were just like day traders. And so you always have to lose your money in your first cycle and then be the day. So just be the day trader.

And so like that, you said the pattern I have seen over and over. And it's like every cycle. So is that every cycle, all the new firms, like all my new friends that came into crypto.

So they always have to do this day trading thing. So it's just like trading different things. Right. 

So just like back in the day, we were trading Bitcoin, all the colored coins. And then all this like quote unquote fair launch POW coin back in the day, because there's many of these POW coins. And then later cycle is just like NFT.

Like NFT is actually colored coin on steroids, right? And so there's so many nice things already that can echo back to the original, like the colored coin. Because when it comes to NFT, it's just like we have like more metadata and like things like that. And that is on Ethereum, like better liquidity.

And then last cycle, we have like BRC20, like that's basically like another version of like Bitcoin colored coin, right? And so there's a lot of this similarity over cycles. But what is it? NAP, what are you referring to? NAP or what's the acronym? What was the acronym? It was BRC20s. Yeah, so like BRC20s.

It was like shit coins on Bitcoin. Sorry, the Bitcoin token standard. I'm sorry, that was an offensive terminology.

Yeah. And yeah, so like just a back to back to eBay Day. Yeah. 

So like eBay Day was just like, it's a really good, like eBay Day, like because it's a marketplace. And so I found out, so I found out about Ciro. And then so Ciro got me into like, like the Ciro itself is, it's also pretty cool.

So I'm not sure you guys like still have access. Well, like we don't have access, but it is carefully designed like for illegal transaction, which is, I think, which is a very eye opening for me. And then so that's also like that's also probably back to our earlier conversation on.

Right. And then so like the ultimate, like the absolute freedom can be also scary. So you don't you probably don't want absolute freedom.

And so that can be very metaphysical conversation on like what level of freedom you want and then like how to design the protocol carefully and like not to not to really abuse the level of freedom and privacy. Yeah. So I don't have like so I don't have a good answer on that.

And I think just like in like a parallel universe. And then so let's say the government is extremely friendly to things like Silk Road. And I think we will have this fentanyl, this like this like this like crazy fentanyl like disaster probably like 10 years earlier.

Right. So like now we have this fentanyl problem in San Francisco and you still see like fentanyl fall, like all the fentanyl, like all the fentanyl banter. And yeah. 

So like that also got me thinking on like like regulation, like even though the cypherpunk spirit is a very anti-regulation. But I still think for the average people and they don't have control, like they don't have control and then they don't have like self-discipline. And also they don't have like a know how to really distinguish what's good and what is bad.

And so, yeah. So like how to actually protect them. Right. 

And then so that's also like it's not just in crypto. Like if we look at like consumer Internet, like Zuckerberg and like Zuckerberg has a very strict rule for like his own kids when it comes to like screen time. But the thing is, he is building like the biggest like time sink and like do scrolling like machine for all the other kids.

Right. And so I think that when it comes to consumer Internet, like it's also the same thing that all the founders are following. They said to become like drug dealers, like drug dealers, like ethos.

You said don't get high on your own drug. It's just maybe maybe to interject there about the freedom principles, like a mental model that I have. And I think it's very relevant for your like how you're trying to associate it to the cypherpunk and crypto freedom is something that we all aspire for.

But freedom without discipline is chaos. Yeah. And you basically if you eat bad food and stuff, your health will decay.

Freedom with discipline is prosperity, which is, let's say, take the example of Singapore. Right. Like there is liberties and stuff, but there's also strong discipline.

And then it becomes a place that is prosperous. I think when you're designing a protocol, the protocol equally, on the one hand, you want the lowest level of the protocol to be as credibly neutral as you can. Like you want to have Bitcoin, Ethereum, SpaceComputer protocol, whatever, something that is accessible permissionlessly.

On the other hand, you want to aspire for code is law, that it's something that is not not possible to tamper with. And also you want to have services that are built on top that are able to exclude the bad guys. Let's say you don't want to have a North Korean hackers or or Iranian regime getting some funds that are illicit in order to bypass and somehow get wealthy.

Right. So it's like it's a question of how to create the rule set that actually serve as the greater good rather than try to think about it as anarchy that actually leads nowhere. I think that anyone with a little bit more sophisticated thinking understands that ultimately it's not just about anarchy.

It's also about what's the greater good here from a permissionless technology and cypherpunk values, free speech, etc. At like a psychological level as well. It's like ultimate freedom is also anxiety as well, if you think about it, because there's no if there's no optionality, it's just like being dropped in the desert and being told we'll go a certain way.

It's like, which way? So, you know, technically you're free. But if there's no clear cut kind of direction or directionality for you, then it's just overwhelming. Yes. 

Just to add on to that, there's a very interesting survey that arranged marriage, like the perception of the level of perceived happiness is much, much higher when it comes to arranged marriage. So I think that can also echo Tom's point really well. Yeah, this is going so far on a tangent, but I did see an interesting thing with Palmer Luckey talking about this as well.

Like he was saying that this idea, this like much more like Western, like finding yourself, finding your partner, going on some like giant spiritual journey idea is just such a fallacy because he's like, well, you know, for thousands of years, humans had very, very happy, healthy relationships. And they typically knew maybe several hundred, maybe a few thousand people if they lived even in a large city. But like that was it. 

Like your actual limit of people that you would meet in your lifetime was the town that you grew up in. Maybe you'd go over somewhere else. But yeah, he was like, it's a it's a trap.

Anyway, back to back to the subject at hand. I am quite interested in. So you've gone from eBay PM.

You've used Bitcoin to get out of China. You're obsessed with the design of like Silk Road, peer to peer marketplaces. Walk me through the process of founding Primitive.

What what led you to think, I want to start like a prop capital firm that also does like VC adjacent activities? Yeah, there was like there was a 2018 bear market. It was pretty deep in the twenty twenty twenty eighteen bear market. So me and my retired co-founder, Aaron Notcher.

So we have been working together for like many projects together. And then and I think like like twenty seventeen, because that twenty seventeen was like my first actual cycle as an investor. And and then but then the day I was still handling all the other so like all the other investments of our firm.

And I think I also did like even investment on like the other sectors, like Fintech and marketplaces and autonomous driving, et cetera, et cetera. So for instance, we so like back at DHVC, I so I led investment in like Figure, Moneylion, blah, blah, blah. And like they all went public.

And also like did like Series A, like just a personal check into Flatsport and a few other like really big like SaaS company. Also, I also did like Rippling and like Series A, like SaaS. And so I think I did OK as a just like a general tech investor.

But like crypto is the only sector I'm just like just that every is that every day I woke up like when I see my portfolio. Right. Because I have like so many different portfolio is that you go if you go to like a restaurant and then you will naturally gravitate towards like a certain manual that you want.

And so it's like having a buffet, but you only want to eat certain things. Right. Like that's when you figure out, oh, I really like this food.

So that's what happened to me is that, OK, I woke up every day and then I look at my portfolio. There are so many different sectors. But I only so I only want to dig into what happened in my crypto portfolio.

And so like that's so like that's when I realized, hmm, I should probably just like drop the other things. And then I should probably just drop the other things because like the other things is just a very consuming and like a war meeting and all that. Right. 

And so like, yeah. So like that's when when it comes to the twenty eighteen bear market. And so I'm like, yeah, so I really want to just drop all the other stuff and then just say like just like only in like crypto investment.

And then my retired co-founder, Edward Melcher, like he was one of the most like I would say like the most international and global individual I have seen. And he's a Jew and he's like a local like he born and raised in a local area here and and like grew up in Palo Alto. But like he can but like he can speak like fluent Chinese.

And and so he basically did his undergrad in like Peking University and then being the first undergrad in biology. Because if you want to learn biology as American in Chinese and then imagine the level of difficulty there. And so like like like he's my best friend.

And then so so like in twenty eighteen, like Aaron and I were like, yeah, he was working for Xiaolai, right? Before, from memory. So like he was working for Xiaolai and Xiaolai is considered as the godfather for like Chinese crypto. And so they basically own the entire supply chain of like crypto.

And so they own the biggest exchanges. So they own the biggest investment fund. And Xiaolai was also very instrumental in the whole education of like crypto and like Bitcoin and like China back in the day.

And so so like he's like a very like prominent teacher in general. So he's like a mentor for many of our generation back in the day. Yeah. 

Anyway, so twenty eighteen bear market and like me and Aaron was like, yeah, so we should just do these things ourselves. And then we have enough money that we make from like the like the bull market in like twenty seventeen. And and then and I don't want to do anything other than crypto.

So like that's how Primitive started. Yeah. You were in the twenty eighteen like bear market.

You've done your prop fund stuff here. What was your experience with the twenty twenty like DeFi, DeFi summer? How did that go for you? Oh, like twenty twenty DeFi summer was, OK, let me think about this. I think we were farming everything.

And and then, yeah, Yen, Wi-Fi, whatever. And like I think the DeFi summer was like the DeFi summer sort of like the DeFi summer sort of like bring back a little bit of the Cypherpunk spirit because it's a relatively fair access. Right. 

It's a relatively fair access. And then also like it's just OK. I remember back in the day in DeFi summer and like the smart counter security, like probably it's just like people are looking for a thrill, like because it was Covid, it was like lockdown.

And I remember we were looking into all the farms and then like one of my DeFi farmers, my team member, like he said something very, very it's like it's like, OK, so I would probably just speak out loud. So he was saying that aping into the farm without any smart contract security check is like having sex with a condom. Like that's when I learned about, oh, so why the thing becomes such a big thing.

And then people just say aping all the farms and then without any security check is like during lockdown. And so especially for guys and guys look for a thrill. And that's when I realized there's definitely different psychological like it's like the psychological is a psychological level.

Men and women are designed differently. Right. And like currently, like there's no physical war for men to fight.

So that's why they have to have some other outlet for their testosterone, like either Memecoin trading, like like unsecure, like smart contract farming or whatever things out there. Right. And so like, like that's what I thought, because I was the meme, men, men used to go to war.

Now they trade meme coins like this is the, this is what we got. I really think that because I like evolutionary, we're not that evolved. Right. 

And then so we are like evolutionary. We are not that evolved. And then so like what about men now? Like they don't go to war.

And then so they're sitting in the basement. They're sitting in the small cages, like especially during like COVID. Right. 

And and so that's why my theory, when it comes to the DeFi summer is the access like testosterone in the form of like financial populism. And yeah, so probably this is like a different angle from many others. And then we have access testosterone, we have access liquidity, and then we have this financial populism forming up right from like, so from Gamestop and all that.

So it's all this like three forces combined. And like that, so that made like DeFi summer boom. And yeah, so I think like DeFi summer.

Yeah. So we did a lot of things. But that's my key takeaway on understanding like the male psychology.

Yeah. I liked it. That's the first time I've heard like a like an EvoBio theory as to why.

I've heard various renditions of like the financial nihilism mixed in with financial nihilism would be more for like meme coins in 2023, 2024. But like, yeah, I think that's the first time I've heard the biological substrate get put in there for like excess male testosterone, high risk taking, stuck inside, bored. What are they going to do? It's actually it's actually a pretty bulletproof and retroactively correct thesis.

Dovey, what do you make of DeFi, the status of DeFi now? I think that the recent like balancer hack kind of frightened people again. And it really sparked that conversation around essentially the risk that you're taking for a lot of DeFi and like the amount of like DeFi hacks that there are compared to like the yield that you kind of see on, you know, what a lot of people consider to be like safe investments of like, oh, well, I'll just park a lot of stable coins or a lot of ETH or a lot of something somewhere and get like a five to seven percent return. And I think people have at least very recently post-balancer hack that that idea has fallen out of favor a bit.

How do you how do you see DeFi kind of progressing? And Athena also had recently. And Athena. So probably we have to take a step back on on like the capital allocators like profile, because at this cycle, like the capital allocators profile like change quite a bit.

Like we still have our like crypto native like people and like on-chain capital, right? And and then but like ETF and like all the other like traffic instruments and really just a change by the capital allocators mix. And and like that's why also we haven't see any like actual like just like any altcoins in this cycle. And I have like and I think I long said about probably like 20, like 2024 or early early 2024.

I have been talking about this publicly that I don't think we're going to have the same like DeFi season or the altcoin season like this cycle because because that because ETF is not converting the retail to like like it's like two different channels nowadays. Right now we have like the traffic channel. We have like the DeFi on-chain channel, but the traffic channel is driving by ETF.

But like ETF is not converting the retail slash institutional money like on to on-chain like just like like there's so there's no like a path there in between. So ETF like basically like the ETF flows and the crypto native flows and the crypto on-chain flows are in two different liquidity pools. And we have seen projects like Athena and then probably undo like doing some just like DeFi stuff.

But the more retail investors like buys ETF that the less that they're buying like all the like so like the more like the more traffic flow flow into ETF. And then so like the so I think the less of the so the less of the liquidity will be there for the DeFi kind of like DeFi pool and like DeFi and DeFi liquidity. So the interaction is just not there.

Yeah, so like that's what I think we are lacking. So like this cycle, so I remember clearly that last cycle like we have seen. So OK, so in the 2017 in the 2017 cycle, we have like ICOs and then ICOs are the direct on-ramp for the marginal new money into centralized exchanges.

Right. And 2020, 2021, we have like both the DeFi and both DeFi and NFT. And the both the DeFi and NFT, we have seen the new users like deposit fiat directly to the centralized exchanges and centralized exchanges that change for stable coins like Ether and like directly withdraw that and then to participate to the crypto native speculations like naming like DeFi farming, like NFT whitelisting, like whatever, like whatever kind of stuff.

And I remember clearly that in 2021 and then we we are seeing like a massive pattern when there's a Coinbase withdrawal and went directly to OpenSea and like many of these direct withdrawals from like CEXs like to do all the so to so to so to have like all different on-chain operations. And also Moon, so Moon, so like the company MoonPay was also like took off also due to this on-ramp demand for APN into NFTs. I think like this cycle, we only have like Memecoin trading, like if we think about like where are the marginal, like like where are the marginal users for the on-chain activities? And then we have like Memecoin trading and prediction market users are not so like because the prediction market thing is like like the OI is relatively small and then like the active traders, like many of them are just browsing like the market itself.

I think like the actual users, like the absolute number of like users like cannot compare with like what like the DeFi summer as I last time, or at least not as good as this like NFT craze. Yeah, so, so I think just like the traffic money are not doing many like DeFi stuff, right? And so we are seeing just like the crypto, like the crypto residual money are are like sitting on like DeFi, like Hyperliquid you can also consider as DeFi, but it's not the same DeFi as 2021, because like from like design perspective, like Hyperliquid has some improvement. From like new ideas and but essentially is still kind of like similar and and so they have their own like HLP pool. 

Yeah, but it's still a, it is so I wouldn't consider Hyperliquid as a full on DeFi. And like there's still some like centralized element around that. Yeah.

Yeah, so I think like that's just like a very like long like thought process when I think about what happened to like DeFi like this cycle. And also we don't have any new DeFi primitive like this cycle, right? And like Athena, it is not a DeFi primitive. So Athena essentially it is like a hedge fund. 

So it's like a tokenized hedge fund, right? So it's like a tokenized hedge fund with like a single strategy, like that's the delta neutral strategy. And many of this like DeFi thing happened recently, like the balancer one is more of like a DeFi problem, but the stream finance, it is not a DeFi problem. It is like an off-chain manager, it's like an off-chain strategy.

So like a stream finance problem is like a transparency problem because it is raising money on-chain, but like using the money off-chain. So it does not have the necessary like transparency there. And so like that's why we have seen like the blow up there, right? So like to Tom's question, I think I'm still bullish in DeFi, but we really have to make like DeFi plug into like all the mess. 

So we really have to think about what is the proper way to plug DeFi into the traffic distribution channel and into all probably like new banking. And so it's just that we have to broaden the upper funnel for all the DeFi application because currently like the upper funnel, it is not being broadened like this cycle for most of the DeFi products out there. Like that's my feeling.

One interesting interpretation I hear about where things are headed with DeFi and maybe not ETFs, but a good segue to the digital asset treasury companies, right? So the original Michael Saylor deity maybe doesn't get into much of the DeFi space. But then when you look at stuff like Sharpling that I know you guys have been involved or Tom Lee, this capital is not going to just be idle. It's definitely going to be allocated to on-chain activities. 

And one of the interpretation I heard is that ultimately this would be the catalyst for much more interest in altcoin season in general and renewed interest in DeFi. Because ultimately, once we exhaust this interest in just having capital sucked into a dot, you'll have retail looking to outrun, outperform what would be the premium that you can get on a dot. So that could be a spark. 

But what do you think would be a lever otherwise? Like what do you see as a potential lever to get started a new DeFi or alt season from where we're at today? I'm not sure whether we are going to have the same alt season and the return of the altcoin is going to be extremely dispersed. And that's just the reality because the market is maturing. And then once the market is maturing and the participants of the market will be looking for some kind of valuation model, I think most of the altcoin, there's just no proper valuation model out there.

Even if I have seen a good valuation model when it comes to DEXs or PERP DEXs, you can basically do this regression model on OI and market cap. But many of these altcoins, they're basically just a speculative vehicle and how I can evaluate it. So that is the biggest problem when I just chat with my Wall Street longshore funds who are more sophisticated when it comes to capital allocation.

I think we can still do this at memecoin stuff, basically trade everything as a memecoin or as a pure narrative vehicle. That's fine. But I think crypto de-cycle, just like the altcoin de-cycle, not crypto specifically, because Bitcoin is probably in its own land already and becoming a macro asset.

I think crypto de-cycle, altcoin de-cycle is just being triple-killed, triple-killed by AI stock and triple-killed by AI stock, AI slash tech stock, zero-day options and also traditional market. Because previously, most of the altcoin is just serving the purpose of pure speculation. But now all the retail can speculate things that they can relate better, they can understand better, and they can probably entertain better because the prediction market essentially is an infotainment.

So I think we are not going to see the same altcoin season as before because the altcoin energy, the same altcoin energy has been diluted by so many other vehicles out there. I think it's pretty apparent, especially this year and even last year as well, for our liquid team, because for our liquid side of the practice, they are not just trading crypto, they're more like a macro fund. And whenever they want to have crypto exposure, they will actually trade CB stock or micro strategy because it has much better volatility than Bitcoin.

And so what worries me is Bitcoin probably already graduated from this speculative asset. But when it comes to most other assets in our space, and then so being like a speculative asset, if the volatility is completely crushed by Bitcoin,

And like, even ourselves, like when we want to have like crypto exposure, we don't, we don't, we don't like, we don't, we don't trade native Bitcoin, because the, because the Coinbase stock and MicroStrategy stock and then MetaPlanet stock has a much better volatility, yeah. This is something I wanted to ask you about. You've got a pretty solid, you know, rap sheet of experience in investing, picking founders.

I saw you post something to Twitter recently that was talking about like dark triad personalities in crypto. I'm quite interested to hear more of your take on this dark triad issue that we've got. Yeah, so I posted this, I think, 2022, right.

And so I think like in our space, so as an early stage investor on our, so on our, on our venture side, and when it comes to early stage investment, and it's all about a founder, and like, there's like nothing else more than the, like, there's nothing else more than the founder itself. But like we have discussed, and like crypto is a, like, crypto is basically a kid between, so crypto is the kid of like financial populism, consumerism, and also probably like tech libertarian, right. And I think historically, we have seen like, like evil leaders. 

And so like, so this kind of like evil leaders, and, and I have, and I have been thinking hard on why we are seeing so many evil leaders, like in crypto, like even more than finance somehow, because like finance, like the close proximity, like the, like the closest proximity is that the finance industry. But probably I wasn't there when in early stage of like finance, probably like that's also the same thing. But I think there's also another compounding effort, like this like compounding factors when, when, when it comes to like the emergence of like all this like evil leaders is because the influencer, like, so this influencer and like social media culture, so that really just that facilitated them to be more like this, so, so really facilitated them to just like gain the clout, right. 

And because that in our space, because in our space is so, so, so because like, in our space, and many of the things like the average, like the average people, like the average crowd is always attracted to like, who's getting the most attention, regardless of the virtual. So like, that's why I decided to kind of like dodge higher personality or like someone who's a very performative. And then so like, like, just like, like, because like, like the narcissist or like the psychopath, and then so they can be extremely charming online as well, right. 

So and then like, they probably tend to be overcharming online. And then like, because when it comes to online, when it comes to online communication, like you are losing, like all the nonverbal cues, and then so you basically cannot read their facial expression. So it's very, very hard for them to hear their tones. 

So like, that's what all this dark, so all this dark, so this dark, triad personality, and so they all know how to put themselves in the center of attention really, really well. And I think the whole crypto space is basically largely built on top of like Twitter, right. And, and so if you are a dark triad person, and like, you know how to easily like disguise and then like just hide the true nature, like behind the screen. 

And then also the audience, like the audience basically have like goldfish memory, right. And then so they don't remember like what happened from like, from like last like 10 minutes. And so like this, that makes it even harder to like distinguish them from like actual genuine, so like actual genuine, like authentic founders. 

And then, and then many of these authentic founders, and they are kind of like quiet online as well. So like, that's also like average selection. And so you will have like all this super loud, dark, so super, super loud.

And there's a performative like personality. And, and then so like, they can get all the attention. And nowadays, attention basically means like social proof, right. 

And so I think that that's why, like, that's why when it comes to like crypto, and then so we have seen so many these like dark personality, like influencers, like getting online, and then just like getting traction, and then like scamming people, and over, like over and over again. Yeah. Yeah, no, the internet is the perfect place for like your, your three, or particularly like narcissism and psychopathy.

Machiavelliansim also, but like, yeah, the internet is like a really good forcing function of like, you can remove so many of the constraints that prevent that like interpersonally, with normal human relationships. But moving away from the more dark side. Dovey, I was really interested in your longevity arc. 

I see that you've got like a Twitter alt that's focused on, on longevity, longevity and health. What's what started you down like longevity, health rabbit hole? And what are like the, the top things that you think that you've found to be the most either rewarding or most like high leverage? Okay, so I think we talked about at the core value principle level, and why like the whole thing of longevity and transhumanism is somehow can like tie back to the original cyber conspiracy of like being like a solid individual, blah, blah, blah. I think like more for me and myself. 

Yeah, so okay, I think it started from a pretty like just I think it so it started like my so my passion for longevity, because I don't know, is longevity per se. So just my passion for discovering myself, like, so I started the whole journey from just purely discovering myself. And then it's a very like geeky interest. 

And, and, and also, like, thanks to my parents, like, thanks to my parents. And so they actually, we have many, we have, we have many daughters in our family. And I almost, and I was almost like pre-med as well. 

And but my mom was like, don't be a doctor. And so it's a pretty bad lifestyle. But I still, but I still just have like a very high interest when it comes to anything about health, about biology, about human physiology, things like that. 

And also my parents have been like, they, so they, so they keep my every hormone level and like health report, and like everything like since my first, like, since when I had my first period, like, that's like back to probably a 1415. And so, and I have this like giant database and this Google chart about all my hormone level, and then so how they move along the day, like, so how they move like over years and like things like that. And then also, I began to analyze the trends and changes, like, in the spreadsheet, which naturally evolved into a very like comprehensive, like self-qualification, like self-quantification, like projects I have. 

And then so I even built my health OS in Notion. And like now with like GPT, I can basically dump all the data there. And then so I've been trying all the things like, like CGM, like continuous glucose monitoring, and like very early on all the rain and very, and also very early on, like metformin, like GLP, like SGLT2, like all that kind of stuff. 

And then so I have been taking metformin for like, probably for a decade now. Yeah. So ever since college.

I thought people stopped with metformin recently. It's became like, for some reason, I saw also Brian Johnson was mentioning that is. I think like, yeah. 

So, well, so that's why in order to do things properly, you need to understand yourself well. And so for me, I just, I'm microdosing metformin and like 500 milligrams. And I think, yeah. 

So like, you have to understand your own, just like biomarker and all the physiology, like baseline and like benchmark. And yeah. So like, if you are doing like heavy lifting every day, and then so you don't like, because metformin is also like a micro-stressor to you, right? And then so you don't want to overdose like metformin and, but it's really individual. 

So it's very like individual by individual. So like, so I just don't think there's like, okay, I can just listen to some influencer, like talk about something. And also GLP-1 as well, right? Just that GLP-1, like I will not take GLP-1 myself because, so first of all, like it's mainly for cosmetic purpose. 

Like if it's for me, because I'm normal on like BMI, I'm very high muscle mass and all that. So, and then just like, even for like cosmetic purpose, and if I really want to shed more, like shed like 10 more pounds, and then so I wouldn't use a GLP-1. Like the, like the issue being is like GLP-1 is, it is also like, so like, it is also a hormone, right? And then so if you just like taking GLP-1 and then so it will like suppress and it will suppress and down regulate your own capability to secrete GLP-1. 

So I'm always in for a more like natural way, not like a quick hack. Because I think like currently the problem with all this longevity hype is like everyone is looking for like a quick hack. But there's nothing as this and then wouldn't count to your like body and like, and wouldn't count to your body and long-term health. 

And so I think like today most people are being caught in like two major traps. And like the first trap is just like not knowing what to do. And then many just lack like even basic like health knowledge. 

And then probably coupled with unlimited resources. And then so I have seen my friends just like being less ascribed like, like insulin, like, so like insulin immediately. And then, but when like early insulin resistance, that could have been easily identified and my reverse, like just with my lifestyle change, right? And because I, the current healthcare system, it is not healthcare, it's basically like sick care.

And many of the doctor don't even order like OGTT, like which can easily identify insulin resistance and like during just a routine checkup. And I think on the other hand, like there's also the fault, like it's like a kind of a false hope. And like, even for the one with like financial resources. 

And so they basically just want some like 10,000 stem cell treatment, like to various fancy peptides, blah, blah, blah. I think essentially like to say the baseline for longevity is just a back to the basis, right? And then, so can you fix your sleep, right? And can you fix your sleep, like the quality sleep, like consistent exercise, and then like the very balanced diet, and just like don't overeat. And many of these are probably coming from over-consuming. 

I think like if you can master like these like three areas, but that's already like good enough, right? And then so probably on top of that, like you can do like supplements and then you can do like fancy stuff, like I have my sauna house, like at the backyard, and I have my soft shell, like so, and I have my soft shell, a hyperbaric chamber at home as well. Like you can do all this fancy stuff, but like you have to fix your like basis first. Yeah. 

Yeah. I feel like it's a very, very common thing in not just like tech scene or people with high resources, but almost everywhere. It's just like the superfluous effort that gets applied at these kind of like tiny things that don't really move the needle of like, I'll get this supplement or I'll do this thing. 

And it's like, eh, if sleep, exercise, and diet is not fantastic, you don't have a base to build anything on. Yeah. I've seen like, I have a few friends, wealthy crypto friends who are, they have all of the expensive gear. 

They take a lot of supplements, but they're kind of overweight and are not taking care of. What's the point, right? What's the point, you know, and then try to do Ozempic to balance it. It was like, like, it's like the retardation. 

That is the thing. So feel the, and this is something we'll, we're getting close to time now, Dovey, and I'll let you go because we'll run an outro in a bit, but I am interested. So, you know, Daniel was saying that you actually managed to live quite a balanced lifestyle considering the amount of like stuff that you do, you know, even though you are, I'm actually stunned that you have actually managed to acquire 15 years of data and do that. 

I'm so not, I'm so not that kind of person. So I actually struggled to relate. I get so caught up in, in more, I'm less of a data guy, put it that way. 

And so like the field of longevity can get pushed into like, you know, optimization a fair bit. What do you see is like most important stuff, like outside of like physical optimization that works in like the longevity stack? I would say like brain health, like just like brain health is everything. And so I'm, so I think like the next step for me is like art and space and then blah, blah, blah.

And then, so I would really dig into the two end spectrum of the brain. And one is the early development of the brain and then from like age one to like age five. And then like, that's when before all the pruning happened and also towards the end of the brain, right? So like there's Alzheimer's, like, like Parkinson's, like all that. 

So I think like brain health is everything because we are basically manifestation of like the brain, right? And then, so like that is the only important organ that, so like, just think about this thought experiment. So I had, and I had this conversation with all my robotic company and imagine if you're a human and then you can see like bare minimum, like life, whatever. And, but you have to only keep one organ, like art in the brain. 

And then, so like you have the, you will need to have the brain there, but like art and brain, and then what is the other organ that you want to keep, right? So it's your hand, it's your eyes, it's your leg, or it's your ear, it's your mouth, like whatever. So like, so, so basically coming from this like, like illumination mental model, so can really help you to understand like what's important when it comes to your like body health. And then, so yeah, so like brain health is like definitely like absolutely important when it comes to, so when it comes to, so when it comes to longevity. 

But that's a pretty big topic, right? And then, so like there's a neuroscience and like there's a psychological development. There's also a lot of things related to our immune system as well. Like we have this brain gut, like, so this brain gut, like asses, and then like all this endocrine system is basically controlled by the brain as well. 

And, but like, there's also like environmental feedback loop for the endocrine imbalance. And, and so I think just like, I think at the end of the day, longevity is about, just like, so longevity is like a whole system work. And, and so it's very hard for me to pick, like if I have to add something on top of my current stack and it will be brain health. 

But I think the brain health part needs to start from like babies. It is not just like, okay, so I can probably improve for that. Because there's not a lot of things we can improve like currently, because our prefrontal cortex is pretty much well developed. 

And you, so you, so you, so you won't be able to produce more neurons, right? And so I really think it has to start from the baby. And, but the thing is that there's literally, like literally like zero thing about a guideline for like new parents about baby brain development, right? And yeah, so, so like that's something that I'm, so that's something that I'm still learning. And so I have been talking with many professors out there on like the, so, so like why guys have a much higher, like tendency to like develop like schizo, right? But that woman is much more prone to like depression. 

So like, that's also related to our brain structure, just a different gender, like have like different like brain structure. And it also relate to our like hormonal, so relate to our hormonal response. And, and yeah, so it's a, so it's a pretty deep topic. 

And so I think I will spend my, like once we like conquer space. And then, so I think in parallel, I will just say starting to, so I will start to spend more time on that area. Yeah.

Dovey, thanks so much for coming on the Frontier podcast. It's been amazing. Where do you want people to go find you on the internet and what would you like them to go look at? Yeah.

And you guys can just go to X at doveywan. So just like @doveywan.

This has been great. All right. We'll run it.

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Building consensus protocols that global decentralized systems depend on is no easy feat. From her PhD in Computer Science to HotStuff to Facebook’s Libra (Diem), SpaceComputer Research Coordinator Dr. Dahlia Malkhi’s career demonstrates that breakthroughs are forged by teamwork - not on solo geniuses - and why that matters as consensus moves beyond the cloud into orbit.

The Beginning: Academia and Distributed Systems

Consensus is the foundation of every distributed system. It’s how computers, separated by geography and trust, agree on what’s true. For decades, it has been the collaborative effort of computer scientists to continue evolving and improving state-of-the-art distributed systems.

Malkhi was interested in the field of distributed systems from the beginning of her career, long before blockchain or Web3 existed as concepts. After her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Malkhi’s interest spurred her to work with some of the greatest scientists of all time.

Of note, at the Hebrew University, an unexpected cross-disciplinary collaboration was forged. Working jointly with Noam Nisan, a pioneer in complexity theory and inventor of algorithmic game theory, Benny Pinkas, a renowned cryptography expert, and Yaron Sella, Malkhi’s then PhD student, they developed the Fairplay system. It combined practical research with theory in advancing the state-of-art Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC).

SMPC is a foundational cryptographic protocol that allows multiple parties to collaboratively compute a function without revealing their inputs to one another.

Fairplay was the first ever usable SMPC system, and led to generations of real-life circuit-based applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Fairplay is but one example, along with many other pioneering works in distributed systems and security, that constitute the foundation of how the cryptocurrencies we use today function.

So how did cryptocurrency enter the distributed systems picture? 

Malkhi’s short answer: 

“Distributed systems experts did not get into cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies got into our space.”

Marc Andreessen Gets It Wrong.

The next chapter in Malkhi's career was as a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. Towards the end of her time there, Malkhi and her colleagues noticed cryptocurrency - particularly Bitcoin - was rising popularity after the Whitepaper publication in 2008. 

Malkhi can still remember the day when she and all the researchers at Microsoft read the article Why Bitcoin Matters by Marc Andreessen in the New York Times (2014) that stated Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem.

“And we were like… no… it didn't.”

To Malkhi and other experts in the field, Bitcoin didn’t so much ‘solve’ the Byzantine Generals Problem, but instead brought up new questions: What does the Bitcoin core algorithm known as Nakamoto Consensus guarantee? Under what assumptions? And how could those guarantees be made stronger, simpler, and more efficient?

To put these questions in context, we need to return to the pioneering works of the field. Over the course of the previous decade at Microsoft, Malkhi had collaborated with Leslie Lamport, the Turing Award winner behind Paxos and the author of Specifying Systems. His research focus was Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), the idea that distributed systems can still reach agreement even if some components act maliciously or fail. This challenge was famously modelled in the Byzantine Generals Problem (Lamport, 1982).

Bitcoin's Nakamoto Consensus didn't solve the Byzantine Generals Problem. What Bitcoin did solve was the ability to globally scale distributed systems and overcome the double spend problem by creating an economic incentive to collectively maintain a global ledger of who owns the value of that digital currency (e.g., DigiCash and Mondex). Securing this behaviour requires increasingly large investment of work (e.g., compute, power), and creates a large imbalance. 

In contrast, in the classical settings, a Byzantine Quorum (a super majority) of parties is authorized to drive consensus by having authority or stake in a collective. This concept was first introduced by Malkhi and Michael Reiter in 1996 in the famous paper Byzantine Quorum Systems. Being able to scale quorum-based consensus drove years of research, which culminated with HotStuff.

Casper the Friendly Ghost Faces Hotstuff the Little Devil

HotStuff started taking shape when the VMware Research Group (VRG), was co-founded by Malkhi and her colleagues in 2014. Together the VRG researchers wrote a number of papers laying the groundwork for HotStuff, with focus on bridging Bitcoin and academic approaches to consensus. 

The breakthrough of HotStuff really took off after a blockchain workshop at Shenzhen Tisnghua-Cornell summer school in 2017, where Malkhi and fellow researchers met Vitalik Buterin, fresh off the publication of Casper, the Friendly Finality Gadget for Ethereum. Casper was the concept of building a partial consensus mechanism that combines Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm research with Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus theory.

Over four days of discussion, Malkhi and her former PhD student Ittai Abraham mapped Casper into an academic protocol format to figure out how to streamline and linearize consensus.

The ultimate breakthrough came on a 16-hour flight home from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Disconnected from the internet but wired from days of debate, Malkhi drafted what became HotStuff: A consensus protocol that transformed years of theory into a protocol that addresses the challenges of the Byzantine Generals problem with both simplicity and linearity. 

HotStuff is a BFT consensus protocol for partially-synchronous systems. It uses linear communication; instead of complex protocols with multiple states and message types and incur quadratic message overhead as previous academic works did, nodes confirm blocks in HotStuff with a uniform, linear pattern.

Over the following year, Malkhi, Maofan (Ted) Yin, Michael K. Reiter, Ittai Abraham, and Guy Golan Gueta, refined the HotStuff protocol. In particular, Yin (co-founder of Ava Labs & the Avalanche protocol) wrote the first open-source implementation of HotStuff, and Reiter developed the model-checking correctness tester.

Through their collective effort, the first paper, HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness was published in 2019. It is now one of the most cited papers in blockchain research. 

HotStuff’s simplicity was highly influential on the development of distributed systems, as now developers could implement it without needing to be an expert in distributed computing. 

HotStuff’s adoption spread quickly, from academic labs to Silicon Valley giants. Nowhere was this more visible than at Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar venture known as Libra (later rebranded Diem).

Diem: Blueprints for a Global Currency

Diem was one of the biggest undertakings of Malkhi’s career. As CTO, Makhi led engineers to create a unified digital currency that would allow for the easy transfer of funds and payments between billions of people. It would have been a USD-pegged stablecoin network that would allow users to send the new currency Diem over any interconnected device.

A big component of Diem was determining the consensus protocol to be used. After A/B testing several, they landed on HotStuff. It was determined to be the easy-to-implement solution, it met all the requirements, and fit well into the prototype. HotStuff's theoretical guarantees were vital for assuring banks of system safety.

Heartbreakingly, due to challenges with government regulators, the project came to a close in February 2022.

Nonetheless, Diem's heritage permeated throughout the industry, and HotStuff’s simplicity and intuitiveness led to the algorithm’s widespread adoption not only by Diem. For reference, the HotStuff-based core logic for the DiemBFT system is less than 100 lines of code. 

“When you have a good algorithm, developers recognize it.” 

Malkhi was unaware how many people had picked it up until she started getting messages about HotStuff usage and its success.

Over time, there have been many enhancements and adaptations to HotStuff by Malkhi and others in the community. Notably, Espresso Systems, a decentralized sequencing platform for rollups where Malkhi acts as an advisor, driving the productionization of HotShot, Espresso’s HotStuff‐based consensus engine. During the HotShot development cycle, working together with Kartik Nayak, Malkhi introduced HotStuff‐2, an optimization that cuts latency by roughly one‐third, significantly improving throughput in a high‐stakes production environment.

As HotStuff continued to evolve the way we use distributed systems, Malkhi’s focus shifted to new frontiers: consensus in orbit.

On the Precipice of a New Frontier

Distributed systems have been an integral part of space technology since the 1970s, expanding significantly with the rise of satellites through the 1990s and 2000s. In fact, the foundational research by Lamport on the Byzantine Generals Problem was funded by NASA. Systems in space experience the challenges of high latency, similar to Bitcoin. 

So why is sending consensus into orbit the next step for blockchain-based infrastructure? 

While Byzantine fault tolerance revolves around minimizing trust, deploying tasks on satellites takes trust-minimization to the next level. Once a compute-platform is securely deployed on a satellite it becomes tamper-resistant, secrets are essentially leak-proof, and communication with it becomes virtually jam-proof. There are other features relevant to satellites that transcend what can be currently achieved on Earth, like the ability to prove the location of a tamper-resistant computation and Sybil resistance. 

In the past year, there has been a significant increase in satellite deployments, naturally motivating exploration of orbital systems as a new class of runtime environments. SpaceComputer represents an early and influential effort in this direction, establishing a trusted execution platform whose security and operational guarantees differ fundamentally from those of earth-based TEEs.

But the ambition goes well beyond building a trusted execution platform. The goal is to create a decentralized network that powers the financial and coordination backbone of a new generation of orbit-native applications.

Taking Consensus to Orbit

The stars aligned across several chapters in Malkhi’s career that led to her involvement in SpaceComputer.

Malkhi’s advisory at SpaceComputer first took form when she connected with Yan Michalevsky in hopes to recruit him to join VRG. When he instead chose to co-found Cryptosat to build small, cost-efficient satellites for powering Web3 infrastructure, Malkhi was intrigued. 

Rewind to two years ago, Malkhi met with Daniel Bar (Co-Founder of SpaceComputer) and Yan Michalevsky. They told her they had decided to build a space blockchain as a separate project to Cryptosat. 

Malkhi said:

“If you're going to have a constellation of satellites in space and they're securely launched and they're running software and you can communicate with them and you can do all the cryptography needed on it, building consensus among them will NOT be your biggest problem. I (we) will solve that problem.”

Malkhi began working with the pioneering team at SpaceComputer to outline a preliminary design for the platform, which they published in the Blue Paper in November 2024. To combat challenges of deploying computation in orbit such as limited bandwidth, intermittent communication and high latency, a key component of the design is a two-tier architecture. The Layer 1 will be a Celestial tier serving as a ground-source of truth, and an Uncelestial Layer 2 to scale performance. 

Tying back to HotStuff, the team saw the protocol’s linearity and simplicity as crucial in celestial settings, and is actively exploring enhancements in HotStuff protocols with cutting-edge related techniques. 

Malkhi and the SpaceComputer team see three key areas where HotStuff enhancements will be useful:

1. Opportunistic parallel proposing
2. Reducing latency 
3. Network topology

Parallel proposing is important for satellites to communicate with a within-range ground station, or with each other. To parallel propose is to transmit data to be included in the next block opportunistically, without having to wait for another opportunity or rotation, which reduces latency.

“Additionally, a significant challenge the SpaceComputer team is collaboratively addressing with scientific researchers is building this system over a dynamic communication network topology without constant, all-to-all connectivity.”

Yet, with these areas where HotStuff will help tackle challenges to consensus in orbit such as limited latency and bandwidth, consensus is not the biggest barrier at SpaceComputer.

Following the same thread as Malkhi’s talk at the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC '25) in July, the real hurdle is physics. Satellites have limitations on computational power and heat dissipation, and often come with a bigger price tag.

Despite these constraints, space creates a unique environment for security properties that cannot be replicated on Earth. Once securely launched, the satellite becomes tamper-resistant. When satellites are in direct line-of-sight with secure ground stations, confidential transfers can happen with no malicious interception or jamming.

Orbital paths also unlock geolocation attestation. Because satellite paths are predictable, users can prove they’re speaking to the right node overhead. This property offers Sybil resistance that Earth-based systems struggle to provide.

When building a product founded on security, the only path to deployment is to build carefully and collaboratively, with the goal that every step is pioneering towards a new frontier.

Optimism

If there is a constant in Malkhi’s work, it is the people, from colleagues like Leslie Lamport to students like Ted Yin who became co-authors and founders. Each chapter of her work is a network effect in motion. That is why SpaceComputer’s push beyond the clouds is more than a technical bet. It is a bet on communities that build things together, to build the self-sovereign infrastructure that the rest of us will one day take for granted.

Malkhi expressed her pride to be part of the SpaceComputer team, leading the charge towards the frontier.

She described Daniel Bar as the visionary cypherpunk CEO and semiconductor veteran leading the team, and Filip Rezabek as the technical powerhouse and rising star in the trusted computing space. She highlighted Amir Yahalom’s deep and broad software expertise, who will guide the software development to the highest standards in security products.

The team is growing in various capacities and strengths, all invested in the mission: accessible public space infrastructure for the space economy.

They carry the passion and ambition to build strong foundations in a new market, and do the heavy lifting to make the mission of secure distributed satellite systems a reality. 

Getting to space is not something that is done alone. Part of SpaceComputer’s success will come from the community and partnerships built across the crypto and space industries. 

Pioneering on the frontier is both risky and exciting. As Malkhi said:

“It is a moonshot, but if you don't make it to the moon and crash on the way, you still burn bright in the sky–people remember that.”

Malkhi's career is an inspiration to distributed systems engineers and entrepreneurs alike as we continue to evolve computation systems. Whether you're a builder, a researcher, or a long-term observer, this is your invitation to join us. To be optimistic, to create systems that will still be running long after Earth’s infrastructure has failed.
The future of sovereign, trust-minimized compute starts at SpaceComputer.

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All right, so for the beginning of the session, we'll share a little bit of insight into what brought us the motivation to work in space and how the space sector currently looks like.

So what does spacefaring mean at the crypto frontier? What does space mean to different people means different things. For some people, it's just an empty void. And for other people, it's a kind of cyber sci-fi future.

I think that another way to look at it is a universal multi-civilizational canvas, like artists look at a canvas and they can create so many different things out of it.

So with a dash of entrepreneurial pragmatism, space has become more open for business than ever before.

We see not only SpaceX, we see also the rise of the space-based data centers as a major movement, whether it's Elon Musk that is interested in it, Google that announced they're entering the space, and even mainstream accelerators like Y Combinator are looking and backing companies in that domain, like StarCloud that has been doing quite good work on that, bringing the NVIDIA H100 to orbit.

And taking a quick look at the history of what happened in space is a milestone to remember. The moon landing happened quite a while ago in the late 60s, and that kind of showed the ambitious ability to get to space. It's just already something that I think gave so many generations hope of what we can build as humanity.

Afterwards, in the 80s, the first space shuttle, so essentially a crewed mission that was possible to use like airplanes but to get to space.

And then in the 90s, with the rise of consumerism in free markets, we saw the first private space enterprises and basically the ability to launch missions by private companies and no longer just by state-level actors. And then with the commercialization of satellite TVs and GPS, that kind of validated that this is not just some Cold War space race, it's something that is very relevant for so many applications that were unimaginable before.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and the Falcon 9 mission success eventually brought reusable rockets, and that meant that we could launch much bigger payload at a much greater cadence and open up for just unimaginable things until that time. And one of which is Starlink, which today is deployed and supporting so many different regions. Personally, I live rurally and it's something I use every day to build technology at the frontier.

And we see that this is becoming something that's competitive across the market, so also Chinese companies are entering the space, Europeans, etc. And now that the space stations are somewhat phasing out from being care taken by governments, private companies are also entering that sector and they're going to be built by different private companies.

And an interesting story for Jed McCaleb that started Ripple and then Stellar and did something quite good with the crypto capital and founded Vast, and they're going to build the first space tourism with Haven One hopefully launching in 2026.

Now if we think about space as a stack from the point of view of a builder, looking at the launch providers is kind of like the layer one, because without being able to get into orbit, there's not much you can do.

So layer one of space in some respects is today SpaceX with hopefully Starship getting 400x more payload volume, and Blue Origin and other players entering the space.

Then orbital infrastructure, that would be the space stations and other auxiliary stuff that are either permanently there or providing services for space native deployed constructs.

Then rideshare and satellite deployment. So when we're like an early stage startup, we don't always want to develop our own rockets or don't want to always develop our own ground station or buses, energy. So we basically have companies that deal with that too.

And we can buy these things, I wouldn't say entirely off the shelf, but it's getting more and more commoditized. And then afterwards, there's the communication network. So if Starlink is supporting residential internet on Earth, there's more and more communication offering also for inter-satellite links and otherwise competitors to Starlink in residential Earth.

Including players from other places like Guang that kind of tries to follow the footstep of Starlink. But from China, space is a rather national security sensitive aspect, topic.

And then when we're looking at the application and compute stack, now that there's much greater payload than before, we can start thinking about novel and unique applications.

And with SpaceComputer essentially, we're looking at building a public infrastructure in the very same sense that we had Bitcoin and Ethereum being built on Earth on top of the internet. You were essentially building permissionless layer for smart contract and settlement as a space native compute environment. And with that, I'll pass to Filip, my co-founder.

Hello everyone, great to be here. And again, also on my behalf, welcome. Hope you are having a great time.

From my point of end, with respect to the technical background, try to see what are some of the services actually we can offer. And what makes me very passionate about the stuff we try to build. So we definitely see that when it comes to building secure systems, there are some challenges that we are facing on Earth with respect to the limitations.

Some of the solutions provide. And we would like to ideally have the opportunity to build a SpaceComputer with some of these challenges in mind and see what can be done in a better fashion when starting a new era of frontier with respect to the space infrastructure that we foresee. One of them is definitely very prominent, which is how actually users can interact with the space infrastructure.

And for that, we definitely see a huge market with respect to operating or running your own base stations on Earth that are actually able to communicate with the systems. But of course, afterwards, once you are able to communicate, you can also unlock many types of solutions, especially in a more and more autonomous world with respect to algorithms, AI, key material that actually is being used in most of the applications that we are using on a day-to-day basis. And of course, moving forward, we are still talking about interactions with on-Earth applications.

But definitely moving forward, we are very excited that there is a huge potential for new markets that are actually focusing on building space-native applications that are actually not maybe even around yet, because just the technology is not ripe yet. But we definitely see that there is a huge potential with respect to that. So, since Daniel mentioned, there are a couple of challenges we are actually facing with respect to space itself, I want to just mention a little bit of a reflection from our state of space that we are actually experiencing.

We definitely see the future is bright with respect to the next 10 years, but what happens in between, it's something that we are struggling with on a day-to-day basis. Shout out to our R&D team that is heavily working on these types of challenges. And it's something that makes us sometimes a bit frustrated, but also very hopeful that we see that we can be part of something great with respect to enabling new types of solutions.

And this is something that we are trying to solve with respect to providing and solving some of the challenges with respect to compute communications, which are definitely many real challenges because, as Daniel was hinting at, even though there is a commercial off-the-shelf service claimed to be, it doesn't necessarily translate into building such type of solutions in the real world.

And one example, even though it's something that we are used to on Earth with respect to using TLS solutions, communicating to any website, it's not taken for granted when it comes to space native infrastructure. Around 50% of communication happening with satellites is actually unencrypted, and you can easily listen if you just deploy your own antennas on Earth.

And it's something that we actually have to walk and try to build the solutions from the beginning. So we have to actually really build the fundamental blocks so that we can crawl before we walk, and walk before you run, actually. So we are actually spending the last year on identifying some of the challenges we have to solve.

With respect to that, we divided our activities into four dedicated prongs. So, of course, Dalia will be talking about it later, is the aspect of the Celestial infrastructure, the Layer 1 solution itself, that will be heavily relying for the scalability aspects on the Celestial infrastructure. But, of course, other services that actually have to enable this type of communication is Trust Minimized Gateway, that we call Orbitport, and, of course, later on, offer solutions in the direction of security services, which is, for example, Cosmic True Random Number Generator (cTRNG) that we already are offering.

We see a huge potential for proof-of-presence solutions, key management services, and many others moving forward. So diving a bit more into the technical aspects where we currently stand, we are focusing on leveraging as much as possible from our single satellite that we currently have available. But, of course, we are launching several new satellites during next year, to which we want to have access and provide the capabilities that we are so excited about, about the aspect of the confidential compute in more detail as well.

And how users actually interact with this type of infrastructure is through the gateway we call Orbitport, that is aiming to provide and be always extended to also provide good usability to users on Earth in case they want to interact with our infrastructure in space. So what is Orbitport? You can think of it as a trustless gateway that is enabling space communication. So it, in general, aims to provide end-to-end confidentiality for users on Earth with respect to getting information from the satellites themselves, and, of course, integrity of their data as well.

And we definitely see that before we actually are able to deploy something, we need to have a way on how to communicate. And the important aspect is that Orbitport itself should be able to communicate with many types of providers that we want to integrate in the future to enable permissionless environments as well. Now when we are able to communicate, what is actually happening and enabling the new type of solutions with respect to the satellites themselves? And on that part, we are focusing on leveraging the capabilities from the physical isolation because it's, as we know, it's beyond borders, it's beyond reach, and definitely very much immune to physical tampering, which is something very interesting, especially if you look at some of the recent attacks on trusted execution environments that are actually struggling with keeping up with that, even though there are many great initiatives, it's something that we have to prepare for and build for the infrastructure in space as well.

And definitely we see that it's the ultimate tamper-proof and sensitive resistant layer that is something relevant for us. One of the components that we definitely see is for the computational resilience, the aspect of SpaceTEEs that are aiming to provide a dedicated isolation environment on the CPU and promise to ensure that your secure data and code itself is being protected as well.

This is just a brief comparison on how do we currently position the SpaceTEE itself, but stay tuned, actually we are currently in a work of our own architecture that we call SpaceFabric that aims to provide the capabilities we are used to from current TEEs, but is combining with additional hardware components to actually provide much more robust environment for running your sensitive operations itself.

And once we have the communication enabled, we are currently already offering one solution called Cosmic True Random Number Generator (cTRNG) that is enabled by the communication via orbit port to actually get your confidential data on Earth and deploy them in different settings. We also are running our random beacons that actually people can use and we are currently integrating with first partners that are able to provide this type of capabilities to users on-chain through a dedicated Oracle. So definitely happy to announce the partnership very much soon, and people can start to play around and deploy and use Cosmic Randomness rather early.

With that, basically also I want to dive into the aspects where we see current plans for SpaceComputer. So as mentioned, we are currently actively working on the paper focusing on the SpaceFabric, which is the architecture of the satellites themselves that we are aiming to provide for the next generation of confidential compute. And through that we want to also unlock some of the interesting use cases regarding key management for both on-Earth native, but also in hybrid environment for on-Earth and space environments.

Deploy a single node that actually will be running our dedicated consensus with execution clients. So we're really much looking forward to the talk of Dahlia that will be covering the aspect of consensus work that we are currently pursuing, even though it's not fully fleshed out yet. It's definitely exciting.

And start to enable new types of security services, either in the direction of proof generation using zero-knowledge proofs, scaling through L2s, and of course something that is very exciting for us, try to build and have a small constellation of satellites that are enabling to run our dedicated L1 with the confidential compute capabilities themselves. So we are a little bit bullish on this aspect that Earth is the first base for compute, but it shouldn't be the final compute frontier as we see. And there are many activities in the market that are providing us confidence that we actually will be living in a very interesting future with respect to space native applications themselves.

Thank you very much, and if you are interested, feel free to reach out. We'll be also here and looking forward to see you during the event. Thank you.

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This is the transcript for the second episode of The Frontier Podcast with Ameen Soleimani, hosted by Tom Mitchelhill and SpaceComputer CoFounder Daniel Bar.

Welcome back to the Frontier podcast, the show where we interview the pioneers pushing technology and humankind into the future and going deep on the original cypherpunk values of cryptography, digital sovereignty, and the limits of human ingenuity. I'm your host, Tom Mitchell-Hill, and today I'll be joined by my co-host, Daniel Barr, the co-founder of Space Computer. Thanks for joining me, Daniel.

Cheers. Good day. Happy to get the Frontier pod again.

And today we are speaking with Ameen Soleimani. Ameen brings with him an incredibly impressive and somewhat controversial resume in the crypto industry. Ameen is the CTO of 0xBow, which builds compliance tools for privacy protocols that work to exclude, provably dissociate, nefarious actors like terrorists, thieves, and other criminals from using crypto's privacy tech and rails.

He is the founder of the sex work platform Spankchain and the co-founder of Iran Unchained, a blockchain-based DAO that combines the principles of crypto's coordination with social policy with the goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic and empowering women in Iran. He's also the co-founder of Reflexor Finance, which offers the first ever controlled floating peg stablecoin, RAI. Ameen, welcome to the show.

We're incredibly grateful to have you on. Thanks for all of that introduction. Just a very chill, you know, non-controversial resume.

Something actually I noticed we missed from the intro there. Also the creator of MolochDAO, which underpinned quite a lot of the DAO adoption in 2019-20. Frontier of DAOs.

When I was into DAOs, there was like three of them, and now like 10,000s, you know. I did want to get stuck in on privacy a little bit more, just because privacy has, at least in like the more markets side, has kind of picked up now that Zcash has come back out of nowhere. I think everyone's now kind of questioning what that means.

I think there's a lot of new school crypto entrants that don't know what Zcash is, and I'm like, well, this has been around for a while. It's the Gen Z. It's the Gen Z cash, right? It's the Zoomer cash. They're infused by it.

They don't know what it is. I mean, what are your thoughts on Zcash and the fact that it's like really returned to the limelight really quickly? I'm happy for them. It took them a decade.

For people who don't know, Zcash was the original zero-knowledge proof deployment, first one in production in history. It was basically a minimalist fork of Bitcoin, same 21 million cap, slightly adjusted mining schedule. I think.

I'm not exactly sure on those details. But the point is, is that they have a shielded pool where you can do peer-to-peer transactions and no one can see which transactions correspond to what amounts or what balances or addresses. So I think that people slept on privacy for a long time.

I think that the government actions against Tornado Cash, where they sanctioned the protocol after North Korea deposited hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from Axie Infinity into the protocol and then arrested Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev in the Netherlands and the US, also put a chilling effect on privacy. Some privacy projects shot down over the last couple of years. And so I'm glad to see that under the current administration that privacy devs feel good about promoting their projects.

And the price action is also reflecting that people feel more comfortable talking about and using these products. They don't feel like they're going to be attacked by the government for doing so, at least right now, maybe in the US, maybe today. Now I also think that there are risks to maybe some idealism around these products.

I was also idealistic about Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash had something, I don't know, a billion dollars in TVL at some point, a lot of money in ETH. And none of us thought it was going to be a problem, and then North Korea put hundreds of millions of dollars through it.

And so I'm not – I hope that doesn't happen to Zcash, but it might. And if it does, then they will also have to ask themselves hard questions like, is it a good idea to build things that help users dissociate from the potentially known criminal deposits? Or do we want all the money to be fungible and all of the users to potentially be suspect? Now there are reasons why they don't want this kind of thing to be normalized, because then they might have to build something or they might fall under regulations that isn't accepted. But I still think that one of the weird ways that modern financial privacy is not exactly like encryption – that is a tough pill to swallow for most cypherpunks – is that I don't actually need anyone else to use encryption to get the benefits of it.

But if I'm the only one using an anonymous money protocol, then it's pretty obvious who I am. And so my privacy comes from the other people using it. And so if I'm in a – like, I – the quality of my anonymity set also matters in addition to the quantity.

I don't necessarily want to be in the anonymity set that includes, for example, the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, or the North Korean terrorists, because then as a user I am getting and giving privacy to them. And that may be something that, like, privacy users want to not think about. But those of us who have had to deal with North Korea have had to think about it, and I think it's worth thinking about proactively.

And that's what we've built our new company for, 0xBow, building privacy pools. It lets you do this – it's like one simple trick to keep terrorists out of your anonymity set. And we monitor their funds and we reject their deposits if we see their funds come from known illicit sources, and we can also retroactively reject funds.

And I think that's a good idea. I think that that allows you to not necessarily need to dox yourself to a financial institution or something in order to prove that your funds are legit, because you can in public prove that you're not – your funds are not associated with potentially illicit funds. So yeah.

I'm a big fan of privacy. I think privacy is super important. I think that the, like, Second Amendment angle is actually a great way to sell privacy to the government in America, because we can say that for the same reason that we are allowed to arm ourselves as citizens to protect ourselves – these rules came from, like, actual threats of foreign invasion, and not only that, but, like, the government also infringing on your rights in ways that are irreconcilable.

And the status quo is more or less that we're comfortable with all of our financial data being honeypots in Coinbase or in banks or financial institutions, and they pretty constantly get exposed to foreign actors, hackers, and so forth. And so it becomes a national security concern to actually protect the American people's data from the foreign actors who might want to abuse it. And there's also instances where, like, the data collection policies themselves end up being threats to users.

Like, Coinbase leaked a bunch of data, and I know someone whose parents was scammed, like socially engineered. They got called up, and the person had their Coinbase transaction history, so they thought it was a legit representative, and then they sent a bunch of money out of their account that they now can't get back. And that sucks, and that's, like, a direct result of having these data... KYC is basically a massive data... The joke was that it's called a kill your customer.

When the ledger hacks, and, like, people got, like, mugged in Europe because their, like, home address was on the ledger databases that they sold them. Back in 2019, you launched SpankChain to help provide, like, a safer financial system for sex workers that faced a somewhat reluctant, like, economic landscape back then. But, you know, you kind of really courted controversy in 2020 when you uploaded a sex tape of yourself with an adult actress.

Can you walk me through the thought process behind this and run me through, like, the response from the crypto industry and just, like, professionally that this brought about? Yeah, it was... We've had a lot of fun working on SpankChain and built a couple different products. At the time, we were building SpankPay, which is a payment platform, you know, to help clip sites and cam sites sell their tokens for crypto, kind of like a BitPay. And I was also dating a porn star for some time in 2018, 19, and decided to... When I was doing that, we made a couple tapes that she released on her OnlyFans, and they did pretty well, and I thought it would be funny to get into it myself and both somewhat normalize it as well as help promote SpankChain's products.

The reception was pretty positive in the sense that I think my audience is still just like my crypto fans who thought it was really funny that I was doing this, and that was mainly the people that I was, you know, promoting it to. So I thought, you know, it worked out. But yeah, that was that phase.

We're also building a product called SpankBatch, which was trying to be a platform for connecting porn stars together to, you know, shoot content. It didn't ultimately work out, but that was the promo. How do you look at kind of like SpankChain and SpankPay now with the rise of things like OnlyFans in terms of like, I feel like it's become a lot more normalized in terms of like financial protection of sex work online, at least.

What is that relationship between crypto and then like sex work payments look like now compared to how it did in 2019, 2020? Yeah, I think when we started out, crypto was more of a pariah and sex work was also more of a pariah in the sense that they were both excluded largely from the financial world. And so it made sense to try and use crypto to bring that to sex workers who got PayPal accounts shut down and funds seized and bank accounts shut down to promote self-custody and owning your own funds. So what's changed since then is a lot of the crypto companies have also been able to have bank accounts and become more widespread.

And sex work itself is a little bit more accepted. More online sex work, like things like OnlyFans, you know, selling content digitally. And so a lot of the generic platforms, like even crypto platforms, can now serve sex workers successfully in a way that doesn't really give SpankChain any sort of edge.

So I think it's a positive thing for the industry that crypto is able to help. And SpankChain is sort of transformed into a hedge fund that buys and sells crypto. It invests in projects, but it also has a lobbying arm.

And so we're actually active in D.C. helping promote some of the legislation that benefits sex workers by protecting their rights to having bank accounts or if they get shut down, that mandate the banks having to provide a reason for shutting down those accounts. OK, I have to say about the like both just seeing that founder journey and the early days, something that I think the good actors in crypto and I obviously consider you one of them, even if the project didn't materialize to the original vision or become like the next Facebook whatever, the stellar team that that was assembled, right, like so many of the early people that that you're collaborating with in those days went on to become awesome contributors and builders that are today working on on epic projects. And this is something that you see coming out of good teams, like whether the project succeeded or not.

There's a lot of new knowledge, new talent that ends up becoming, you know, world class, top talent that builds stuff today. So, yeah, whether it's I remember James Young, I think, was involved there. And Will Price, was he already involved in SpankChain or was it after? He was involved in early days of a couple of different projects.

So he was involved in Rai as well. Yeah, I mean, SpankChain had a lot of great team members and supporters, you know, we overengineered our first cam site. The first thing we actually did before SpankPay was build Spank.Live, which was a cam site that used an Ethereum layer two payment channel to do all of the payments, overengineered to a massive degree.

But the lead engineer on that team then became the lead engineer in Optimism. And so he's been doing fraud proofs on mainnet for like six years. That was like way before any L2s really exist, just for context.

Yeah, my my primary contribution to Ethereum scaling was to rule out state channels as a viable short term scaling solution so that the researchers could go back and focus on roll ups and L2s and other things. Process by elimination is a big one, too. We were just willing to put something in prod and there was a bunch of naked girls who were willing to dance on camera and help us test it.

That's not normal for crypto. What you were talking about before, just this idea that like crypto and sex work and, you know, a lot of other kind of like early tech back then was had a bit more of like pariah status. But particularly over the last three years, we've seen crypto in particular become very like institutional.

It's grown to be a lot more like traditional finance through ETFs, adherence to regulation, also just actual regulatory progress. So I kind of want to ask you a two part question, because a big part of this podcast is looking at like cypherpunk original values of crypto that did actually give it that pariah status that kind of pushed the boundaries a bit. So I want to ask, how do you define the term cypherpunk? And do you still see like a viable path forward for crypto to kind of revitalize some of the cypherpunk values? Or is it is it just lost? Are we is there no room for that moving forward? It's a great question.

How do I define cypherpunk? I'll start with that. So cypher means code. And punk is to me, it means being a sort of moral entrepreneur where I'm willing to bet on the acceptance of some norm in the future.

And I'm willing to stake my reputation today that this norm will actually be helpful or useful or widely adopted in the future in a way that if I don't like it doesn't, then I like a fool. And, you know, I have I'm basically willing to endure some of society's ostracization of me being a weirdo in order to promote some subculture. And like the cypherpunks are promoting the culture of code and not only code, but encryption.

And so I mean, code in the sense of like cypher, like a cypher that helps you solve a word puzzle that is the basis of all modern cryptography. So the cypherpunks believe that people should have encryption and they were seen as societal outcasts for defending that belief. And then they turned out to be right because now you have a mandate.

The government forces you to encrypt all government websites. HTTPS is everywhere. You have that little lock on your browser that shows you that the website you go to, your traffic is encrypted.

And so I think that like the I think I think we focus too much when we think about cypherpunks on the fighting the man part of being a cypherpunk. And I had a funny conversation with Virgil Griffith, who went to North Korea and then spent five years in prison because of conspiracy to violate international sanctions. And he pled guilty and did not have time and he just he's just getting out now.

And when I met with him, he's had this to say, I was like, blew my mind. I'm like, the dude's been in prison for five years. And he had this to say, he said, you know, fighting the man is not winning.

Building a better man is winning. And building a better man means building the society that protects our cypherpunk values, where people have access to encryption. And that is actually how the cypherpunk wars were won, was that the government ultimately folded and embraced the cypherpunk values to permit encryption and mandate it and all, you know, government web traffic and make it, you know, not a criminal offense to do so.

And so I think the same thing should happen today is that we should try to do better than anarchism. I think anarchism is not only nonsensical, but also like kind of demoralized. Whereas like, you can't even imagine that a society like could be good.

And so you just reject the idea of society entirely. And I think some cypherpunks have, you know, people who think that we have fallen out of grace with the cypherpunks original vision, see us not necessarily fighting the man, but becoming the man and they're afraid. And I think there's like a synthesis path here where it's like part of growing up and you realize that you should protect the values that you believe in.

And to the extent that Ethereum can do that or is doing that, I think it's a journey. We're all on like different parts of it. You know, I think there's still a strong like anarchist contingent that's like going to go down fighting the man.

And they think anything that isn't that is, you know, not worth doing. I think there's definitely a contingent that those guys would describe as sellouts, which are happy to work for the man and, you know, integrate with what you might call surveillance states or stuff like that. And I think there's still a balance where like you could imagine a ZK world that is used for evil if, you know, all of the blockchain IDs are like required to, you know, report to the central authority for everything.

But you can also imagine a ZK ID world where the ZK part is used to protect individuals and their rights. And, you know, voting is properly anonymous and verifiable and financial transactions are also protected. And these things are good.

And so, like, I don't know, I want to see the optimistic side of being a cypherpunk, too. I think maybe maybe a part of what you're saying about understanding that it's building a better man rather than being like anti-establishment pure resembles in a way that there's this saying that if you weren't a hippie communist in your when you were 16 or 20, then you didn't do your thing as well. If you weren't a capitalist in your 40s, you didn't do it well.

So it kind of I would think the equivalent is, yeah, many of us have a little bit of this Freudian anti-establishment cypherpunk interpretation. But then you're right that if all what it amounts to is being destroyed, the man, it's kind of like what today we see with the socialists or like defund the government or like let's destroy the Western civilization, like let the US fall down, et cetera, rather than like understanding that the cypherpunks in some more deep sense, it's more about free speech and empowerment of individual freedom. But it comes with it comes with like accountability.

It doesn't come with anarchy. Right. Like free speech is a great example of this, because like I would say something like free speech is something that is aligned with cypherpunk values.

You know, the right to not be subject to illegal search procedure, the Fourth Amendment, also something aligned with cypherpunk values. It is by leaning on and supporting these laws that we like that we can build societies that protect cypherpunk values. We don't need to tear everything down.

And America is to some extent an embodiment of some of these cypherpunk values, you know, in many other ways. It's not. We have we have some of them going for us.

And so we shouldn't just throw them all out when we, you know, try to fight the man. Now, it does come back a lot to this idea of synthesizing the two. You can't.

You see a lot of frustration, particularly among younger people with like, oh, we'll just throw it all out. It's like there's a lot of stuff that was worked very hard on to get us to this level. And it's not all perfect, but there's plenty worth conserving, if you will.

I am curious as to how you because like as a CTO of 0xBow, you know, you're coming up with a solution to like help bar bad actors from using privacy tech. But how do you conceptualize the like, yeah, that that dichotomy that you had before of like the if you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy like junk argument on one side of like, well, we think we can reasonably assume the privacy is is like everyone requires and would like a certain level of privacy. No one wants to be surveilled.

But then on the other hand, it's like building tools that like just kind of not arbitrarily, but just really over index for pure anonymity are clearly just going to be a logical endpoint for bad actors to wash money through. And so like how do you balance those two in your you mentioned that it was a really difficult question. So I'm probably opening up a very big can of worms.

There's there's like the pragmatic answer and the philosophical answer. Right. There's the pragmatic answer is like, well, we're a U.S. based company, so we follow U.S. based laws, you know, are the people that we don't include or anyone downstream of the OFAC list of illicit addresses, anyone that could be reasonably like we saw a deposit from Novatex, for example, the largest Iranian exchange.

And we rejected it. I don't know if those are my compatriots or my enemies, but we can't tell them apart. And so we have to reject it when we find money from like Coinbase or other reputable exchanges.

We accept it comes from like named accounts or just on chain activity that looks human. You know, someone is buying stuff, selling stuff. We'll accept it.

And if it comes from potentially other privacy tools that aren't up to our standards or no KYC cross-chain exchanges that are less reputable, then we might look harder at it or just reject it. So I think maybe like what I pick between the lines and tell me if I understand. Obviously, there's like pragmatics sometimes make things not optimal.

But if KYC and the approach of the TradFi world to to inclusion is assuming that everyone is guilty until proven wrong. So so like maybe the approach that you're thinking with 0xBow is more like assuming everyone is all right, unless like you can. Yeah, I should have been more clear.

We don't do KYC. We only do KYT, which is Know Your Transaction. We are able to do this because, one, we're not a money services business.

We don't take custody of the user's money. We can't freeze the money or move it around in any way. But also, you know, KYC is not good enough.

If you like professional criminals have identity mules that they'll bring in. And I don't really care what ID you show me if I see that the money came from an illicit source, you know. And so we're mostly around just tracing the funds and seeing where they came from.

And so we would love to, you know, the assumption is that, yeah, everybody is legit, but there's a waiting period. And so when you deposit, you pay a vetting fee. We that the funds that are coming and we do have to vet each deposit independently because like you could deposit could be legit and then later you get money from a hack and then you deposit and, you know, we have to look at the money, see this new money.

Where did this come from? So that's why there's a bit of a delay. We usually get everything within 24 hours and only in some cases is it longer. So most of it's automated and some of it gets flagged.

And then those are the ones we do manual review on. So, yeah, you don't want to OFAC around and find out kind of thing. No, we are our company basically exists to try and tackle this problem, which is to try and keep the bad guys out of privacy tools and this privacy pools.

So that was the pragmatic answer. What was the what was your philosophical answer? Sure.

Yeah, the philosophical answer is like, you know, civilization is a garden and gardens need gardeners and walls and, you know, you are free to not use our privacy pool. We are making a judgment. The judgment is trying to reflect the aggregate interests of, you know, the users.

Even if, you know, I was trying to build an anonymity set, myself personally and the government didn't mandate that I had to exclude the, for example, Iranian mullahs, I choose to exclude the Iranian mullahs, then it's obvious that I'm the one excluding the Iranian mullahs when I withdraw. So I have to essentially horse trade with other people. I'm like, hello, you would like to exclude Hamas.

I would like to exclude the Iranian mullahs. Let's do a trade. And so then we build the set of people that most people want to willingly dissociate from that also leaves them the largest possible anonymity set.

And maybe those people disagree with this and they make their own thing, but then they either choose to include the other people because they don't care about getting and giving privacy for them. They'd happily infiltrate their, you know, financial anonymity set, or maybe they don't want them in. Either way, anybody can use the technology, right? It's all open source.

And, you know, the other answer here is like, if you really hate privacy pools, you can still use tornado cash, which MolochDAO gave all the grants to and me and my friends built and, you know, trying to get keep the friends out of jail for it and all of that. And Oxbow also did, if you feel like using tornado cash, but you have so are so inclined to not extend the anonymity set of the North Korean hackers and other DeFi hackers, we have conveniently prepared a list for you of all of them and you can, you know, dissociate from their transactions. And I think that's called tornado.oxbow.io. And we have our conveniently, yeah, that's the system.

Our digital sleuths went and traced all the tornado deposits and made a list so that you can. So yeah, I think philosophically, that's just my point. It's like the people hate on privacy pools because they say the existence of someone who is picking, you know, who is in or out means that it is a bad system, you know, intrinsically.

And I think that is not the case. In theorem, you would be free to personally choose who is in or out of your set and you could do it that way. But computational limits, you know, for individuals mean that we're all best off using some service and, you know, any service has some tradeoffs.

And so you're just going to end up with whatever most people don't want to associate with is going to be the, you know, thing that has the largest anonymity set. And maybe it takes some time for other, you know, protocols to attract illicit funds that then make people think harder about this problem. But we've had to since tornado cash.

Yeah. Like assuming ultimate freedom is just kind of like a naive thing. It's like name one human structure where no one's picking or choosing what's coming in that works well over time.

It's like there has to be some like absorbing barrier at some point to just say, OK, sorry. I tried to do a really difficult thing, especially for people in our industry. I tried to empathize with the regulator.

I tried to imagine I was like, OK, if it was my job, like say I'm like the future CFO of Iran or something and like the terrorists are, you know, using tornado cash to pop off my homies and pay assassination bounties. Like, would I allow this? Would I allow Iranians to, you know, use this protocol in the name of protecting their privacy and their freedom while I see that money coming out of there as being in it? And it's like probably not. It's probably not a great idea.

Would I do it if they were willing to say, hey, look, I'm not the terrorist who you have identified? Maybe, you know, in that case, I might be a little bit more friendly. I'm like, oh, OK, thank you. At least you're helping me do my job, which is hunt down, you know, the bad guys.

And so something like privacy pools, that's what it does, isolates the illicit and, you know, legit funds. And so it helps the regulators essentially do their job. And that's how we're framing it.

And I hope that, you know, Zcash never has to do that. But I anticipate that they might. While we're there, talk to me about Iran Unchained.

It's no small thing to have your mission statement be overthrowing the Islamic Republic. What inspired you to take this on and how does the Iran Unchained kind of project coordinate for this? Sure. So 2022, September, Massa Amini was murdered by the morality police in Iran for not wearing a proper hijab.

This sparked the Woman Life Freedom movement, had a lot of influencers and women cutting their hair in support of this. And generally, it was a movement opposed to the Islamic Republic of the mullahs ruling Iran. The youth, they're very anti-Islamic.

It's the least Muslim it's ever been in like a thousand years. And yet the government is extremely repressive. And this flared up after Massa Amini.

And that's really what sparked me to lean more into my Iranian culture, heritage, history, and try to figure out ways to use whatever skills, experience to help. Iran Unchained, we started, it's a DAO on Ethereum using a Moloch V3 framework. But it's basically a fundraising to support Iranians, activists for various things.

So for VPNs, Internet connectivity, there's certain exemptions under OFAC that you are allowed to send money even though Iran is sanctioned and they are supporting Internet freedom, humanitarian aid, so like food, medicine. We sent a bunch of food to areas like next to where people were on strike, not necessarily sending it to the people on strike, but, you know, trying to be clever and also pro-democracy. So we supported newspapers.

And the reason we had to support these things, we decided to do this is because like Web2 platforms like GoFundMe were getting taken down, even though they were advertising that they were operating under the specific OFAC exemptions. And it's because, you know, some bank compliance officer doesn't want to deal with it. And so they're like, this is not worth it for us to host, you know, that this could go wrong.

And so me and my friends, we just read the rules. It doesn't say you can't raise money in crypto. You set up a nonprofit, you can send up to half a million dollars a year.

And so we started doing that, sent about half a million dollars over the last, I don't know, two and a half years or so to support that, sent OFAC a letter every quarter about where the money goes and been able to support a couple of different projects as well through that. There's a satellite TV station and, you know, things like that. So that was the core of Iran Unchained, through Iran Unchained.

I also met a bunch of other Iranian activists and we did some other fun things. So one of the fun things we did was that me and one of my activist friends, we went to Kiyv for ETH Kiyv last year. We went, Vitalik was there.

It was cool. Everybody in Kiyv loves Vitalik because, you know, he was all like Slava Ukraine on day one, day two of the war. They were stopping and taking pictures with him and stuff.

It was pretty cute. And we went there and we met one of the Ukrainian dev teams called Raramo. They built this thing called Freedom Tool and it was a way for them to troll the Russian government and to hold a parallel election.

They got like some tens of thousands of people to vote in it. Some opposition leader endorsed it and it uses like ZK proofs on top of passports. And so you can generate an anonymous proof on top of your passport that your passport is legit and then you can vote anonymously using that registration token that you get.

And so they were able to like troll the Russian elections. We saw it and we were like, this is amazing. Also, the Islamic Republic is having their election in like 10 days.

So why don't we just fork the whole thing? And it turned out that the Iranian passports worked out of the box. It's some combination of like hashes and signatures that need to be correct. And so we were able to like build a voting system that works with Iranian passports and then, you know, troll the Islamic Republic elections.

We just stayed in Kiyv for a week to build this. And, you know, only maybe a couple of hundred Iranians actually used it because everybody was terrified of uploading their passports. And, you know, what is what is this? Your knowledge? What are you doing with my data? I'm like, it never leaves your phone.

Why are you collecting? You know, you're like trying to explain stuff to people. But it did help us get in with a bunch more of the Iranian Internet nerds and other of the activists. And now I'm able to potentially promote these tools to a larger audience.

I've been going to the rallies of the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who's the son of the former Shah, who was the leader up until 1979 when he was kicked out. And I think he's the most popular person in Iran, actually just straight up the most popular person in Iran, but also the most popular to lead the revolution to sort of referendum where Iranians can self-determine their system of government. After the Islamic Republic.

And I think that, you know, I hope that for a future referendum, it's using some proper ZKID system and voting system and not some paper ballot. You know, in my lifetime, I would love to live in a society that actually implements some of this this cool technology that we've been building. I think maybe just one one comment on Iran in general, I think anyone that works in tech, you'd meet many people that are educated in Tehran or wherever and emigrated and working on epic, epic projects.

So the talent is insane. And it's just like I wish that there would be, you know, this market would be connected by a free market and a free society. And, yeah, there would be basically no limitation of oppressive regimes.

And I think it's a lot of all the efforts that you're doing and smaller, big efforts is it's really it's sad. You know, I feel like Iranians have a lot to offer the world. And unfortunately, like I joke about this, but it's like Iranians wish for an Iran where the primary export is not jihad.

It's like all we want to export other things, you know. But we're stuck with the jihad. So we unfortunately have to get the jihadis out.

It's, you know, in theory, and we love this like network state movement. And I've read the like network state book. Have you read the network state book, Tom? I actually have not.

I attended the network state conference. I've actually come around a lot more to network state kind of ideals now. It's taken me a while, but I've loomed back through.

I started off being skeptical and I've kind of course corrected. I went deeper because I would argue that the source material for the network state is actually a Jewish state by Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It's a great playbook.

And I encourage and encouraging Iranians to read it and learn from it. The guy, this was written in like 1897. And you imagine this dude, it's like pre-Holocaust everything.

He's just like, bros, we have been wandering for 2000 years. We should stop wandering. You know, we will pick a homeland.

It will be between Argentina and Palestine. It's literally in the book. Argentina is fertile ground.

Like, maybe we should go there. And then everyone's like, no, no, we need to go to Israel, set up our ancestral homeland. And so they do that.

And the playbook is to set up two organizations. And one is called, it's a nonprofit. And that's called the Zionist Organization.

The other one's a for profit. And that's called the Jewish Colonial Trust. And so the nonprofit does the like census, figures out who are the Jews, where are the Jews, how many of them are there.

Do they want to go back? Will they go back? Will they be in wave one, two, three, you know. And does all of the like code of conduct and like voting and electing and committees and constitutional drafting and that kind of thing. And then the for profit, the Jewish Colonial Trust is like a bank.

Right. And so they IPO this bank. Jews want to build a country.

First thing they do, they sell shares in a bank. And it works and they raise money and they start financing land purchases and basically implementing the will of the Zionist Organization. And there was sort of like a tacit understanding that the directors of the Jewish Colonial Trust would be selected from the committee leaders of the Zionist Organization.

And so this way there were some checks and balances. And the for profit was explicitly not supposed to do things that were just like randomly for profit and not aligned with the interests of the Jewish people. And that's why the checks and balances were important.

I think that Iranians have a lot to learn from Jews in terms of coordination and in setting up these structures. And blockchains can help be the like digital substrate for helping, you know, build some of these structures. So I'm looking forward to.

The way you describe it does sound a lot like a crypto project where you have some kind of foundation. Then you have the token entity that does all of the fundraising and it's very like tech bro Balaji vibe. So I'm not surprised that you made this interpretation that way.

Yeah. And the goal of the network state was buy land. Right.

And it's like, hmm, who has successfully executed this playbook? Let me read what they had to write about it, you know, not like the tech bro way. But I think that the network state stuff is cool. It's a bit of a LARP.

Right. But the tools are actually incredible. And legit useful like anonymous voting tools, DAOs, like treasuries on chain that are like unruggable by individuals like this is great, great stuff, you know, and being willing to experiment and be on the frontier, dare I say, of these things is, you know, great for pushing them forward.

And I think that they will find their way into the communities that need them the most. And so that's what we're trying to do. OK.

Yeah. Me and Balaji in the kibbutz just hanging out. That's right.

I went for one day in the network school of Forest City just out of Singapore there. I was also very skeptical or I don't know, like it's too like tech bro nonsense LARP as they say. And I have to say that when when I was there, yes, it definitely there is a LARPy component, which is quite, quite substantial.

But I think that sometimes, you know, in the spirit of fake it till you make it, then there is genuine like hope and intention. And even if just a fraction of good people come in and do stuff, so it's still very inspiring to see. And I'm actually hoping to spend some time there next year.

Yeah, I'm a fan of it, if I wasn't clear. Like, I'm happy that it opened the door for me to learn even more about successful implementations of it. And, you know, I want to apply it.

Right. Like we have a different kind of goal here. Like for Iranians, we're like, oh, we know the land we want.

There just happens to be other people running it. So we have a slightly different, you know, set of strains on our problem. This is the this is the first time I've heard of like Zionism, that's like a tech project.

So this is this is a great frame. Right. The second page of the book, he's like basically technological capitalism is like has created all of the wealth.

I'm sorry, bros, but like getting more people to like push oxen carts is like not the future. Machines are the way that all wealth is going to be created. The disproportionate amount of wealth will be created in 20th century.

And we should learn to, you know, integrate that directly into our culture. And I was like, Dan, this dude is like tech tech bro, capitalist day one. It's like labor stuff in there, too, though.

Like this is before a lot of the socialist experiments were sort of proven wrong. And so he's like, we will have four day labor weeks and, you know, all the way the way trying to appealing to everybody. Certain things.

I'll do communal farm work. That's right. There's a lot of there's a lot of that in it, too.

Yeah, I do want to ask. So I think Daniel shared with me that you've that you've been misunderstood before as an anti-Semite in crypto. Could you run me through this? Yeah.

Yeah, sure. If I could see myself today, like having seen how everything played out, I would have taken this a lot less seriously at the time. Because what basically happened is that I got into a spat with Glenwell, who's kind of like your, you know, self-hating Jew commie.

And I at the time I was making fun of I was like, you're really proud of how Jewish you are. You know, he has a little three parentheses. And then he was like, I mean, this is hate speech, blah, blah, blah.

And I was not in a great state of mind. I was visiting Japan. I'd seen a friend I hadn't seen in 10 years.

So I am very intoxicated and stimulated, stumbling home at three in the morning. And I looked down at my phone and I see people accusing me of hate speech. And I'm like, this is going to be hilarious.

So all the people who think I hate Jews, you're right. I do. You know, send tweet.

And then I was like, also, I hate Muslims and Christians. Right. Nobody ever brought that part up.

I don't know why. But this was this was a very sensitive time. This was 2019.

This was before, like, BLM and a lot of that stuff. So people were very sensitive to imagined slights. And so I ended up getting canceled by a bunch of people for saying I hate Jews as a joke.

Who probably today hate Jews, not as a joke, because those are the same people that were doing the canceling five years ago. And now they're all like free Palestine and anti-Zionists and all that. So, yeah, it was it was a bit unnerving.

I mean, I was supposed to open for Joe at DEF CON in Japan that my speaking slot got canceled. You know, a bunch of people were mad at me. And I agree.

Like, it wasn't the right thing to do. Right. It's not like I support this type of trolling.

It normalizes even fake hate speech was a good idea. And like it made my friends have to stand up for me and like they didn't I didn't need them to. You know, everybody who knew me at ConsenSys, Joe Lubin is my boss, you know, Joe Lubin.

Right. And he had to, like, hold it all because, like, Amin is making a joke. Guys, please relax.

I remember. I remember. Yeah.

And like that was, you know, the unfortunate part of that. And, yeah, I mean, if I knew now, I would just be like, man, that's a bunch of stuff. This is silly reactions because I kind of wanted to see what would happen.

Right. I was trying to see how many people would take the opportunity to jump on me for something that I thought it was obviously a joke. But there was a lot of people who saw the opportunity to willingly misinterpret, you know, what I was saying and capitalize on it.

So I think, you know, I learned something that day. But, you know, yeah, it was I was misunderstood. But I think today I would be more likely to get canceled for saying I'm a Zionist.

Right. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I think when you're more than 10K follower account, basically anything that you say, there's haters and there's a fan, you know, I don't know.

I'm I realized on October 8th that I, you know, had probably also bought into the anti-Israel propaganda too much. You know, I always questioned before that I was like, you know, grew up pretty liberal and the same way that I got over a lot of the Trump propaganda that I, you know, 2016, I thought he was a racist, misogynistic, sexist piece of shit. Twenty twenty four.

I voted for him. Right. So I think had a similar thing where like after October 7th or something, when I saw it, I was like, this this this is pretty typical.

Right. This is what I would expect. It's a Palestinian Hamas and friends carrying out some terror attack on people who are trying to live their lives.

The gate went down for a couple hours. This is what you expect. Right.

October 8th is what radicalized me. Seeing people cheer all over the world in Sydney, they're saying that's the Jews in England. They're on the streets cheering and all the Arab countries are giving out chocolates on the streets.

That's when you come around to realizing how lonely it must be to be Jewish. Especially when things like that happen. And you might be trying to live your life in such a way that maybe you're like, oh, I'm not pro Israel.

I don't care. You know, and the people who you think that you're like, you know, friends with, they're like, oh, yeah, you're one of the good ones. But then that happens.

And then you're like, oh, shit. They mean me, too. These guys actually are, you know, against Jews generally and are using anti-Zionism as like a way to hide it.

It's not like Germany, they lost World War Two or something. People were like, Germany as a country doesn't exist anymore. Circling back, looping back in, if you will, to use some LinkedIn core language.

Crypto, like I think from the outside perspective, people think of it as the typical like hyper libertarian. They see Bitcoin as and that's kind of like their primary interaction with crypto. It's like the libertarian destroy all banks.

Fuck everyone. Don't tread on me kind of shtick. But often within the Ethereum community in particular, I feel like there's a much stronger vein of like left wing politics.

I mean, how do you kind of like approach the like left wing? Like what are your thoughts on like the left wing socialist push in the Ethereum community or other areas of crypto? So crypto left wing, yeah, Bitcoin has largely been like guns and steak. Right. So it's not as much of a left wing aligned movement as Ethereum has been.

Ethereum definitely leaned on egalitarian values, trying to help the little guy, you know, things like that. Bank the unbanked. And I think I and to be clear, that's also part of what made it attractive for me.

And I think I've also been egalitarian and.

I think I still am egalitarian in a lot of ways. I think that I see some dangers of applying this equality lens in places that it doesn't belong. I've seen that in terms of policy on the left, and then there's a sort of crypto part of it.

And we were just talking about how crypto has gotten pretty politicized. Vitalik, I think, sets the culture in Ethereum largely and at the EF more directly. And I think what happened, for example, after Trump got elected is that Vitalik was standing up for his friends that he saw were demoralized by the right winning and who were sad about this and decided to speak out and say, like, make communism great again.

And that's kind of what I was trolled by when I decided to beef with him and stand up and make I read it as a joke, wasn't it? So I don't think it was actually a joke. It's the type of thing that Vitalik does because he doesn't want to actually take a stance on something. And so he was, like, referring to his post-degen communism that he made on April Fool's in which the only thing that's, like, really a joke is the title.

But if you read the content, it, like, reflects probably a bunch of ideas that Vitalik actually agrees with. And yeah, I think that as crypto becomes more powerful and our politics ends up mattering more. And so, like, for example, Hayden was being attacked by the SEC, right, during Biden's term.

And he still was against Trump and didn't support Trump. And then afterwards was still, like, hesitant to say thank you for all of the lawsuits getting absolved. And it shows that, like, how, you know, crypto's political leaning left, especially Ethereum's leaning left, can hurt us.

And then, you know, we're not even necessarily, like, grateful to the people who helped us or the political party that helped us in ways that we should be. And I thought that it was counterproductive, especially while Roman still had his trial to be, you know, mocking the US government and Trump instead of trying to work with them potentially to, you know, free Roman and set up better rules for privacy devs and things like that. So I was really impressed with the Bitcoiners for getting Ross free.

And I think that that's something that Ethereum people didn't think that Trump would even keep up his word to do. And I think that they were surprised that he did. And I think that, you know, I remember thinking of that as, like, a litmus test.

I'm like, well, if he does do that, then we have to acknowledge that, you know, he did keep his word on at least one thing. So yeah, I think that the hard part about situations like this is that Ethereum people like to claim that we're neutral. And, you know, opposing Trump is somehow neutral or, you know, supporting other countries is somehow neutral.

And I think it's better to just not pretend that we're neutral and do things, you know, and align with the parties that aren't trying to attack us. Vitalik did mention that thing where Ethereum is credibly neutral, but I am not, which I think, like, you see that he's quite careful about. He would be very vocal about being a pro-Ukraine, but he would actually keep out of most of the things, at least directly, whether it's conflict avoidance or just being strategically aligned with different constituents.

Hard to tell, but I think the network or the technology as credibly neutral does play an important role on judgment. I think that is an admirable concept. I think that it stops being neutral once, you know, okay, let me give you an example.

Vitalik, when Vitalik said make communism great again, even outwardly appearing as a joke, you know, people who are building on Ethereum got calls from, like, customers, you know, countries, representatives of countries that were like, are you telling me that we are now supporting this communist thing? We do not want to be supporting this communist thing, right? And so, like, as much as we might want to say that, like, who's holding all of the ETH, right? That matters in determining whether I want them to be richer or not. You know, Vitalik leads the EF. The EF pays all of the core devs.

The core devs implement the roadmap. So how, you know, neutral is Ethereum really if Vitalik is not? It felt like people were using neutrality as something to hide behind when they didn't want to take that side. And so, you know, they'd be like, we support this side.

And then when a different thing would come up, they'd be like, but we're neutral on this other thing. And so it's like, you know, I get that. Ethereum has to serve a large and diverse, you know, populace with conflicting goals.

And so it has to be, you know, willing to put on a lot of different faces to serve the whole market. So, you know. Yeah, I guess it's good that we have some commies, you know, so that, like, the commies also stay here and keep building open source code.

Sure. And like, what's the, what's your rate on like the, cause we're just talking about it, but the kind of like Church of Vitalik kind of phenomenon, like, you know, some people, again, we can get stuck into almost like a semantics discussion of like, well, it depends on the frame or the layer that we're using. But it's like, a lot of people do see the kind of like founder led status of Ethereum as being like a benefit compared to like the completely a non like Bitcoin, like, okay, well, there's no immediate direction from any one person in particular.

You know, do you think that Ethereum should be like less Church of Vitalik? Or do you think it should be, not necessarily that you have to choose like it as a binary option of like, well, it has to be Vitalik, but it has to be more like thought decentralized. But what do you think that Ethereum should look more like? I don't know. It's above my pay grid.

You know, I'm, I got annoyed by the Church of Vitalik because, you know, it got in my way of trolling communists. And so I decided to bash it for a while. I'm generally, you know, I'm incredibly grateful for all the contributions that Vitalik has made.

I spent like a decade dick riding this man. You know, I think that he was very wise to invest in like zero knowledge technologies. You know, he has had an incredibly difficult job stewarding this community, trying to, you know, like, I don't think he's ever had like a real job outside of Bitcoin magazine.

You know, he just like became a billionaire after a couple of years of working on Ethereum as the more or less de facto leader. And I hope that we all can step up in ways that lead him to not be as needed. But unfortunately, so far, that doesn't look like it's been the case.

The sort of network effects of his contributions led him to become even more integral in some ways. And even when he's backed off, you know, it's really hard for us to replace him. I think Evan Van Ness had an interesting like medium post about like the influencer space in Ethereum.

And it's very highly concentrated around Vitalik and his followers. He's just like the loudest person versus like other blockchain ecosystems might not have, it might have multiple different, you know, KOLs or influencers that are pretty visible. I don't know why that is, you know, Vitalik is just so cool.

And, you know, we all benefit from him being so cool, but it also means that we are very much exposed to his whims and he gets a lot of things right. He doesn't always get things right. To the extent that the church is helpful, it's good for people to be inspired and motivated.

To the extent that it's not is that we shouldn't have blind faith. He also gets things wrong and he also would benefit from people challenging him. And I think that we should, you know, challenge him more in ways that are constructive and try to grow up out of needing the church of Vitalik so that, you know, we level up and then we decide, you know, what Ethereum is and what it does, so.

One of the things that I find in the DAO ecosystem, I remember people used to say leaderless and things like this. I actually find that DAOs that don't have leaders end up just the tragedy of the common loot on the treasury and DAOs that have leader full, everyone steps up to be a leader that cares about, you know, cleaning, making sure that things are tidy. These succeed.

And I think in the concept of Ethereum, historically Vitalik and the close entourage around him, it was a lot more dynamic. You used to see that he works on interesting projects and people come in and sometimes move on and sometimes stay. I think over time it became that the close trusted entourage became complacent because probably they became too wealthy over time and are no longer as motivated to do this novel groundbreaking experimental thing and are kind of like capitalizing on hogging the power of having Vitalik's ear.

And I think also like, frankly, probably got a little bit tired from changing and always curating the people around him. And to that extent that personally, it looks to me like some people are really well-meaning, but there are quite a few elements that are a bit just like too jaded and happy with having this position of power, so to speak, rather than seeing what is the real benefit for the greater good. Obviously easier to criticize rather than being in the arena, but that's at least how it seems like from the outside to me.

Well, that's a pretty reasonable tag. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's hard for him to learn how to navigate all of these social dynamics.

He has to play these games and see how they end up and then adjust accordingly. He's done pretty well keeping everybody together for a pretty long time. Happy to see new people get included.

I hope that, I guess I expect him to go the same way politically or that we kind of have maybe where we start out more left-leaning when we're 20, we have a heart. If we're not a Democrat when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a Republican by you're 40, you have no brain or something.

But yeah, it's like, he's just like so powerful within our space, memetically, philosophically, spiritually, technologically that a lot of times instead of being leaderful and like stepping up, we just complain to him, try to get him to do the thing that we want. Mixed results. Usually it's better to step up yourself and figure it out and then complain.

It doesn't work, but yeah. I think it might be pretty good for like in terms of time. Is there anything you're burning that you wanted to get off your chest? No, just thank you so much for having me.

Check out privacypools.com. Pause it. Dude. Hell yeah.

Fantastic, man. This is awesome. It was great.

Cheers. Have a great day, guys. Hell yeah.

Awesome. Catch you guys. All right.

Cheers. Thanks a lot.

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