Ethereum Privacy for Institutions | Mo Jalil and Oskar Thoren

Wall Street wants to come onchain, but public-by-default finance creates a problem institutions cannot ignore. ETH Systems co-founders Mo Jalil and Oskar Thoren join David to explain why privacy may be one of Ethereum’s biggest institutional unlocks, what banks and asset managers are actually asking for, and why the opportunity goes far beyond private payments. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near-pod 🔑BITKEY | GET 10% OFF USE CODE: BANKLESS | #bitkeypartner https://bankless.cc/bitkey 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 ETH Systems 1:34 The Founders 5:28 Institutional Privacy 12:43 Real-World Use Cases 21:19 From Bespoke to Scalable 30:22 Building the Product 33:40 Institutions Are Coming 35:40 The Future of Institutional DeFi 40:24 Privacy vs Transparency 46:51 What Ethereum Can Do? 49:54 Cypherpunks and Institutions --- RESOURCES Oskar Thoren https://x.com/oskarth Mo Jalil https://x.com/motypes EthSystems https://x.com/eth_systems --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, I'm here with Mo Jalil and Oscar Thoren. They are the co-founders of ETH Systems, a new spinout out of the Ethereum Foundation focused on three things: Ethereum, institutions, and privacy, which I think is desperately needed for all of crypto and Ethereum included, obviously, for really elevating Ethereum to the next level. Oscar, Mo, welcome to Bankless.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  David, thanks for having us.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Why do we need privacy on Ethereum? Oscar, I'll throw that to you.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Sure. So I would say that Ethereum is great sort of technology and works great as a sort of credibility neutral base layer, but obviously it doesn't have privacy baked in. And that's why you see a lot of people have been trying to figure solutions for that, whether it's on the base layer, but also a lot of the application layer. So basically, that's sort of the missing piece, if you will, in Ethereum land, and that's where we come in.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Anyone that listens to Bankless already knows this, so I apologize if I'm saying the same things to her many times, but basically, for us, we care about institutions. They generally have two things that they really care about. One is their business, and the second is that they're compliant. And because of those two things, they kind of tend towards places that they can control. At the same time, you have public Ethereum, which has deep liquidity, has all these new business opportunities, and great ways of doing things they've already done, but much better. But you can't get both without cryptography. So for them, they need that in order to basically access the benefits of Ethereum.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Can we talk about your guys' backgrounds? Because this is not day one for you guys. This is day one for ETH Systems or month one for ETH Systems, but this is just the next step on, I think, your guys' very long arc that started a while ago. What context do we need to know from you two and the work that you've done in Ethereum, in privacy, and with institutions that you guys are bringing to ETH Systems? Mo, maybe just continue taking that one away?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a bit about myself. So I actually started in traditional finance. I used to build algo trading systems like Goldman Sachs. And that's what I did for like five years. So I have a really good understanding of the kind of things that basically these kind of investment banks need. I then spent basically a number of years kind of in the hedge fund world. And for me, that was like the interesting part of the arc, where I was looking at all these different things. I remember reading the Bitcoin white paper, being blown away, but like, that was too early. That was way too early. And then fast forward a number of years, I joined Ethereum Foundation, kind of leading a lot of the APAC BD initiatives. This was last year when there was, Tomasz was basically the co-executive director. And something became extremely obvious. In order for any of these

• 2:40Speaker 01

  organizations to use public Ethereum, they needed privacy, they needed cryptography. And I'd known Oscar for a while, actually. So I remember calling him up and saying, hey, look, Oscar, there's something that I think you'd be a great fit for, and we should talk about it.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  So I've been there, sort of Ethereum and crypto space for around a decade or so. Focused like a lot on privacy very early on. So before this was kind of like a big talking point, working at Status and also creating an R&D lab. As part of that, we were sort of developing very stuff of peer-to-peer communication protocols that were used for sort of censorship systems and privacy and so on. So been sort of into protocol design and privacy and resistance specifically on the protocol infrastructure layer for quite a while now. And then I guess the last five, six years, been sort of diving deeper into C9 proofs and sort of doing various tooling for it, including work with some of the early members of PSC at the Ethereum Foundation, and also wrote like a little mini book on C9 proofs, did some research related to folding schemes, and some tooling for making

• 3:37Speaker 02

  client-side proving easier and so on. In the last few years, I've been at Ethereum Foundation and also advising them when it comes to sort of privacy strategy and now sort of the new access layer. Yeah, and as Mo mentioned, that's where we met, and we kickstarted Institute of Privacy Taskforce. I think for me, one difference is that I used to sort of focus primarily on privacy of individuals. And while that's still something that's very dear and close to my heart, I think one thing that I noticed is that there's a massive, massive demand for privacy of institutions. And I think that's come about with the last few years, where there's been more regular clarity and so on. And you see that a lot of institutions, they actually care a lot about privacy, to some extent even more so than than individuals in some circumstances. So I thought that was quite

• 4:19Speaker 02

  exciting and sort of been a great sort of opportunities that we've been focused on for the last year, and sort of building things in public and so on, and then spinning out into a separate entity a month ago or so.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just to add on that. So we basically, I think one interesting thing about us is that when we spun out, we came out with a year's worth of work, like an entire body of things that we've been doing, from multiple workshops that we've gone, you know, hands-on with lots of different organizations, to, you know, public goods that we've published, which is basically a market map of all these different use cases that people are looking at and how they map onto privacy solutions in Ethereum. And then finally, we had basically write-ups, looking at whether it's like, you know, private dispersments or public, you know, public ledgers versus private rails, those kind of things. So I think for us, it was interesting. Like, yeah, like you said, the organization, like ETH Systems, is less than a month old, but the work we're doing spans not just a year, but probably a decade worth of like the work that we've been looking at.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  There are a couple of things you said, Oscar, that I'd like to learn a little bit more about. You said, "privacy strategy for the EF." And then you also said, "privacy for institutions is different than privacy for individuals." I want to learn more about both of these things. But let's start with privacy strategy. What is a privacy strategy? Like, what, can you like, just illuminate what the strategy is?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think a lot of that had to do with sort of the context that PSC found itself at the time at the Ethereum Foundation. And I think one thing that we did is sort of try to move that into the Ethereum Foundation and see what type of privacy things Ethereum Foundation should focus on. That is now most, and there's like a lot of other people, so I don't want to talk too much about for Ethereum Foundation and what they are working on. But what I would want to add to is also what Mo just said, is that as sort of part of the Institute of Privacy Taskforce at the Ethereum Foundation, what we were trying to do is basically connect to these two worlds, where you have institutions on one hand and then ecosystem on the other. And in talking to them, oftentimes, they didn't necessarily understand the Ethereum world, because they just see sort of, oh, it's a blockchain, there's no privacy. But the fact is that Ethereum ecosystem is extremely

• 6:18Speaker 02

  rich in terms of different protocols or vendors of various solutions that exist. So what we're trying to do is sort of explain to them what the space looks like, and in turn also talk into various companies in the space and protocol engineers and so on, and explain to them, here's what these users actually are looking for. And that's where we sort of developed the privacy market map, where we sort of talk about these specific requirements these users have. And they can be quite sophisticated if it's like specific business requirements or legal constraints and specific use cases. And then basically map that into sort of a set of solutions, whether it's like vendors or protocols and so on. And then basically doing POCs and write-ups to show things that are missing, like how you can combine these building blocks to create protocols and solutions that sort of fit what these users are looking for.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just want to add one more thing on there, just really quickly, because I think, Oscar, I know you mentioned PSC, and folks that are listening might not know what that is, but actually, the Ethereum ecosystem has been deep in privacy for many, many years. So I know privacy is like a really hot topic now, especially last year with Zcash and, you know, all these two of these privacy protocols. But the EF has had a cryptographic research lab for seven years or so, right? And that's what, that was known as PSC.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  The privacy stewards of Ethereum, just like the group of people talking and building about privacy solutions. Does, just everything that you guys are saying, does this mean that we have the privacy solutions that we need in terms of just like code on the shelf, ready to pull off the shelf and apply it, if institutions just know it's there and know how to do it? Or in the terms of just like building privacy on Ethereum, building private systems on Ethereum, we still have some building to do? Like, where are we in that arc of, we still need to build more solutions? Or we already have the solutions, and we just kind of need to come up with some standards? Or institutions just need

• 8:07Speaker 00

  to be made more aware of them, and somebody kind of needs to just hold their hand and put the building blocks together to get what they need? Like, where are we with the evolution of privacy around Ethereum for institutions?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I would say it's very much a mix. And I think one thing you see and have seen over the last decade, and this is partly due to Ethereum Foundation, but other people in this space, like Zcash and independent resources, have been sort of pushing up and making a lot of the cryptography actually usable. And then there's sort of companies that have come up around that and sort of made it even more usable. I would say that some solutions, which we know how to do, but then when it comes to specific constraints, I would say we are still, there's still a bit to go. Because a lot of these institutions use cases, they are not necessarily obvious in terms of the specific constraints. So you do need to customize things a little bit. And you could say, oh, just use like a privacy L2. But if you look into the specifics, oftentimes there's like the common sort of trade offs, not every institution is willing to make.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  And it's very interesting when you, when you talk to these companies is that some of them, they're extremely sophisticated, like they have their own R and D department with 20 people and cryptography PhDs. And we were looking at the space for like years. And then on the other end of spectrum, you have people who just like, maybe they don't have like a very strong technical team, but they sort of want like a white label solution. So you see this wide sort of spectrum in terms of what these users are looking for. And then also different timelines and different sort of targets. If it's like retail, like massive scalability in terms of TPS, or if it's more the higher assurance kind of security use cases. So it very much depends on the specific specifics we're talking about.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  And just to add on that, I think maybe, Oscar, I don't know if you're going to push back on me on this, but I think at least for the kind of use case that we look at, it's, I think largely more of an engineering problem as opposed to like a research problem.

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• 12:38Speaker 00

  Like, what's the number one form of privacy that they are looking for? Is it their account balances with stable coins? Or if they are interested in like creating real world assets or using real world assets, it's like revealing their, how much of an asset that they have? Is it sending these assets? So like is private business to business, stablecoin transfers for payments, like businesses probably don't want to reveal that activity on-chain? What kind of privacy is the most common, commonly needed privacy from the conversations that you guys have?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I can add a bit of color here. So first of all, I think when it comes to the work that we do, we span a broad range of use cases. And our time is usually spent on the work that hasn't already been solved, to be perfectly honest. So for example, we talked about the situations that you just talked about. All of them, I think a lot of people know about them, like for example, private payments, you know, kind of tokenized deposits, those are great. But they're already kind of solved in many ways, at least for some organizations in some countries. The type of work that we look at is kind of like the work that really hasn't been taken a look at yet. I can give you some examples, right? So one is that, you know, we were definitely talking to a particular organization, let's just say, tier one investment bank,

• 13:54Speaker 01

  where they do this thing known as inter dealer compressions, right? So what ends up happening at the end of the day, they send all of their trades to a trusted third party, which they pay millions of dollars a year, by the way, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And what happens is that this trusted third party, they look at this bank's trades and all of their positions. They look at another bank's trade, all of their positions, and then they net out. And no one likes doing this, but they do it because the value it brings in terms of compressing these trades down. And they also have less capital requirements because they don't have to, you know, get that ready. They have less transactions they have to do. And we basically had someone that come to us and they were like, well, hold on a second.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Is there any way that we could do this? And this is the perfect example where a kind of like, I would say foundational new technology like Ethereum, a shared state, could give them this without this particular third party. But the problem is then the entire world gets to see everything. So that's an example of like a very specific use case that, you know, I've talked to other teams about this and most people haven't really seen this business or this opportunity that needs to be addressed. But this in itself is a several billion dollar basically business that could be taken a look at. That's one. To your point around basically private payments, we've talked to a number of different organizations across different jurisdictions that are looking at this, and they all have different requirements. And I think Oscar made a great point where like,

• 15:11Speaker 01

  sometimes a use case is well known, like private payments, but the jurisdiction it's in gives you a very various permutation of it that makes it non-trivial to do.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, also to add on that, like I would say, we talk about privacy a lot, and I think that's great. It's very important, but I don't want us to focus only on that because oftentimes, if you go, if you think about building confidential and secure systems, that's one of the things you care about. Like you also care about sort of the security properties and, and if it's sensor persistent and, and so scalability and so on. So it's, a lot of it is also about sort of elevating the space a little bit in terms of rigor. Because if you look at all these institutions, they already have color market fit. So they already have like a system with like billions of dollars flowing through. And you want to be able to move on to Ethereum with confidence. And in order to do so, they need to actually be sure that the system works the way it's supposed to. So that's like a little bit different from like, you know, like live coding an app or whatever, like it requires you to actually think carefully about what are security properties

• 16:04Speaker 02

  that you have. And privacy is definitely one of them and one of the more tricky ones, but also just one out of several. So you need to think about all of them as a whole in terms of a system and like having kind of technical specifications around this and so on. So I think that's like another thing to think like a bit more holistically about it, that just like multiple properties and they all have to be satisfied in order for institutions to actually want to move over on to Ethereum.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I know what, that might not be like a satisfactory answer in terms of what's the most kind of popular use case. It's probably because we go for the really kind of edge case kind of problems out there.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Is there an example, is there like a case study that you guys have worked with in the past that we can talk about where you could, you had the end to end conversation of you had, you started talking to this institution? They had a privacy need. You guys worked with them, did whatever you guys do. And now they are using Ethereum in a confidential, private way. Is there, is there a story you could tell us about like an example that's like worked so far?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can tell you a story. I don't know if we can mention names because.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would figure, yeah. I mean, if we're talking about privacy.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. People, people don't like to share it, especially the bigger you are, the more that you have that you basically don't want to share. But we can talk about a couple. So for example, so we're talking about payment, everyone understands that, right? Like, you know, I, you know, I do a payment to you and doing it on chain, everyone sees it. It's a use case that, you know, bog standard. For a particular jurisdiction, it's a bit non-standard because first of all, they want, they want it to be confidential and they would like to roll it out for almost the entire country. So what's happened to them is they're like, we, we think blockchains are amazing. We think, you know, payments are great, but we need to be able to do it at scale for an entire nation.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And the thing about a payment is that normally it only has like really two actors, which is a sender and a receiver. This one is like a DDP, like they usually have two actors. But because of this particular country, they have a regulatory requirement to have four actors, for payments. This is the sender, the receiver, the auditor, and then the government, essentially. And to do that in a privacy preserving way, they tried for, I think, two to three years, I'm anonymizing the years bit. And they tried, basically, you name it, protocols are out there, and they were not able to do one in a way that was acceptable. Basically, wasn't performant enough. Could they basically hit the TPS? Could they do it in a way that it basically is not like ridiculous computational costs? What's interesting is that for the last year or so, we've basically been publishing our market map,

• 18:29Speaker 01

  we've been doing write-ups, and they basically saw one of the basically proof of concepts and works that we've done, because we often do exploratory work on what you could potentially do on Ethereum. And they're like, oh, hold on a second. We've tried, you know, I don't want to name the protocols or the teams, but we tried X, Y, and Z for three, four years. We published a natural report about this, a 16-page report, and why we can't do it. But it seems like actually this like piece of work that's coming out of the EF could work for us. So they basically reached out to us and they're like, hey, hold on a second. We'd love to have you guys, you know, reference your work and build something that actually looks like it could kind of solve our needs. And that's an example of one where I think, not only is the work kind of interesting, and it might solve a few people's problems, but you can do it at scale.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  You can do it where you can affect tens of millions of people. And I think that's an example of like some of the things that we've done that, you know, had we not done this open source work, had we not published it, had people not seen it, they probably would have just put that on the back burner for a very long time. Or worse yet, gone to, I say worse yet, gone to some kind of private network.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I would also add a little bit to that, that like, if you think about institutional sort of sales cycle, they are quite long. So oftentimes, like, it requires quite a lot of work to get something going, and there's like, you know, some confidential around that, and then it takes a while until you actually see sort of the complete fruits of your labor. So that's generally like a thing. And I think one thing we noted at EF, and this is also one thing that gave us, I guess, the idea that it makes sense as a separate for-profit entity, is that we had a lot of engagements and collaborations with various institutions. And there were many cases where people were like, okay, so we would love to continue working with you guys. How can we sort of pay you? And we're basically saying, no, no, no, we're a nonprofit. Like, we have to be neutral and so on. So we have to say no. And sometimes where some conversations stop,

• 20:13Speaker 02

  because it's extremely important that Ethereum Foundation stays incredibly neutral and so on. So we kind of have to back off there and let other people sort of take the ball there. But I think that also shows a lot about how much demand there is and so on. And so as we've been spinning out now and into a separate for-profit entity, it's a lot easier to have sort of these commercial agreements in place, because it's a lot easier for an institution to understand. It's very straightforward in terms of contracts as well.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  What I'm hearing from you guys is it feels like there is a lot of very bespoke solutions that need to be built, as you said, for the specific permutation of privacy in a particular compliance jurisdiction, for the specific needs of a specific institution. My concern about that is that if we keep doing bespoke stuff, it doesn't really scale. Because if you make a perfectly fitting glove, it's only going to fit one hand, right? And the alternative that I see for that is like, well, we have the core of Ethereum, things like Uniswap, things like Aave, things like EOAs, like my address, my ledger.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  And if we can get privacy in these core things, the level of scalability that we get on Ethereum on net is going to become much larger. And maybe institutions can, like, once we get pretty high fidelity privacy scaled and easily accessible and closer to a default on Ethereum, then institutions could like bend a little bit. And they're like, this doesn't perfectly fit, but like, I can maybe change my systems a little bit in order to fit this form factor of privacy. And if we get everyone onto the same standard, then the total amount of privacy, both on Ethereum and on the world, can grow massively.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And so I'm, I have, I guess the question is a concern about the scalability of what you guys are doing. And isn't, don't we just need privacy a little bit more baked into like Ethereum core, rather than doing bespoke stuff on the margins? How would you guys respond to that?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've actually got a really good answer for this. So a couple of things. I think one is that we could do both. That's one. The mechanisms that do that, and that's why I think Ethereum is amazing. The second thing is that, you know, we talk about these bespoke bills, but actually, each one of these markets, each one of these industries is freaking huge. We're talking about potentially hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So the way we think about it is that we actually like, we don't like doing purely bespoke bills. We think that's a really bad idea. What we think is that you go in and understand these highly specific use cases, because if you don't really understand it, you can't really solve it. And then what you end up doing is that you can create generalized solutions that can be usable for other people. So for example, I told you about the interdata compressions. That can be useful for every investment bank.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  We talked about, for example, the, the kind of like, you know, multi-party DDPs that can also be spread out. So our plan really is, and the way that we think about it, is that we want to generalize, and we want to do two things. One is that where we can, open source and share with the rest of the world, because that basically hardens the way that people look at privacy on Ethereum. The second is that, take these usable components and put them into a place where it didn't essentially become a stack that people can easily switch on. So the way I think about it is that this bespoke work is almost like, you know, when you do a startup, have this idea maze. Bilaji talks about the idea maze. You go and you try to find out what works. And, you know, Paul Graham also talks about things like, you know, do things that don't scale. And that really is important when you work with institutions, because they have these systems already. They have billions of dollars of business.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  And to get them on chain, you have to start from that side as opposed to the DeFi native side. And I think, like you said, like, there's different people working on both, but I don't think actually enough people are working on the TradFi side that then converts into Ethereum as opposed to, there are many teams already on the crypto native side that are kind of going the other way. So having both is the way to do this.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would agree with that. And also, like, I would say, like, in general, the space has invested like a lot in like generic infrastructure, if you will. And like, if you build, they will come. But that's not always the case, especially when you're talking about these large institutions with like very specific requirements. So I think there's value in like actually going after the specifics and then generalizing after. And there's a few ways we're doing that. So like, one is in terms of open source libraries that we're pushing out, so like building blocks, and also in terms of like technical specifications that are written in such a way that they can sort of be generalized, or you sort of, to the extent that it's a special case, you sort of make it very clear. So it's like swap ball, or pluggable, or modular, and so on. And then I think, in general, like basically, privacy is amazing. We would love to see that. And that would just enable us of even more use cases. So we definitely support that. I think it's great.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  It's just not the main thing we're focusing on. And then there's like a lot of other things. So for example, when we talk about liquidity, there's like solutions when it comes to interoperability, like Ethereum Economic Zone, and these sorts of things. So I do think you can get the best of both worlds, and there's like many different ways to approach this. We are focusing more on like, how do we actually move institutions onto Ethereum? And that's our number one priority.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just to add on that, I know we've got like a million points here. But I think for organizations that may have been running for hundreds, like over 100 years, some of them are like that old, you need to kind of build that bridge and come from where they're building. It's like, hey, look, this is how your business is. Okay, let's translate that. I think trying to force them into doing it the other way might not work. We've seen a lot of teams that have tried that, and it hasn't worked for them.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Is ETH Systems a startup or a nonprofit? What's the legal entity behind ETH Systems?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So ETH Systems is a for-profit entity.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Profit, okay.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. Because my question was going to be like, isn't this best done as a startup trying to build a very scalable venture-sized outcome? You guys are, you guys are a for-profit. Is that where you guys are?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Okay. I was like, I was like, okay, wait a second. If you guys are having all of these conversations, and you're seeing, you're seeing that you can build solutions, like, isn't this best done with something like, with KPIs, like TVL and volume, and you guys take like a cut, but this, that is what you guys do?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So for us, it's for-profit organization for a couple of reasons, actually. And this is something that we debate, actually, we talk about this quite a lot, right? It was like, I think there are a lot of nonprofit organizations in our space, and I think they're amazing. But for the work that we're doing, it's going to be a multi-year journey. And the most, I think, cleanest way to sustain defund it is to do as a for-profit entity. That's one. Because public goods funding is extremely, extremely hard. And in my opinion, grants should be given to people that really need it. The second thing is that The types of organizations that we work with, in order for us to do the last mile, they actually require you to be a for-profit organization to go through procurement. Like, being a nonprofit is actually a red flag sometimes, and they just can't work with you.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  So for those two reasons, we basically went with the, basically a for-profit route. Knowing, by the way, that we have so many sister organizations and friends in the ecosystem that are nonprofit, and they can kind of prepare, they got the mantle there.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And also, like, just personally, like, at least for the last seven years or so, like, I mostly worked at sort of nonprofits, so I definitely value that. And I think there's amazing value in terms of these, like, R and D and going really deep and public goods and so on. So that's amazing. I think in this case, it's kind of obvious, as you kind of alluded to, that it's a very straightforward business model. You know, there's a customer, and they're willing to pay for something, and we can help them. So I think that's, it, it makes a lot of sense in this, in this instance, especially for the reasons Mo mentioned in terms of commercial counterparty and so on. I would add that, like, we're not only doing that. So the way we approach this, we kind of have these two work streams. So one is business-driven and the other is open source. In an ideal world, they are like 100% sort of aligned and so on. But the business-driven work, a lot of it is talking to institutions and understanding their specific requirements,

• 27:55Speaker 02

  if it's business or legal, and then basically mapping that to technical constraints and, and designs. It's sort of helping them in that, in terms of, like, if it's like educating them or do architecture reviews or POCs or production environments and so on. Then based on that, we get like a lot of business intelligence or details, like particular details that are hard to talk about. We take those and generalize that, and we use that to sort of push out open source building blocks that can sort of elevate the space and also inform people. So it's kind of continuity in terms of the work we did at Ethereum Foundation. So that can, I think, take the form of, like, POCs, like, explaining, here are some examples of constraints and how you can think about it, like write-ups, the service of the space, like, how, how you can get these properties, open source libraries, technical specifications and so on. So we think that's extremely valuable, both for the ecosystem as a whole, but also in terms of, like,

• 28:40Speaker 02

  you know, just general communication and also attracting world-class talent. Because open source is like something, it's hard to do too much open source. And, and fundamentally, a lot of the security properties and private properties, they need open source solutions. Like, you can't just sort of hide things and do sort of security by security. So, so a lot of these institutions, they actually ask for open specifications and open source in order to be able to trust the system. So that's something extremely important to us. We try to sort of keep a balance between the two, both sort of being very pragmatic in terms of business demand, but also very principled in terms of open source work and pushing it out with permissive licensing and so on, so other people can build on it.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and just one last thing on that, is that oftentimes there's these, like, unintended side effects. And one of the great things about kind of the work that we're doing is actually you end up having for-profit institutions funding some of these public goods and become great for the rest of the ecosystem.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  So are you guys a, like, a consultant dev shop where you guys are hired and paid to build technical solutions for institutions? Or is it something a little bit closer to something like, I don't know, Uniswap or Aave, where you are trying to build systems in code on chain that imbues institutions' like workflows with privacy, but you're trying to build like a large, scalable structure that, I don't know, like, governs over a system or something, something like that? And so, like, there's a spectrum there where you, it's just like, you guys are just like, you know, privately paid consultants, and that has like one size, like, outcome in terms of investment.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Or there's like the massively scalable system where, while you guys are talking to all these institutions, you're getting a view of the landscape, you are starting to get a picture of what's needed, and then when you guys are ready, you guys are ready to build the massively scalable, like, venture-sized outcome. And you're, and that is like a product that you guys build. Like, where are you guys in, in that spectrum?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is really clear for us. It's definitely the latter, which is basically, we, oh, we love products. Like, I was the CTO of my last company, building products. Austin's been bringing products his entire life. Products are the way to go for, like, scalable kind of solutions. But like you said, it's a spectrum. Like, you need to do a lot of that kind of hands-on understanding of all the various use cases, taking a bit more of like a forward-deployed engineer model, sitting down with them on the trading desk and understanding what they're doing. But the goal definitely is to take some of these learnings and turn this into, like, scalable products that you can roll out in basically mass.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  How far along are you on the research and proving the landscape and gaining information side of things? Like, how, how, how complete do you feel in terms of informing a product that you will eventually build later? Or is there still more, like, research and development to do?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  As I mentioned before, like, the institutional stages are quite long. So it's the kind of thing where it is actually quite useful to take your time a little bit in terms of actually doing multiple collaborations with POCs and architecture reviews before sort of going deeper into one or a few product bets. So we have a lot of active collaborations, but it also takes a little bit of time to actually see those through and sort of see, okay, so what is the exact thing where we have a sort of competitive advantage and so on that makes sense to sort of go double down on?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to, yeah, to Oscar's point, basically, we do have a couple of ideas already, like, some that I think could be absolutely quite game-changing, but it requires more testing of the thesis, going in there and really understanding whether or not those fundamental questions that we have have been answered, and we're not quite there yet. And I will say, by the way, there's already examples of, like, venture-scale type businesses. For example, private RFQs, right? I think Zama did something recently where, I personally think that's a huge business, and actually, up until they did it, I don't think there were many people that are doing it at, at that level of scale. And there's other opportunities that are like that, will stop. I, I, I'll make a prediction, over the next 24 months, you can see a whole number of businesses pop up that are like that. And the reason why I say 24 months is because a typical institutional engagement will take kind of at least 18 months.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  You, like, it takes you a number of months to get, to talk to them and educate them, another month to go through procurement, and then, like, almost a year to kind of get the initial version out.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  What's the appetite these days for institutions to actually come on-chain and do things, do things in like the, the decentralized public blockchain context? And they're like, clearly the answer is some, but when you guys have conversations, is it a little bit more of like, you guys are going to them and be, and trying to like convince them to come on-chain? Or are they coming to you and being like, we really want to come on-chain, but we can't because of these constraints? How much selling do you guys have to do to get people to come on Ethereum?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Oh, so this is going to sound terrible, but actually, I'm a really bad salesman. So most of the people are coming inbound. Like, I'm, I'm not the worst, I'm actually second, but I'm not the greatest. And most of the demand has been inbound. So I think for, first of all, it's one thing that's amazing about that is that they understand the value of blockchains. Secondly, I think I've got to give credit to DeFi here. They can see what's happening in DeFi, and that really, really interests them. So the things like Aave and Uniswap and Lido, they want those things, but they want to do it in a way that they're compliant. So to your point, like, the demand is absolutely massive, like, it's huge. And the thing that they're looking for is, in some ways, I'd even kind of classify as institutional DeFi.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Like, and you'll see for various organizations and DeFi protocols are basically making forks of their products to do this. But it's huge and it's coming. And what you'll find is that the ones that have been looking at blockchains for the longest time, so up until recently, we've got through Claritiv, hopefully coming, and like, um, Genius Act, they were looking at it with almost like, oh my God, this would be amazing if we could do it. And then the floodgates started opening up. So we don't do much selling, to be completely honest with you. We do think a lot of the demand is, it's basically intrinsic to basically these businesses. They used to do proof of concepts, they used to have basically like innovation teams that try things out. But last year, something really changed, where sometimes a CEO would basically pick up the phone, talk to the innovation team, we're like, hey, look, you guys have been working this for five years, we actually want to do business now.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Maybe one way that this unfolds is, we, we have the DeFi ecosystem, the main core, like, campfire of Ethereum, the Uniswaps, the Aaves, the stable coins, you know, the, the Pendles, Morphos, like, all that kind of stuff. Like, I'll call it the center of Ethereum, it really feels where all the heat is. And institutions are looking at me like, well, that makes sense, I want to go play there. First, there's going to be a, a very distinct, parallel, dare I say, even siloed ecosystem that gets built out for institutions that is private and fits their form factor of needs? Because directly integrating into those things is probably like too, too soon, too ambitious,

• 35:21Speaker 00

  and we need to do, just, we need to have things going out in the wild first. And so before, before there's like deep privacy institutional integration to kind of like the core DeFi apparatus of Ethereum, there's first going to be distinct, siloed, separate arena, separate playground, separate sandbox for institutions to come in and do their business logic on-chain in a private manner. And then they're going to see like, okay, this is working out for us, I like what we're doing here. And then maybe somebody can build us a system that integrates what we're doing into Morpho in a compliant way. And then, and then later, these systems start to intertwine and grow a little bit more together rather than being two separate versions of Ethereum. But that's kind of how I see the path playing out.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  You guys are slightly nodding your heads. And so, like, first it starts off completely separate, and then we figure out how to intertwine. The market will figure out how to intertwine these things. Do you guys agree with that sort of like logical?

• 36:16Speaker 02

  I wonder if you've been in, been in our meetings or something, because that's exactly how I think it's going on. Because if you, when you talk to them, you notice that they are, they're like, there is like a path, right? And they are, some are further along, and some are extremely sophisticated, and they're already thinking about this. Like, they have, they're thinking so deeply about like, how do we integrate with these institutions of DeFi? How does this compose with all of everything else? So that's naturally happening, and that's something that we see the more sophisticated actors are already starting to plan for. But they sort of need to learn, right? Because it's a new system, it's a new world, they need to sort of level up in terms of their thinking. And like, a lot of it is also like translation work, because a lot of these companies, they've been around for like 100, 100 years or something like that, and they have a compliance officer, and, and the legal framework they're operating under was written for, for, for the old world.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  So all of that needs to update, and that goes into like, has everything to do with like policy work? And like, how do you even map this to technical capabilities? And that's like, in a decades-long transition that's happening all across the space. And it'll continue to happen, and it will take, take a while, right? But obviously, there's sort of smarter money, more sophisticated money, will sort of try to front-end run it a little bit and sort of get ahead of things. But that's definitely how we, I think at least, that things will go.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I've talked to asset managers, I'm talking about like traditional asset managers that, that will come to us and say, hey, look, we want to put these products on-chain, we can see what you guys are doing, we just need to figure out a way to do it. Like, there, there is a lot of, I think especially the more forward-thinking asset managers, and they are definitely, definitely interested in doing this. And I have this conversation almost every single, I would say, week or two. Like people are saying, hey, how do we do this?

• 37:49Speaker 00

  What gets unlocked? Like, paint a picture for me. I know this, I know privacy is hard and crypto moves, I think, slower than it did in the past when we were, you know, trading meme coins. But paint a picture for me in like 2033, so seven years. And you guys have done the job that you have needed to do. Institutions appetite continues to increase. Paint a picture for me of what that world looks like with institutions and privacy. Like, what's the ambitious, optimistic case in like a seven-year timeframe?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  I think what you'd want it to be is that for the vast majority of people that are not crypto native, it should be invisible. Like, the best technologies, you don't see them, but you get the affordances of it. For example, imagine I could trade US stocks without being in the US, without giving away my identity because I have digital, you know, I have like a DID system. Like, that'd be amazing, right? So I think the way that we like to think about it is that not only is that basically trillions of dollars passed on chain, but beyond that, like, all of this stuff is visible, but I get the, all the amazing benefits that we currently have with DeFi. I think that's the way I like to think about it. You know, you could access any stocks in the world, you can access any kind of these assets, and you get all the benefits of a blockchain. Essentially, you can do transferability, you have that ownership of the things that you want. So, yeah, I think that's basically how we see it.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Like, in seven years, it's very realistic that the vast majority of financial infrastructure is going to be on a blockchain. It's happening right now. All the biggest places are already doing it. Hopefully, that happens on Ethereum.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  What, some of the core properties that we really, really like in crypto and on Ethereum is transparency, auditability, and verifiability. Going back into some older days, I remember I would debate with Bitcoiners about the adoption of Lightning Network.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  And they would say, like, you, private, like, Lightning channels are private. You can't see the volume. There's actually insane amounts of volume going on on Lightning, but it's private, so you can't see it. And all the Ethereum people are like, you guys are bullshitting us. Like, Lightning is a joke of a product. And just because it's hidden behind, you know, private, private state channels, doesn't mean we can't, we sure, we can't verify it, but like, there's nothing going on back there. And so, like, I just use that as an anecdote of just saying, like, okay, well, if you, if we make things like asset transfers private and we hide TVL and AUM, like, that's also private. And we remove some of these core properties that make DeFi interesting and, like, trusted

• 40:18Speaker 00

  in the sense that we under, so we can inspect source some of, some of our DeFi systems. If we hide everything, how do we know anything is actually going on? Well, how would you respond to that?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think a question I'd have is like, I think some people often mistake privacy to be meaning hidden. I think privacy really is who can see what, when, and how. And, you know, for example, when I do a transfer on my bank account right now, I can see it. The person receiving can see it, but, you know, the public can't see it. That's great. That's great for me, and that's what I'd like. So the question I'd have is like, I think transparency, people want that so they can have a level of trust. But if you, if you could get trust without having to see people's details, I think actually that's a better product where it's almost optional, like, you can get all the same affordances that you have, but it's kind of selectively disclosed. So my question actually to you, David, would be like, imagine you could verify anything that you wanted to.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Like, whether someone's doing the right transactions, it's, you know, it's, it's like the right thing that they said, the TVL is above a certain amount. Like, it's like, good, but it's still somewhat selective where you can't see everything. Wouldn't that be great?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, the things I would want to retain in verifiability and auditability is things like trading volume and market cap of an asset, like TVL. And so when these private assets get deposited into Morpho, Morpho gets to, like, report the AUM of those assets in question. And, or when, like, you know, assets are traded privately, privately across Uniswap or some sort of Prop AM. The actual metrics of the activity is still, like, reportable. And beyond, like, who's trading the assets, I don't really care. And in fact, like, just as, as an anecdote, like, today's Friday, August 7th,

• 41:59Speaker 00

  there's like this Ethereum whale with $55 million T-wapping into, like, Lit on the main Uniswap Layer 1. And everyone is like, oh, look at this guy. It's like, then the price is front-running this individual because we see $55 million of stablecoins T-wapping into this token on Uniswap, and everyone's also buying to get ahead of this whale. Doesn't feel right in terms of just like, that's not how finance should work. And like, the other example that's happening is like, there, people are like, looking at all of these traders on Hyperliquid with regards to, like, Robinhood meme coins, and they're seeing this one account with a trading history who traded all the correct meme coins ahead of Robinhood listing. In this case, it's actually really nice that we have the auditability.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  But still, like, you shouldn't be able to see people's trades. And there, and like, accounts and all of their trading history, that, the fact that that's fully transparent is like an interesting property, and it makes for a lot of drama on crypto Twitter, but like, that's fundamentally a constraint for institutions. But I still want to see the volumes, and I still want to see the assets being traded. There's like a bunch of other stuff from removing of, like, you know, the individual accounts. There's a bunch of, basically, everything else I still want to see and retain. And so, like, so long as I can verify all of that stuff, then, then we can get the best of both worlds.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I would say you definitely can, like, they're not contradictory, because especially with like cryptography and synonymous proof is on, you can get that, you can sort of prove sort of these aggregate metrics that you care about. So there's no contradiction there. Like, you can definitely have a system where you sort of get transparency on the things that you want to be transparent, and then privacy of the things you want to be private. So that's, I think, a lot of also benefits of something like Ethereum, a public blockchain and programmability and so on. You can actually get these properties, they can design the system in such a way that you get the best of both worlds.

• 43:45Speaker 00

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• 45:37Speaker 00

  I love smart contracts.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  What can, who can help you, unblock you the most about certain things? I feel like maybe there's two directions here. There's, there's the broader DeFi ecosystem. So like, I don't know what this looks like, but like, you know, Morpho off a, off a Uniswap, maybe they can help you guys make privacy with those systems easier and more accessible. Is there something that you guys need from, like, the Ethereum community or the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem to make your jobs easier? And then also, the other side of the spectrum, the Ethereum Foundation and the actual Ethereum protocol. Are there, like, EIPs or upgrades to the actual Ethereum protocol that would also make your guys' life easier? Basically, how can Ethereum help you?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I can start maybe the ecosystem, the DeFi ecosystem, like, so we already know a lot of the faults in this ecosystem. But like, for example, if you're Morpho, if you're Ave, we're already talking to some of them already. Like, definitely talk to us, because we'd love to be able to, like, look at your products and see how we can kind of, like, basically modify them in ways that would be suitable for very specific types of these cases that could be incredibly large. So I think for me, it's like, come to us, talk to us, you know, let's, let's look at the products, let's see what we can do to work together. And, yeah, just like, that's, that's the one ask I would have. Like, definitely come to us, and we'd love to talk to you as well. We're very open doors here, like, come, come, come. And then, actually, another thing I would like to say is that, because we do have public goods, like, we, we basically release a write-up every three or four weeks. If you've done amazing work, and I'll, and honestly, this is good for you as well. Contribute to our open source repo.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I would tell you right now, the number of banks that look at it is pretty large. So if you have a product, you have a, if you're like, you've made some of this really kind of intuitive or cool or you've got a defi protocol, come to our repo, contribute, open source, fork it if you want, change however you want, but basically contribute, it's going to be great for you.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  I would add to that, like, so we talked to like a lot of people in the ecosystem and so on. I think one thing that we've started seeing the last year or two or so is that people are starting to be a little bit more open minded about like what the users might be like. And maybe this is partially because of sort of retail movements and cycles and whatnot. But I think that's another thing where try to sort of, yeah, be open minded about like what, who might best benefit from using your product and protocols and so on. And think about what kind of requirements and constraints there are for the under. So that's something we tried to make a bit more public in terms of our privacy mark map. But one thing we noticed a lot, and it's something we noticed at the Ethereum foundation is there's a massive, massive disconnect in terms of what institutions are asking for and sort of what ecosystem provides. And we tried to sort of help bridge those and sort of create a feedback loop between the two.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  But it's definitely a lot more work that can be done. And this is like a ecosystem wide effort.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And one last thing I want to add, and by the way, this is something that Oscar brought to the table. And I think the position that we often have is like cyber punks in the boardroom. Like that's super counterintuitive because these are the two types of groups that normally don't talk to each other. But what we'd like to be is like that bridge where those defaults that could be generally good for humanity, have them built in. But the only way to do that is to get into the rooms that these decisions are made.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, one thing that made me very optimistic was hearing a lot of Danny Ryan's reporting from like inside the room and like Danny Ryan's a cyberpunk and he's talking to the banks. And they're talking the same thing, but with different words. It's kind of like, it's kind of like the horseshoe theory where like Danny's like decentralization is really important. And the inside the bank is like, I want to remove all my counterparties. And we were like, these are the same things. And I feel like there's a, there's a lot of synergies with, you know, the powers that, the needs of the powers that be of the world and like cyber punks. And like the, these things are like coming together and like touching. It's like completely opposite ends of the like, the political spectrum or some sort of spectrum.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  But like the, the wants and desires and needs and products that they're building are actually synonymous. Is that your guys' experience as well?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  I would say so, and I would say it's like you have a lot of the tools that you sort of say, and a lot of the authorities that people care about, whereas individuals is using, they're often very much the same in terms of censorship and privacy and open source and security and so on. And I think one of the great things about Ethereum, you can, you can both have people go like, because some people who listen to this, they might be extremely skeptical and like, oh, you know, tradfunk, we don't want to touch that, we don't want to talk to these guys. You can still have that and build systems that are like super cyberpunk, like no KYC, a hundred percent anonymous and all these things and build it on top of Ethereum. And, and that works great. And, but you can also build these other systems that sort of have similar properties, but may be designed under different constraints, like for example, the legal framework that a specific company is operating under.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  And I wanted to say that like, I think people might job some institutions quite harshly because of the regulations you're operating under. But if you talk to them, a lot of them, they do things like regulatory arbitrage. And they, they also, they're, they're operating in an environment, just like any individual. Like any individual might be like, oh, I'm not going to do a private payment when I buy a cup of coffee because it's not worth it for me. The same way an institution is like, well, this contract, I'm going to do it in this legislature, this jurisdiction, because that's sort of where I get the properties I care about. So it's not that different if you, if you think about it from like a higher level. It's just a matter of like operating in different environments. And, and if you can give them what they, what they need, then they're happy.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Mo, Oscar, you guys are doing God's work. Thank you for doing what you're doing. I wish you guys the best. Privacy is still unfortunately in 2026, a problem, something that the space is lacking. And so the more people working on this problem and building towards solutions, the better. It's probably going to be the biggest unlock for Ethereum specifically that, that I can think of. So I'll let you guys get back to work and thanks for coming on the show.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, David.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Bankless nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, but that's why we're here. The institutions have landed, so we are going even further west. This is a frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.