What's going on with Canto?

Zak Cole, a core contributor to Canto, joins Bankless to answer: "What's good with Canto?" ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow ------ JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:30 Canto Brings It 9:40 What is Canto? 12:40 Nationalizing Apps 16:00 CSR and Market Forces 20:10 Funding Open Source 22:45 Infrastructure 26:00 Native Apps 29:55 The Stablecoin 33:40 The History of Canto 37:30 Launching on Cosmos 42:10 Botched Ads 44:25 Friction Points 48:00 Founder Culture 54:00 RIP Anon 58:00 Community 1:01:30 Future of Canto 1:03:30 Get Involved 1:04:30 Chatting ------ Resources: Zak on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xzak Canto: https://canto.io/ Variant Blog Post: https://variant.fund/articles/canto-a-layer-1-incentive-experiment/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to talk about Canto today. Specifically, what is going on with Canto? David, this is a Layer 1 chain, I know that. I know it's been up about 500% in price over the last 30 days. I know crypto Twitter is talking about it, angry about it, yelling about it. I'm not really sure, but I don't know precisely what it is. What are we going to unpack today? Why is Canto important?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, Canto is a brand new Layer 1 blockchain on the scene, which has caused a bunch of hype, as you mentioned, because the price has done a 500% in 30 days, which is insane even in crypto standards. How did that come to be?

• 0:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Especially because it's a bear market.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Especially because it's a bear market, right?

• 0:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  And so, how did the... What has... What stars have aligned to allow for a 500% price appreciation in the Canto L1 asset? Where did the Canto community come from? What's so unique about Canto that is generating this amount of excitement and hubbub? Is it just a bunch of traders rotating? What's real about Canto? What is perhaps just a trade? There's a bunch of conversations to have here. Canto is experimenting with what's called CSR, which I believe is called Contract Secured Revenue. We will ask Zach about that and make sure I got that acronym right. And this all kind of started when Variant put out a blog post detailing their philosophy behind Canto and why they think it is exciting.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Canto is not the first L1 blockchain to experiment with CSR. I believe Near and others have worked on this as well. But Canto and the way that it was designed and the way that it was bootstrapped has captured the attention in ways that other Layer 1 blockchains have not. So we are bringing on Zach Cole, who is a Canto core contributor. So say that three times fast, Canto core contributor.

• 1:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  CCC.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  CCC. And while this is Zach's first appearance on Bankless, I've actually done three podcasts with Zach way back in my POV crypto days. So longtime Bankless listeners might remember some very old episodes I did with Zach very long time ago. Funny guy, been around in the Ethereum ecosystem for a very long time. And that's also another conversation I like to have. A lot of Canto developers are Ethereum community members, but they have now turned their attention to Canto. So why has Canto captured their attention? So many questions to ask. I hope we can get all of these answers today on the show.

• 2:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Including what to call these guys, Cantonians, Cantonites. There's some working ideas that I have, but I want to hear what Zach has to say about that. And guys, before we get in, I want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at MetaMask Learn. So not just MetaMask the Wallet, there's actually a way you can level up on crypto by going through courses, going through lessons on MetaMask Learn. So David, what have I got on screen? What are we looking at here?

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• 3:35Speaker 01

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• 3:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is way better than the university course where you might be taking, where you have to pay in order to take their courses. Crypto, as we say so often, pays you to learn about crypto. All right. And this is a fun, engaging, interactive way to do it. So check that out in the show notes. All right, David, got to ask you, we've barely spent any time together since like last Thursday. I'm hearing like your voice. So you've been out all the way in Israel and you've been at Starkware. I want to get the full download about that when we record the roll up later in the week. But what's up with your voice, man? You doing okay? Was he like over speaking? What's going on?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of lost my voice. Actually come back the day before yesterday.

• 4:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is better.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  My days are better now. There was the last day while I was at Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv. Friday afternoon, hopped on a plane, landed in Tel Aviv Saturday morning, went straight over to the hacker house to see what they were hacking on. Attended the conference, did nine interviews, which is perhaps why you can tell like my voice was spent.

• 4:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's hoarse?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. The, the, the last day of the conference, I was like, literally like in my brain was breaking with I was like pushing air out of my lungs. And there was just nothing coming out, man. It was just a good ah. And so it's starting to, it's starting to come back. But it's, it's partly because I did nine goddamn interviews over at Starkware Sessions. Those are currently being put through the pod squad, uh, which our podcast stream at team at Bankless, the, the, the podcast mill. And those are coming out on the RSS feed. I'm also writing an article, which is almost done coming out on Thursday, which is what I learned over at the Starkware Sessions. So a bunch of Starkware content coming your way, uh, but, but that is why my voice is spent. You know, put, put my voice on the line for the Bankless Nation.

• 5:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, uh, David's sacrificing his, his voice in order to give, bring you, uh, content. And, uh, we only have like three more podcasts to record this week, David. So, uh, light workload for the rest of the week. All right, guys, we'll be right back with this episode, talking all about Canto, what it is, what's going on with Zach Cole. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our friends over at Kraken. They are our recommended exchange for 2023. Fantastic. Proof of reserves. Go check them out.

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• 8:39Speaker 01

  Bankless Nation, we are back doing our show with Canto. This is Zach Cole. I want to introduce you to Zach Cole is a protocol engineer, co-founder and CTO of Slingshot, which is a decentralized exchange, but also, more relevantly, a core contributor to Canto and new Layer 1 on the scene dominating headlines lately in no small part to its crazy price performance of its native asset. And so we are going to dive into all things Canto with the guidance of Zach Cole. Zach, welcome to Bankless.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Hey, hey, hey. What's up? Thank you for having me on. It's your boy Zach Cole coming in July from Nashville, Tennessee. Beautiful day. How y'all doing?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely fantastic. Has been one of the better guest intros I think we've ever seen on Bankless.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  What's up, what's up?

• 9:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, is this the kind of the Canto energy? Are you guys always like this?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  I mean, we bring it, you know, we've been known to bring it.

• 9:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so the name, all right, we're talking about Cantonites. What else? Cantaloupes? I think maybe someone on YouTube chat said-

• 9:39Speaker 03

  People refer to it as that, yeah.

• 9:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What does the Canto tribe call itself?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I don't know. I think Cantaloupes is pretty cool. Cantonites is good, too. It sounds a little Old Testament, but yeah, I think, I think, I think that's a good one, too. I don't know. I mean, I guess it's whatever people choose to identify as, you know?

• 9:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we ask, can I ask what this Canto thing is at the highest level? So I feel like, you know, people are talking about Canto mostly because of price lately. And so people are like, well, Canto is coming on Bankless. Must be a top signal. I can't say that you're wrong. I don't know. Have no idea. But also, Canto is doing something pretty, pretty unique. It's sort of a unique experiment. And it was a unique experiment even before the last 30 days of sort of a 500% increase in price explosion. So how would you explain this? I know Zach, you're a longtime member of the Ethereum community. So explain it to the average Bankless listener. What is Canto?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Canto is kind of like a novel L1 where we kind of like experiment as a network with different economic primitives. The primary one being CSR, which is contract secured revenue, and that's kind of like a fee sharing mechanism. So things like this haven't really existed in the way that we present them. And what we do essentially is like similar to 1559 where all of the fees for a block are burned and sent to the zero address. What we're doing is taking 20% of those fees that would otherwise be burned, and we're distributing them to the people that launch or deploy those contracts on the network. So that kind of provides a subsidy essentially

• 11:25Speaker 03

  for developers and incentivizes people to kind of build without having to be concerned so much about how are we going to generate revenue? How are we going to monetize? What are we going to do? Because I think a big problem with people that build is that they're passionate about building. We like to build stuff, put things out there. I like to do that with my friends. But it's not always entirely clear, like, how are we going to support ourselves? How am I going to keep the lights on? How am I going to pay rent? What am I going to do? Like, I build this cool stuff, I'm not really getting paid to do it. Like, what am I going to do? So this network kind of allows you to just like focus on your passion, build what you want to build, and we provide a subsidy. So if you build a like, if you deploy a contract and you build a product that a lot of people use,

• 12:07Speaker 03

  you're going to be rewarded. That's baked into the core protocol of Canto. And I think that's kind of like what we're going for primarily. Granted, this is an experiment, completely experimental. Like, you know, here today, gone tomorrow. It could go to zero, it could go to a billion. I have no idea. We're one tweet away, yeah, from either.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  As we always say on Bankless, crypto is risky, you could lose what you put in. Multiply that by 10 and apply that to Canto, guys, as you're listening to this. But let me ask you about this experiment in a little bit more detail. So Zach, so this is a layer one. So this is not a layer two, right? I believe it uses some of the Cosmos, the Tendermint stack, I should say, for a kind of consensus. But it is, EVM is a smart contract chain, is that right?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's EVM functionality on top of the Cosmos SDK that was used to like build the underlying protocol itself. We chose that because, well, first of all, Canto is like a fork of Evmos, and then we built on top of that. Evmos uses the Cosmos SDK and implements EVM functionality. The reason we did all of that is because the Cosmos SDK is pretty easy to kind of just define your blockchain, not have to worry about building all that stuff necessarily, and then just get it going. And then, of course, we have EVM functionality because I'm an EVM maxi myself, so.

• 13:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so a full EVM capability then, and that's, that's pretty conducive to the builder community that you're hoping to attract. Now, the big point of difference, aside from sort of, you know, people recognize, you know, Evmos and, you know, other Cosmos chains that have EVM support, like that's sort of been done before. But what Canto is doing is this kind of unique public goods funding mechanism, right? And so whenever we've in the past described even like things like gas fees, for example, or EIP 1559, these sorts of things, our mental model for it, and when I say ours, I mean banklesses, basically like it's kind of a tax

• 14:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  to pay for public goods. And the public good that Ethereum provides is settlement assurances. And so all of this, this public good goes into like national defense, the defense fund for the chain, right? And so that is the only public good that Ethereum provides, right? It's just chain defense, maximum security, all of the transaction fees, all of the, the burning goes into the value of ETH, and ultimately that ends up increasing the economic value of the chain and the cost to attack the chain. So it all goes into the military and security budget. What you're saying is with Canto, that's part of it because you're obviously

• 14:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  compensating validators, right? So you have a military budget, but then you also have a budget for bridges and schools and hospitals. And of course, I'm not talking about these things literally, I'm talking about other chain infrastructure types of things. And I believe the chain infrastructure from what I've, I see in cryptos, like a DEX.

• 15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what? What else?

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Lending market.

• 15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so a decentralized exchange and a lending market. And what you're saying is the the protocol fees that Canto generates goes towards the taxes, go towards funding these applications. And so like, these are private applications almost on the Ethereum network. But for Canto, they're kind of like government provided. They're like part of the public good and recipients of the taxes. And that's the unique flavor of the model, I think. What I'm curious about-

• 15:56Speaker 03

  You sure you don't know anything about Canto?

• 15:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I just, it just seems like, look, it just seems like a logical thing that you'd go try to do. What I'm curious about, if that if that articulation was like in the in the ballpark. How? So here's the problem with doing that with Ethereum is how do you determine which projects to distribute the tax revenue to and the public goods? And by how much? Yeah, and how much? How does Canto solve that problem?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a really good question. So anybody that takes part in that network, anybody that deploys an application is contributing to the overall growth of the network. So they receive a portion of that subsidy and 20% of what would be burned using an EIP 1559 type of pattern, right? So 20% of the burn fee or the base fee goes to the person that has deployed that contract. So we're not really deciding. It's more like the market is deciding. If you have an application that's getting a lot of traction and seeing a lot of traffic, then you are going to receive a portion of that base fee. So you get 20% of what would be burnt otherwise.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  So one critique of CSR, which again, like I said in the intro, CSR is a model that Canto is applying, not creating. But we have talked about CSR as an industry in many different respects. And like I said, other other blockchains are also working on this. I believe for a moment in time Ethereum was also interested in this. But the one of the reasons why this the CSR model has been critiqued is that when you take 20% of the gas fees for a specific contract and give that to the contract- Devs, you add in a new game theory and that is about with well now a contract dev isn't actually incentivized to make the best contract possible.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  They're actually incentivized to make perhaps an overly complicated, overly inefficient contract because then they get a higher subsidy. What's Canto's philosophy on this?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I totally agree with you. It seems like that at face value, but would you use an overly complicated and overly expensive contract yourself, David?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Well, only if it's the only game in town. I don't really have a choice.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Okay, but as soon as somebody else deploys something that does it more efficiently, you're going to start using that one, right?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay. So you're relying on just market competition to produce efficiencies?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So if you don't do something well, the person that does it better is going to come along and they're going to eat your lunch. So you should be the best you can be. You should deploy the best contracts you can because that's going to ensure that you have a place at the table for as long as possible. Till someone comes along and does it better.

• 18:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it because you're saving gas fees in a more efficient smart contract or is it you just better use?

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Users are going to default to whatever provides the better user experience, whatever is cheaper, whatever is the, you know, more convenient to use. And that's true in any market. You can look at like complicated smart contracts on Ethereum. Like most people are going to do things that are like cheaper. They're going to do things that are more efficient. They're going to use things that provide a better experience for them. And that's just, that's just how it works, you know?

• 19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Canto has this pool of public goods, but it doesn't select the winners. It more, it more kind of like creates a mechanism for this, this pool of money to be distributed. And the market forces are the ones that are selecting the winners. So it's almost like the government protocol of Canto creates like this bidding process and this healthy game of competition. They're like, we've got this pot of money and all of the, the private smart contract developers are the ones competing for that pot of money. But, but really it's kind of market forces and that it's users that are determining the outcomes of which, which smart contracts end up winning.

• 19:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that correct?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when we talk about the market, like the market, it's not like this ominous like figure that we can't really understand. The market are people like me, there are people like you, there are participants within the network. They're all of those, uh, those users. Everybody that takes part within this community has a say in what is going to succeed and what is going to fail. And, uh, the projects that they deem worthy of success are going to be the ones that, uh, that, uh, do better than the others. I mean, that's just

• 20:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so just getting in the details, Zach, of how the funds are distributed. So is it based on how much, I guess, um, like, I don't know if the right word is compute, but, but how much of the EVM resources or how much block space every smart contract is using? And if you're using more block space, then you get partitioned to more of the, uh, the subsidy for this?

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, essentially. That, that makes sense. Yeah. And you would receive 20% of that.

• 20:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And David, you, you call this thing CSR?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I'm, I'm a little wary of like, you know, crypto loves its acronym, uh, acronyms. And so here's another one, CSR. But all that means, all CSR is, is just what we, we just described. It's, it's kind of that public goods funding to almost like the application layer of the ecosystem. Is that what we mean by CSR?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, and it was one of the acronyms that we could definitely have picked a better one for, a better name for. And, and this philosophy, it has been embedded in crypto. I, I'd say pretty damn close to its very, very coarse roots about like, how do we provide a business model to open source? That's really like, goes to the heart of crypto, like open source, how do we fund it? How do we fund open source developers? Uh, and, um, optimism has their retroactive public goods funding. They initially had some sort of philosophy about, that was highly synonymous with CSR, which is why, actually how the show came to be, is I tweeted out, oh, CS, uh, Canto is just doing the optimism thing. Um, and then Zach was like, actually, wait, there's nuances, uh, yes and no. Uh, and then boom,

• 21:48Speaker 01

  this is how we have a show today. Uh, but, but Zach, I want to ask, like, um, like, like I mentioned, excuse me, uh, other layer ones also have CSR in them. I, I, like I said, I think, I think NEAR has, has this and other trains have also experimented with this. Uh, how would you say Canto CSR is different in any particular way? What's unique about it?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  I think it's just the simplicity, like the amount of base fee that your contract consumes, you receive a dividend from that. Most of the other ones have like retroactive type methodologies. They're like a little bit different. Not like, I don't know. I don't know how much different they are. I haven't partake, I haven't really taken part in the near ecosystem enough to like be able to say that. All I know is like, what we're doing is different because we're, we're sharing 20% of the block base fee.

• 22:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's nice about this is there's no like subjective human governance of like, let's all vote to see who receives the 20% pot.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Based on.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is in real time. Like you can, you're like, as it's being burnt, that's going toward this, into a pot that you can then claim, and that's just for tax purposes, but it's essentially streamed.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  So one question I have, Zach, and just to really just plant this, plant this in the ground. This is the thing about Canto. It's CSR. It's not like CSR. And another thing, it's like CSR is kind of the, the big flagship of the Canto chain.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so, for now. I mean, of course, like, everyone's gonna be like, our community is great and we have a lot of fun. But like, from a technical perspective, like, that's like, that's what we have right now. And that's what we're experimenting with.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  When I, when I read the, the Variant blog post, they, they talked about nationalizing infrastructure. And then there was like a DEX that is, maybe enshrined is not the right word, but perhaps it also is. Can you talk about this angle? Like, what is, what are these things that are like enshrined into, into Canto?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's the lending market and it's the DEX. And by providing these protocols as primitives that are like baked into the protocol itself as opposed to application layer, we can kind of like have like what would be equivalent of like a post office, right? Or a fire department, or what you need for like a community to function, like in its bare, like its bare essence, right? So with Ethereum, with Bitcoin, with a lot of that other stuff, all you're providing is, like you said, security. Whereas we're providing some additional things that are more economically focused and financially aligned. So whereas like. Ethereum, you know, it's pretty much just security. Uh, we're also making sure that, you know, trying to make sure that people get fed. And I'm not saying that Ethereum doesn't do that.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Like I am an Ethereum, I helped build Ethereum like, but right now, we can't really experiment in the same way that we could like five years ago. Uh, just because Ethereum has become an institution. So how are we going to test these economic primitives in a way that actually makes sense and drives like good valuable data? Uh, we can't really do that on Ethereum anymore. It's, it's changed. It's like, we're a big myth. It's an institution.

• 24:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you tried to do that on Ethereum, uh, honestly, Zach, I'd, I'd say we try to drive you out. Honestly, it's too big to run these sorts of experiments. Like that, we, we can't just say, yeah, let's experimentally take a hu- like a huge portion of, uh, gas transaction fees and distribute it somewhere like that. That doesn't work at the scale we're in. We, we want to leave Ethereum more credibly neutral. So you're running this nationalization experiment here. Is there, there, there has been talk about nationalizing other things uh, across the like chains, different chains, like even in Ethereum. Um, I know Justin Drake has, has brought up the idea of like having an oracle that is enshrined in the, in the, in the chain. Are there other things that Canto might add, like some sort of, um, price oracle?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Um, so a price oracle would be really, really useful, but designing a price oracle in an efficient way that can actually be kind of baked into a protocol means that we need something that's kind of tried and tested. And there are just like a lot of different versions of a price oracle. Um, one thing that, uh, like, so when you ask like, what kind of things are going to be baked into the protocol? As like, we create this like infrastructure, like think about the things that you need in a, in a city. Right? You're building like this city. Uh, you need a bank, you need a lending market. What else do we do? Uh, well, uh, NFT trading is pretty good. So maybe we'll include an NFT market, you know? Uh, all of these like basic goods that people like to have within a protocol. We should figure out how we can subsidize all of them.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Um, so I'm not saying that we're going to build an NFT market into it or like an oracle. Like, uh, for example, those are things that are really great and that we should build. And I have different plans myself as to what I would like to build into the protocol. But I'm also just a participant in this community. I'm not really like anyone special. Anybody can do what I'm doing. So I'm not like dictating the roadmap of Canto. I'm just like a guy who likes to build stuff, you know?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  How the team formed and how that, I definitely want to get into that conversation, but first I want to still tie off this like nationalization of contracts. What, so like, just to reiterate, there's a DEX, there is an on-chain lending market, and there's a stablecoin, and those are the three main bits of nationalized infrastructure. What does that mean for that at a technical level? Like, so how are those systems treated differently than applications on top of Canto? And are there plans for those, the number of like nationalized bits of infrastructure to grow? Like, what would be the fourth or fifth thing?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they're not necessarily treated different. It's just like their use is contingent on the Canto token itself. They don't really, the governance is dictated through Canto itself. So it kind of like accrues all of that value to Canto and the community, rather than like these rent-seeking or value-extractive governance tokens, right? Like, for every single protocol, if it's something that's actually needed on like a network-wide level, let's just build it into the protocol so that value accrues to Canto and to that token, to the base token, as opposed to like some sort of governance token that's pretty rent-seeking, right? It's trying to extract additional value from its user base. And that kind of fragments liquidity.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  It also like, kind of breaks up like users into these kind of like sub-tribes essentially, like, "Oh, I'm a Uniswap guy, that's how I identify when I engage with this, with the, with the network and like on-chain," or "I'm a Compound guy," or whatever. It doesn't matter, like, we're all Canto folks right now.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  So this is like if Ethereum had its Uniswap and its Aave and its Maker DAO and its Dye stablecoin as like official core Ethereum applications and said like, "This is, this is what we use." And the idea is that all of the fees generated by these various protocols, the fees generated by Uniswap, the fees generated by Maker, the fees generated by Aave, actually would actually go to Ether rather than the Aave token, the MKR token, the Uni token.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. So think about all of that value that has accrued within each one of those protocols individually, as well as Ethereum itself. Like, that's a massive amount of value. If you look at CoinGaco, you look at the top 100, it's safe to say that 98% of that is built on Ethereum, right? So who should be rewarded for that? I think that everyone within that community should be rewarded, just because we're all participants, we've all made it what it is now.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  And so the, just to put myself into the, like, the mind philosophy of a, of a, the Canto blockchain, the Canto chain, it's just like, okay, we are going to make the most used, most primitive applications, and we're going to claim this for the Canto Layer 1, and let the rest of the whatever gets built on Canto to be up to the free market. And so, like, there's like a capitalism versus socialism versus communism conversation here, where like, the Canto blockchain is like the, the authority over the land, and they're saying, hey, the free market is, is free, except for, we make the stablecoin, the, you know, the government makes the stablecoin, the government makes the, the lending market,

• 30:08Speaker 01

  the government makes the, the money market, and, but the rest is up to the free market. And so, you know, putting this into, into Ethereum words, Ethereum is like, free market, absolutely everywhere, there's literally nothing that's enshrined in Ethereum, everything is the free market. And Canto is like, hmm, three applications that are public utilities provided by the government for the government. Would you say this is a fair articulation?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I suppose so, although I'm not like a huge political type guy, so I'm not like, really, like, I'm an engineer, so I'm not gonna have like any hot spicy takes in regard to that, but what you said, you said it with confidence, and it sounds right.

• 30:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that, that's the key, Zach, is as long as you say it with, with confidence, it's, it's, it's definitely the right answer. But, so, um, this is the, the idea of like chain nationalism, which is sort of

• 30:58Speaker 01

  It's like chain central planning.

• 31:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like But only a little bit. Only three things. Three things are centrally planned. Canto is like Sweden or something like this. We're gonna like have more public goods. But it's also, in some ways, it's not.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Take care of the people that take care of us. Everybody's building on top of a network. I think that they should receive some sort of subsidy for that participation.

• 31:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but in some ways, it's also not like so what you just said is kind of David, this conversation of socialism versus capitalism too. There are strong elements of the free market. So even though there is public goods funding, Canto also distributes this in a way that lets sort of the free market decide, right? It's as if like there's a whole bunch of contractors bidding for the government's pot of money. Yeah. It's almost like if you think of like, well, I know this is congealed and we have a military industrial contact, you know, industry in the US, but you could imagine a more like free market in the US where you would outsource and contract a whole bunch of private companies to do your defense.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not actually the government doing all of the work. It's kind of these private companies that are getting better and fulfilling the obligations of the government. That's what we're doing here. One question, Zach, though, about the stablecoin. So is this like, you said it was like DAI almost. DAI is of course can be backed by ETH, but also some other collateral assets. Is it like that? Or is the stablecoin, is it all backed by the Canto coin?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's over collateralized. So it like enters circulation when users borrow it from the lending market.

• 32:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's not like a Terra Luna type setup, is it?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 32:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because that was like I hope no one ever says yes to that question. That was like That was interesting, right? One thing about Terra Luna is they did nationalize the stablecoin, didn't they?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Well, they needed to control its value, so they had to.

• 33:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and then it kind of like there was an element of nationalizing the Elgo stablecoin and making the value of the base chain and you know, U S T and Luna kind of interlocked. That's not what that's not what Canto is doing, though. It's a different.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  The whole reason that Terra went like that whole thing collapsed is because it wasn't it wasn't over collateralized. It was they were trying to do something that would be kind of under collateralized, right? And people are taking taking advantage of that system and kind of abusing it because the governance wasn't actually decentralized, right?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  So if it's if we're working on an over collateralized system and we don't have access to any of those assets, like no one individual has actual access to those assets, then there's no real threat of it being under collateralized. We didn't and Canto launched without any V C backing. There was like no like the initial distribution was like really, really fair. There were over 40 people that helped launch Canto. I was one of those people. I just contributed and we received like a small amount for like compensation for our participation, but it wasn't crazy. It was it was and and that's it. That's all there's going to be for the rest of the history of the chain. And there's no real like force that has more control over this asset than anyone else.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Anybody can come in and market buy and do whatever they want to do. Or they could take part in any of the C S R like initiatives and they can earn Canto that way. But there's no foundation. There aren't any V C's. There's no like private interest here.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that brings us to the question about how Canto got bootstrapped. So Zach, if you can just walk us back through history and and give us the rundown about how Canto went from zero to one. And I think also embedded into this question will be open up the conversation about why Canto is on Cosmos rather than being an Ethereum layer two. So but let's let's we'll end there and let's start with like, how did how did Cosmos or excuse me, how did Canto get started? And how did it get bootstrapped?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. So, uh, like to take it way, way, way back, uh, I was working on ETH2. I mean, you remember when I was working, uh, at Whiteblock? And we're doing a lot of ETH2 research and development and I was like sitting at a bar with the guy that I was working with at the time. And we're kind of like, you know, bitching about like, oh, this is kind of inefficient. This is what, this is a, they should do this, they should do that, this is blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, rather than like bitching about it, let's kind of like draw out our own diagram of what we think Ethereum would look like at scale. And we came up with this sort of protocol-based, um, uh, system, uh, that essentially looks a lot like what kind of Polygon and Avalanche are doing with their subnets. And is what also kind of what Ethereum looks like with a lot of L2s.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  But this was back in 2017 or 18 and, uh, we called it Canto. And I came up with the name Canto because, uh, Canto is like a small subset of a larger poem. I thought that was pretty and, uh, that's, uh, that's what we came up with. Um, we started building it and, you know, a lot of other stuff came about because I was working on Whiteblock and all this other crap. But that was my idea for how we would scale Ethereum. By the time I got back around to revisiting Canto, uh, people were already launching L2s. All this stuff was already coming out. So the idea that we had in 2018 was no longer applicable to help scale Ethereum because Ethereum was already scaling. It was scaling technologically. I think that we can say we, we did it, right?

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Like we can say ETH2 shipped, like the vision that we set off with a few years ago is kind of come to fruition. So what's the next thing that we need to scale? And when I was here in Nashville, I was, uh, I started working with Scott Lewis. And, uh, yeah, he came up with a lot of these ideas for like, uh, economic mechanisms and financial mechanisms. And it made a lot of sense to me. I was like, all right, so it seems like we can't really like, there's not really much need to scale things technically now. But there's a lot of need to scale things from an economic perspective. And what he presented and thought about made a whole lot of, like a whole lot of sense to me. So that's kind of what we focused on and we just used the name Canto because I have the domain name still.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Oh my god, that's hilarious. Okay, so that was the inception moment, but how did Canto go from the brainchild of you and Scott and a few others to an actual like community to what it has now, the community has been generated?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we were just, you know, we like to talk about all of these problems and what the solutions are. I mean, I think we're kind of solutions architects really and like put together a team of like really great people like Plex, which is about eight people. They like did a lot of the building on the initial protocol for Canto and we kind of like had a lull and a lot of like other work we were doing. So it was like, all right, well, let's do something like fun as a side project and like, let's see what happens. And one thing led to another and it just like picked up more steam and now we have like people participating in Canto community, the people that launched it, like we have Johnny Ray, Joseph DeLong, Preston Van Loon. Those are a lot of the people that I brought

• 38:10Speaker 03

  in, who are a lot of OG kind of protocol developers that helped ship ETH2 as well. And, and yeah, now we're just going to see, see where it goes. I mean, we do have like kind of a roadmap, like, you know, but it's not really like up to me to decide. So I'm just a participant within a larger collaborative ecosystem. But, uh, yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  So with this like, oh, there's, it seems to be like, there's a bunch of ungovernance vibes about Canto. That's kind of like the main point. And so I think that's why you're saying like, I don't have any control over the roadmap. It is what it is.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And I think that's why Canto chose Cosmos, because in kind of in the same way that DYDX moved from StarkX onto Cosmos.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Uh, the whole sort of permissionless network building doesn't really, isn't ready on the Ethereum land because there's additional complexities.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So like, the thing is, is like, the reason we chose Cosmos, I think, is because Cosmos was available and it worked. Um, I would have loved, I don't think anybody would have thought twice about launching an L2 on Ethereum had. Uh, like if there existed an SDK similar to what Cosmos has that allows me to quickly and efficiently launch an L2. So I'm sure there are people out there thinking about this problem and thinking about the solutions to that problem. And if there are, please reach out to me because I'd like to talk to you. Uh, I think that that's something that the Ethereum ecosystem desperately needs in order to scale. So, um, but I think that we're on the way and we're really figuring all that stuff out. And that's why projects

• 39:40Speaker 03

  like Arbitrum and Optimism are so important for us as a community. Um, because then that will allow us to experiment in a way that doesn't have an effect or, uh, kind of like, uh, I guess just doesn't have an effect on the L1 on ETH. Like I said, we can't really experiment on it on ETH L1. We can't do it. So the reason that we launched on Cosmos was because that provided us with the tools we needed to quickly build something out without, without having to think about it too much, uh, to kind of like provide ourselves with the playground we need for these financial experiments.

• 40:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Zach, I mean, there could be in the future, you guys maybe move to, uh, an L2 or something like that, or change up the architectures, possibility?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Potentially. I mean, nothing's out of the question.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Is, is that possible? How would governance, uh, move an, a Cosmos app chain to an Ethereum, what would be a layer three, I believe? How, is that even technically feasible?

• 40:32Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm, I, it, it is feasible. I have no idea exactly how it would work, but it's some, it's, that's a problem that I would love to come up with a solution for.

• 40:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, uh, so Zach, Da- David mentioned this term ungovernance, but I'm actually not sure that there is, that is ungovernance. I think there's elements of it that are ungovernance, but I'm seeing here like, um, like, uh, there is a particip- way to participate in government, governance. And this looks like a Cosmos app chain. People are familiar with it, kind of govern- governance mechanisms, which is sort of token weighted voting. Is that what's in play here? Is that, it's not really ungovernance. It's like DAO style token weighted governance. Is that right?

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So there is. I mean, you can participate in governance as a token holder. Anybody can, and they are welcome to come in and vote on different initiatives because it's a community. I think that. Rather than what we're trying to stress as much as possible is decentralization. There is no one entity that's in control. I am but a participant in a much broader community. Everybody else who wants to participate within this community is welcome to do so. You just need to like, you just need some tokens and there's plenty of ways to do it. And there are plenty of ways to do it in a way that doesn't require you to like buy it. Like you can participate in this community by building stuff and that allows you to like participate. That allows you to be a participant essentially.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  But presumably like I, I think of like Bitcoins governance layers as more ungovernance, right? I mean, or squishy governance, Ethereum as well. Yeah, whoever's loud, it's kind of like this layer one social thing, squishy governance. But with Canto, it's more similar to like a Uniswap or it's more similar to Cosmos app chain in that it is token weighted voting or Tezos basically. And so somebody with the majority of all of the tokens can actually push the decisions in one direction or another. And I guess if the community, this is what Tezos has always argued, the community doesn't like it, they can fork off. But there is this token weighted governance that's in play.

• 42:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so you could accrue power in this network by just getting a lot of tokens delegated to you or, or buying them yourself.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, if it's a liquid market and you can afford it, but then why would you want a disproportionate amount of something? That's going to kind of ruin the game for everyone else.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Zach, there's a bunch of questions that I have. I want to ask about the details of the yield farming bootstrapping mechanism. I want to talk about the, the culture around Canto. There's a very, very specific, sometimes kind of

• 43:00Speaker 01

  grungy perhaps meme culture around the Cosmo, uh, Canto founders and a few other topics as well. But first we have to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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• 44:53David Hoffman?

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• 45:38David Hoffman?

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• 46:21David Hoffman?

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• 46:31David Hoffman?

  LOL. Okay, Ryan, you want to take it away?

• 46:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, David, welcome back, man. It seems a little rusty there.

• 46:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so we all just went and got drinks. So you see the behind the scenes, we took a quick break. We are back with Zach. We're talking about Canto, the Y of Canto. And as you probably heard, I was saying to David during break that where I'd like to start, Zach, is with the elephant in the room. I still feel like there is some economic disalignment between what I would say is the Ethereum community, which I know you're a part of, I know Scott Luce is a part of, and many others are a part of, and the rest of the Ethereum community. And I'm wondering if this represents a friction point? If you think like the Ethereum community just needs to get over it, or like what your take is here, but let me sort of throw the take from maybe an ETH maxi

• 47:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  type of position. This is not a position that I hold. I'm just taking a straw man approach.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  I'm not familiar with this.

• 47:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't know these people? You haven't met them on Twitter?

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Let's see, bring it.

• 47:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know a single ETH maxi. Okay, so the position is this. Basically, a lot of L1s have screwed us over. And like, just go through the like, the history of like pump and dumps, of exit scams, either the fast exit or the slow exit, or like downright frauds. I'm like, whatever Do Kwon was doing, like that was pretty messed up, wasn't it? I know that this isn't VC raised, but right, like there are a lot of people that will get wealthy as a result of Canto price go up. I mean, that's undeniable. When you go up 500% in a month, we all know how crypto works. And so the question is, with this economic disalignment from the rest of the Ethereum community,

• 48:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, why is it necessary to produce kind of a net new token on this? And do you think that this will further drive a wedge and drive tribalism between the Canto community and the Ethereum community? And are we already seeing evidence of this? We also know, I mean, you remember 2022, even if it's not the intent of the founders, oftentimes it is, but even if it's not the intent of the founders, communities that rally around token price end up getting very loud and tribal and

• 48:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  they go on attack campaigns as well. And this can be like, almost like a token populism that is unleashed. We've seen this with many communities in the past. Whenever you have big token price runups, it's like there's this corrosive corrupting force of price appreciation. So I'm wondering what you see in that. Is this going to cause an increasing fracture between the Canto community, who's just saying, hey, we're just running this experiment. We love Ethereum, we're just running this experiment. And the rest of the Ethereum community who's just like, well, you're not, you're not helping our ETH bags. And you're pumping your token and you get in fights on Twitter and then it escalates. And then, you know, there's tribalism and like. I call it layer one psychosis. There you go.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 49:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, what's your interpretation of all of this?

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I would hope that it doesn't create a wedge between the ETH community, which I identify as being a part of, and Canto community, which I also obviously identify as being a part of. I think that the work that we do on blockchain in general should present a net positive to everybody within the blockchain community, right? Because any of the experiments that we run can be easily applied to Ethereum, should it work, or any L2 model, or any other blockchain that launches in the future. Like, we're all building off the back of giants. So I would hope that our experiments would just become standards.

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So are you just basically, is your posture, "I'm just gonna ignore the noise and keep building"?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Uh, that's mine. That's what I do. I mean, I've been doing this, I've been in blockchain since 2012. I've been full-time on Ethereum since 2015, and that's always been my stance. And I feel like I've always produced pretty good products for the space. So I don't see, I'm 35 years old, man, I'm like, not gonna change my tune anytime soon.

• 50:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  35 is super old in crypto, too, isn't it?

• 50:56Speaker 03

  I know. This is like, I've been doing this since like, I got out of college. Like, I can't imagine like, doing anything differently. And I'm sure a lot of people think I'm just a complete psychopath, but like, you know, this is what I love to do, and I'm gonna keep doing it with people that enjoy doing it with me. And that's kind of my place in life.

• 51:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what would you say to those who are like, "Take the skeptical approach"? And are like, you know, all that aside, right? So you're gonna keep building, but like, is this just a pump type of project? Are people doing this in order to just get rich on their bags? Would you just say like, "Yeah, and shouldn't they"? I mean, we're protocol devs working real hard. I think we should get wealthy from this type of thing. Or like, what would be your response to the cynic who's just like... Anyone launches a layer one is to get real quick.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  No, I don't think so. I think my response would be you should be cynical and you should be, you should question everything around you and you should also especially question the people who kind of put themselves in positions as like founders or kind of being figureheads within a community. Those are the people that we should, those are the people that should fall under the greatest scrutiny. So I welcome any type of like critique, just because I think that's what we need in order to kind of self-regulate. That's, so I guess my answer is like, yeah, good, good for you. Keep doing that. Keep asking those questions, like the tough questions. Like those are what's necessary. And as far as like getting rich quick, I don't subscribe

• 52:34Speaker 03

  to those beliefs because I identify as a crypto anarchist. I believe in taking care of the people around me and taking care of my community and doing, just being a good person to the people that I love. And those are the people that support me and the people that are around me in my community. So.

• 52:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the Canto founders aren't going to become like, you know, layer one demagogues and archetypes that we've seen so many times in the past?

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Well, there are no Canto. I mean, there are, I guess there are Canto founders, but there's like 50 of them, like 100 of them, right? So like, I think that's a large enough population that we can say that there aren't really any founders. Like anybody that wants to participate in the early days is essentially, I mean, and this is kind of what happened with Ethereum too. Like there were like, how many Ethereum founders are there? There's like a jillion. Texture is an Ethereum founder?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  There's eight and seven, seven of them are sub, sub.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's, there's eight, there's eight founders, but that's like what consensus has dictated to be eight founders after like six years or something like that. At the beginning, there were literally like 40 founders.

• 53:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a lot of claimants for the title, that's for sure.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Anybody that was in the orbit of the launch is a founder. You see what I'm saying?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  But this is, this is also in some sort of, in sort of way like decentralization theater in a way, and this is just human. described titles, there are people who started this thing. And when the idea was incepted by like you and Scott, and I'm assuming at least a few others. It's kind of where it started. And now there's also the details of, okay, that's the idea was incepted in a few central people. Does the code actually reflect that? And I think my, uh, well, I don't know how to interpret code. I'm going to guess that the actual way that the Kanto blockchain was incepted on a technical level is perhaps more decentralized than the way that the ideas were incepted in the brains of like you and Scott. And I don't think we've totally parsed out those details. How, how did the blockchain start?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Like, how did blocks start propagating? And how did Kanto tokens start proliferating?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we had, there was like a genesis block. Within that genesis block, it was distributed to, between everybody that contributed. And that includes like a lot of people. That's like Preston Van Loon, Johnny Ray, Joseph DeLong, myself. There were at least, there were at least 30 other people, like KB from Plex. Now, well, he's from Headwater. Then there's the Plex team, which is about five or six different people. Robin Whitney, uh, there's like a lot of people. There is like, I can't even list all of them. And I'm sorry if I forgot anybody. I love all of you. I'm just like, these are, these are not, uh, things that I really prepared for necessarily. But, uh, yeah. And then, uh, it was just a general genesis ceremony with all of the initial validators.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  And, uh, that was like a population of like 30 to 40.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  So this actually starts to feel more or less like a DAO of sorts. This is like a DAO that's starting a chain with also no, um, walls up about who can join that DAO.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  I consider what, I consider it more of like a collective as opposed to like a DAO strictly, just because DAO carries certain connotations with it and certain like, you know, stipulations. But I consider it more of like a loose space kind of collective.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Okay, understood. Zach, I'll take your point that calling people founders might not be right. I'll take that point, especially when it's incepted at the technical level of the chain. At the same time, I want to take the inverse perspective, the opposite perspective, and say that, okay, people that really kickstart this whole movement do set in the culture of what is going to be created around this blockchain, the culture, the memes, the vibes, and that makes them maybe not capital F founders, but when you're instilling the vibes, you have an outsized role.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And one concern I have, I'm going to put on my ETH maxi hat here. I've been doing my Canto Curious hat all throughout this podcast. I'm going to put on my ETH maxi hat. I'm going to pull up and I'm going to ask Ryan, sorry?

• 56:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you ready for David's ETH maxi hat? I thought you'd never take that off, David.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  No, people assume I have it on all the time, but I don't actually.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  I think I would consider myself an ETH maxi if I'm not an ETH maxi.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And so I'm going to pull up a tweet that I'm going to charge you with, Zach, a Zach cold tweet. And Ryan's going to put it up on the screen here, and this is an Oregon Trail meme, Canto-Phornia Trail. And this is when, like, I think Canto, the Canto price like skyrocketed from like 40 cents to like 60 cents. And the meme here is, "You have died of shorting." The reference here being like, "You've died of dissentry." And this is you tweeting this and you're just saying, "Rip Anon." And something that I've kept in my brain is that I don't enjoy founders who tweet about price. I consider that inappropriate, as in, "You've created a decentralized system that is supposed to be an internet native protocol. Don't talk about the price of your asset." I think that that imbues certain negative cultures.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  And I don't think you are the only person doing this. I actually see this by a number of people who have started the Canto movement.

• 57:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask before Zach answers that, David? So I just want to make sure that you're applying the rule fairly. So would you say that to like the Layer 2 founders too? Or like all the DeFi app founders with the token as well? Like, don't talk about the price of uni. Don't talk about the price of Maddox.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  I genuinely would apply that. Yes. Founder, founders of all things, I think it's inappropriate for them to promote the price of their asset.

• 58:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you're not cutting out specifically a layer one?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I guess that's right. I guess that's right. Yeah.

• 58:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, alright.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  No, but, but I understand what you're saying and it makes sense. I don't, I think that like, it's less about like, talking about the price of an asset necessarily. And more about kind of being like pompous or like, uh, having too much pride, I suppose. Maybe that's a thing. I don't know. That's the way that I would interpret it. Um, but I don't really think that tweet is necessarily about price. I use the term, the, the term shorting is in that, but that's because a lot of us are traders. And when I think of like shorting, I think of like, kind of like making a bet against a community. And if you make a bet against my community, you're likely going to lose because I'm a winner and my friends are winners. We're all winners.

• 58:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the catch.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I think that's actually a fair response. It's like when you short something, you're actually shorting against what you believe in. So.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  There you go. And I believe what I believe and I'm proud of what I believe and I'm proud of my friends. I'm proud of you guys. Like, look, man, David, I've known you for like, forever. Look at you now. You got like a fancy ass camera, dude.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  My biggest claim to fame is my fancy camera.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Came up, dude. We came up. We, we got older. We became more professional. We understand what we're doing now. And like, if you're going to make, make a bet against me, that's probably a bad thing for you to do. Just as a, just as a rule of thumb, because I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing regardless of what's in my path. And if you want to bet against that tenacity of a thirty-five-year-old man, then go for it.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  I can't say that I, I, I don't like the disposition. I, I, I, people should believe in themselves and.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the price, price aside, whether it's one cent, whether it's zero and like eighteen, like whether it's seventeen zeros and a one. It doesn't matter.

• 59:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you, Zach. So this confidence, right? This kind of vibe that you're imbuing, right? It's pretty cool. It's right. Don't bet against the Canto community because don't bet against the devs is another way to sort of express this, right? Can I ask you, like, back to sort of David's point, though? Would you be one to sort of shut down too much emphasis in cantaloupe culture? Cantonite culture on like price? There are times where we've seen sort of leaders in other ecosystems do this, few and far between. I remember the famous 2017 tweet, and you remember this is like Vitalik being like, yeah, have we earned it?

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just wondering your approach to kind of like the early stages of a community and setting the culture. And the only thing I'm just asking about is because, you know, we've all seen so many token communities go off the rails and like get kind of toxic around price. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on best practices on not letting the Canto community fall prey to that and to stick to the confidence? But it's like the confidence in what we're building.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's not. So when you think of, when you talk about a community and what you're talking about people. And when you think about like people working as a group, you can talk about people acting as individuals as well. Once, when people make a lot of money, sometimes they just fucking lose their minds. I've seen it.

• 1:01:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  You've seen it. We've all seen it, right? Like, people just lose it. Like, they become who they actually are.

• 1:01:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Because they don't have to like keep up appearances anymore. They don't have to give a shit about anybody but themselves.

• 1:01:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  So that's when you see people for who they really are. So let me say that price is a function of economics. Economics are the way, are a measure of a community to work together, to coordinate and to collaborate in a way that results in a net success. So there's nothing wrong with being proud and excited of the the price of an asset. What's wrong is saying I'm I've made this, you're worthless, your community sucks compared to mine. That's stupid. That's like a bad way to look. So just be real and like we all like make money. We all do whatever we do. Just be nice and cool to the people around you. I think that's what people what turns people off about price talk.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  It's not saying like my token's doing well and that means that your token will never do well. It's like that's that's just dumb. Like, don't don't be like that. Be like a cool dude. Be like be somebody that people like to be around like, you know, like, nobody wants to be around somebody that's like constantly bragging about what they have like. It's not if you're coming from a place of like that, then then then that sucks and you suck. I'm sorry, but like, you know, just like be cool. Like, that's it. I don't know. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm not like a big brain guy. I just like put numbers on a screen.

• 1:02:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I the the bluntness is something I've always appreciated about you, Zach. You and there's a certain cohort like you and Amin and a few other people could just like call it for what it is. And I don't think enough people in crypto do that. And so I definitely appreciate the disposition.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  I'm not here to like, if I like, I'm not here to like, I don't know. I don't know what you expect from me. I'm just like, I'm doing what I enjoy. People I like. I like you guys. I like everybody like, you know, I work with anybody. I like, you know, and if you're a dick, I don't want to work with you. I'm sorry. So we've made a community. That's it. Like, and and the economics of that community are like how well we can all work together.

• 1:03:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are these the vibes of the community right now? How would you describe the the vibes, the culture of?

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  I mean, those are my vibes and those are the vibes of the people that I think I attract. Just because like, I kind of like have like simple resistance mechanisms that kind of filter out the flames. Like, you know, so, yeah, I suppose so. I think so. Those are the people that I'm around. I mean, we're all pretty cool guys that I would hope you'd like to get a beer with sometime.

• 1:03:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zach, I'm curious what the what the future is for Canto. This is a really early experiment still, right? Remind remind listeners again when Canto was launched. And how like how far you've come and then like, I know the roadmap is not yours to determine fully. But what are some directions you're seeing your social consensus lead in in in terms of Canto? And what do you hope it accomplishes?

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I think we, well, we launched in September, so what is that, five months? It's been about five months of building and working on things. And I think in the future, what we want to do is just figure out how we can scale economically in a way that like makes sense for all the participants, kind of like building cool games. I'm really interested in like gaming and like playing games with my friends, kind of like MMOs. Like I used to play Elder Scrolls Online a lot, but I've kind of like replaced all of the time I spend playing those video games with like building out blockchain primitives and kind of like economic infrastructure. And that's a lot more rewarding to me, just because the XP can actually be translated to real world value for some reason.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  That's the world that we, that's the world we built. So I think like building out that regard and kind of experimenting in those ways is something that I want to do, kind of like building online games and like doing stuff like that. So yeah, things that are entertaining. Like we're about to launch, like some of my friends are about to launch the first, the world's first fully on-chain DMV line simulator. That's going to be really fun.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 1:05:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is it?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  What do you do? A DMV line simulator?

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  DMV line simulator, yeah, it's dumb. You're gonna have to see it to get it. It's not really that, it's not really that.

• 1:05:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like you're talking about DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trying to simulate the line, like the queuing mechanism for like the most hellish place on earth.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  I would imagine that's actually relatively simple.

• 1:05:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you're calling this a game?

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's a game. I mean, you play, you play a truck driving simulator, right?

• 1:05:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  So those are the kinds of things that we're like playing around with.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Zach, if interest, if listeners have been piqued by what we've been talking about today, where should they go to learn more about Canto?

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so the entry point to the Canto community is on the Slingshot application. So you could go to slingshot.finance to get involved. Canto.io is kind of like the next place that you would go to kind of like bridge, stake assets, lend. Canto-tools is a pretty good website that kind of has a directory of places and dApps that are, that exist on-chain. So checking that out would be good. And all of the other underbelly of the Canto community kind of exists within a bunch of disparate Telegram groups and across Canto Twitter.

• 1:06:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Canto Twitter.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Canto Twitter, that's great.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  The other CT.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Zach, thank you so much for joining us and helping us explain the world of Canto.

• 1:06:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like I figured it out. Thank you so much, Zach. Oh, one thing before I probably should ask this earlier in the episode. So the way this works is there are validators, right? It's like any Cosmos.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's 100 to 150 or so validators on the chain as well?

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's 100 and anybody can join by staking the necessary amount to get into that validator set. It uses tendermint consensus.

• 1:07:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very cool. Well, thanks for explaining this experiment and for hanging with us today, Zach. We appreciate it.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks a lot for having me on. Are y'all gonna be in Denver or what?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, alright.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's also that music festival in Nashville, Zach, that's not too far away that I'm coming for.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Come through, man. You're welcome to crash here. Christian's here too. We should all go out.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is some old POV crypto days that we're never talking about right now, so.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  We should have another POV, one for the time.

• 1:07:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder what Christian thinks of Canto, David.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure it's the same old Bitcoin maxi take that.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  I told him about it. He knows all about it. I go, I hang out with him all the time. He knows all about it.

• 1:07:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  For bankless listeners that don't know what we're talking about, again, I've said this a few times. I do, used to do an old podcast called POV Crypto Podcast, which was me and my very Bitcoiner co-host and who is now at Bitcoin Media, Bitcoin Magazine. And so people, I'll defend myself against the Ethereum maxi label over and over and over again. My genesis was in having a podcast with a Bitcoiner. Zach was on there a number of times. And so this is why I'm able to.

• 1:08:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  What did you say on those podcasts, Zach? Were you arguing with Christian too?

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny because like I got started in blockchain through Bitcoin and then I found Ethereum in 2015. So I like identify with like as both a Bitcoin maximalist and an ETH max.

• 1:08:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, both tribes, yeah.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  I don't really like, I'm not really extreme on either one. I know where both groups are coming from. And then like as people have joined, like they take these different stances. I tend to be kind of agnostic. Like I understand Bitcoin because that's what got me into blockchain. I love it. And Ethereum just like made more sense when it came out because applying business logic to transactions is like, duh. Like, you know? So I don't know. Yeah. So I would just kind of like talk about. Well, at Whiteblock, I kind of made a name for myself on calling out a bunch of like bullshit.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  EOS, EOS, Whiteblock made the report about EOS's net working capabilities.

• 1:09:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was Whiteblock back in the day?

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  EOS's boasted transaction throughput is like 10,000 times its actual amount.

• 1:09:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was 2018, you guys published this, right?

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, 2018, yeah.

• 1:09:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I remember that.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  That was some of my early research. And so like, I can't like, what I'm good at is figuring out complicated systems and reducing them to very simple things.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Like, you know, it's like, most things are just hit the button, this is what happens. And, you know, like, a lot of people are kind of coming out during that ICO wave and promising the world to everybody. It's like, we can do this, we can do that. But it was mostly bullshit, and it was mostly scammers, you know, that aren't even around anymore. So like, you know.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Ryan, this is the report that like, all the Ethereum people use to like, show like, a lot of people like, kind of felt the EOS wasn't legitimate, and their claims were ridiculous. And then this report came out.

• 1:10:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I remember.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  And then, and then it's like, look at this guy, this is what we've been telling you. And then it also led into like, all the Ethereum crowd being like, oh, multi-coin had rotated out of their EOS narrative, but they're gonna try it again. And then they did it again with Solon.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Oh, there you go. Yeah. So these people have been doing the same thing over and over and over again for the, throughout the history of this industry. So, you know, it's nothing new. But that's kind of like how I like broke into the ETH scene was kind of by saying, calling people out on this bullshit, you know? It's just like way too, like, we need to use our powers for good, you know?

• 1:10:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. We'll end it there. Need to use our powers for good. I know that that was a fake close of the show, but we just had to talk to Zach about a little bit longer. So we appreciate you coming on, man.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot, dudes. Cheers.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 1:10:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Risks and disclaimers. Of course, I gotta let you know that Canto is risky. So is all of crypto. So is DeFi. All this stuff is. You could lose what you put in. Let me repeat. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.