Welcome Mitja, co-founder of Gosh, which is the creator behind the ackinacki chain. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Peter. Nice meeting you. Namithya, tell us about yourself. Well, I'm an entrepreneur for the last, I don't know, 35 years. I started young with Voice over IP primarily. That was my first foray into the technology space. So started several companies like Telcos, Delta 3, which went public on NASDAQ in 95, I believe. Then I... I wanted to do more in peer-to-peer technology domain. So I went to create kind of distributed hash table based database, which was like distributed, almost decentralized, I would say. And through that wasn't very successful that one. We were like about 10 years earlier to the market. But through that I got introduced to Bitcoin, which is what is relevant stuff is right. um So yeah, I read the Satoshi White Paper quite early. I think. like maybe 2010. yeah, but it was great, but it was nothing to do really, like with that. You couldn't do much. You could mine, that's for sure. But yeah, but it was fascinating. So I did some mobile, while I'm doing some mobile stuff, then like in mobile technology, then uh Ethereum then created. And that became more interesting because you could do already stuff on that. I kind of, even before Ethereum actually, I did some Ripple stuff in fact. I currently, by the way, came about the fact that Vitalik also worked for Ripple. Funny enough. So that was like very surprising to me, but yeah, he did. I don't think many people know that. That's actually... that, but I then came about this uh funny fact. But anyway, so I did some messenger where you could send money using Gripple API. No, money, whatever, crypto, if you call it crypto, of course. Now several people would like to kill me now, but anyway. So yeah, and then I did some projects on Ethereum because that was already way more interesting. And then I got introduced to some people which told me that Pavel Durov wants to start a blockchain. I said, okay, that's interesting. They asked me what we could do about this. So I said I need to read something about that. So I read white paper and Tone Virtual Machine specifications and I proposed a plan and I became a CTO of the Tone Lab. did kind of developer tools for Tone. From 2018, the Tone wasn't there. There was no code. Nothing was released except for the Tone virtual machine specs. So we did the implementation. We had to, because otherwise we wouldn't do anything to do, basically. So we did the Rust implementation of Tone virtual machine from the scratch from the specifications. And we also did implementation of the node. In the beginning, it was like what we thought the protocol could be or something like we basically left patches for to be filled to be kind of done when the protocol will be out. So yeah, so we did the um Rust node and uh when we did the Virtual Machine, we also did the Solidity Compiler for Tone, C++ Compiler for Tone, infrastructure around that like cloud, like databases, uh indexing databases around Tone. before the tone was even starting. yeah, then like the history already, like the tone was problems with the SEC. So some other networks started based on our expertise because we were the only one who could actually manage kind of tone-based networks at that time. so, and then I left to start Gosh, three and a half years ago. Yeah, the Gauche was in, like in the beginning, the Gauche was, the idea was to do implementation of Git, decentralized Git. ah But from the beginning, we knew that, like, there was no chain that is capable of processing that amount of information that needed for decentralized Git. Like, for example, if you take Linux repository with all the history, it's like 50 million objects. Now there was, there is no chain at the moment even that can process that amount. In a process, yes, but in sensible amount of time, like when you hit the uh merge button, that it will actually be something that you can at least wait while you're doing coffee or something, not for three weeks. Hmm. All right, so I started this consensus research when I was in Tonelab because I realized early, quite early that uh even Ton, it's not scalable enough to support um what we actually needed. And then I looked at Solana as well. spoke with Anatoly back then and kind of Solana is a brilliant design, but even that wasn't... capable. We knew from the beginning that Solana wouldn't scale that much. You would need to change a lot for it to scale. And so, yeah, so I said, okay, we need to start from the scratch probably. Again, there was nothing, even the scientific papers weren't providing what we needed. So we did this research. It was published by Springer Nature Lectures on Computer Science last year in July. ackinacki, it's called the research called ackinacki probabilistic proof of stake, uh, consents protocol with, fast finality and a parallelization. So the idea was to take Tone Virtual Machine and simply replace the whole consensus portion of everything except for Tone Virtual Machine. Why Tone Virtual Machine? Not only because we knew it and we like implemented it, but also because it's the only, uh, asynchronous virtual machine. like you need the synchronicity if you want to create like parallel or highly parallelized environment and of course in terms of scalability you need highly parallelized environment. um So that was really the only choice so we took Tondrejomachine and then ah we kind of replaced the whole consensus thing and IK and IK reaches consensus just in two communication steps and so that's why we say the fastest blockchain possible. You cannot go below two in interactive settings. You cannot do that. um Of course, a lot of that is marketing, but in fact, it's true scientifically. You cannot go below that. uh In consensus theory, um it's impossible if your consensus is deterministic. With deterministic consensus, you cannot go two steps. It requires more. So that's why I can't whisper. Probabilistic consensus. Yeah, so that's like, that's how I got here. Yeah. So, gosh is the labs behind the ackinacki chain. um Let's start out with a fun question. Tell us about the name. What, what was going through your mind when you came up with the word, the name ackinacki and what does it mean? Yeah, that's funny. I'll tell you. So when I wanted to do the presentation explaining the protocol and we recorded it, it's actually like 500,000 views or something right now. So we wanted to record this live and I thought how to illustrate how blockchain works, how a Kinaki protocol works. And so I created this lore of creepy creatures. blockkeeper, block producer, through which I kind of explaining that. um But uh the actual inspiration from the name came from my son, which was doing me a hell by playing uh the game, Poppy Playtime. It's a scary kind of horror game. And there is the most, uh like the most... horrific character there called Huggy Wuggy. OK, so I said, OK, that would be nice to call it. And why ackinacki is because acknowledgment and not acknowledgment message is how uh ackinacki protocol actually works. So I took the acknowledgment, not acknowledgment, and I created just this character, which from the beginning I thought it's a girl. It's girl with slashes, so she has a knife. And then the whole lore around that kind of became a reality. And when we actually uh thought about how to get into the market, we actually said, this is nice. Like people like that and we should run with that. So we took this lore and we kind of created everything around this lore with the go to market. And what did you learn from, I mean, that's really interesting that you kind of accidentally stumbled upon the name like that, or were inspired by a game that your son was playing. What did you learn about storytelling as you came up with this name? Because it's a very technical product, yet you've kind of made it more down to earth and relatable by putting a story around it. I think that, I think Steve Jobs said, right? That what matters is a story. Like if you want to talk to people, you need to talk through stories. Actually, I had part of my life, like in the very beginning, when I was very young, was about like making movies and stuff like that. So actually my father was a theater director. So I kind of introduced to this part quite early. So I know how important is the story. The story is actually everything. If you want to go to the market, you need to go with the story. So for me, it was like obvious that we need a story. And yeah. Um, so tell us the, if we could back up a little bit about ackinacki, what was the key, the primary problem you were trying to solve, maybe articulate it for the audience. And then what was the key insight that you had that, ah, I need to create ackinacki. Like ackinacki will solve this problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I earlier, OK, uh basically, what you want to do is like, say it's a stupid example, but it's just an example. So let's say you want to create a decentralized Facebook, which you don't, but let's say you want. uh in Facebook, if you go to the mobile application and you post something on Facebook, you don't expect that to take minutes or a lot of seconds. Actually, you expect that to take exactly one second. There is actually research saying that people are ready for responsiveness of one second. If it goes above that, they think something wrong. Something is not correct. So, okay, so I the finality of this blockchain should be something that is comparable with the cloud computing today that we have. My cloud databases, back-end services, and so on. That is below one second response. And that's first requirement that I kind of came with. And second of all, of course, you have, like if you create Facebook, you probably don't want to like die after 10,000 people simultaneously want to post some messages, right? So you need to be scalable within this kind of one second finality framework. And that was the reason. And actually the inspiration... From the technical perspective, I came back, all the way back to the cloud computers. I had to go to Lamport, like consensus research, Raft protocols, and stuff like that. Then that's how I approached that. said, can we do like BFT, uh Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Protocol, um but that would work like cloud computer works, like the cloud protocol works. Because the cloud protocol works fine, like Raft and even Paxos. They work great, they're very fast, they're just not full tolerant. And if they try to be full tolerant, then the finality rises very quickly. Can we fix that? That was my, basically, that was the problem I want to solve. I see. And tell us the state of ackinacki right now. Is it you've launched mainnet? that? No, not yet. Okay. that's exciting. Well, tell us how testnet has been going um and tell us the plans for mainnet. Yeah, the testnet been more than a year in different, of course, the different testnets, a lot of testnets. My approach to launch, think is, actually I heard Anatoly speak about that recently when he said like, he would try to launch Solana now, he would turn all the knobs and wouldn't be very secure about that. meaning that try to break things and try to be as fast as possible. And he cannot do that now because the salon already has all this money and all this investors and everything behind it and so on and forth and so forth. So like the whole ecosystem that uh would be unacceptable to break, ah but we don't. So we will start from all the knobs turned up. ah That's why we kind of try to get all our community engaged before the network launch. So from the beginning, we will have like whatever transactions that are needed to be like in demand and we try not to break that. So that means that we couldn't just prioritize safety all the time. We had to prioritize the design and then to be the safest possible. And yeah, we're working with our partners Pro Vendo, which is doing formal verification. We are trying to be as safe as possible, particularly when we talk about smart contracts and the token distribution systems and tokenomics of the implementation, inaki-naki and all of that. But things will break. We know they will. um But we are prioritizing design. it will be as fast as possible. Yeah. Now to build ackinacki, did you raise uh some VC funding for it? We didn't raise VC funding like per se, we did the node sale, but yeah, there was VCs behind the node sale. We released that the Kingsway Capital, Huck VC, like uh K5, some other like good guys. Got it. Got it. And you've been building ackinacki for about two years, is that correct? More than two years. Three years. um And during the three years, you started out with your initial hypothesis and did that change along the way in the last three years as you were building ackinacki? It didn't change a bit. Tell us about that. Well, I mean, I think when you take that ultimate view on design and on requirements, uh it wouldn't change, wouldn't expect to change because it's not something that we saw as a marketing trend or something like that. Like, I believe that we are not there yet in terms of design of the blockchain design, technically. And because we are not there yet, We will have to be there, meaning that's how human race works. We always go till the end ah in terms of taking the technology as far as we can. We always do that. There is no way we're not going to do that. it's no way we're just going to sit in the middle and say, OK, we have three seconds final. It's fine. Whatever. Not going to happen. We are going to push as far as we can. And we are just. part of that process. So for me, it was very clear that the design need to go ultimately as far as possible. And it will go there. And if we are not going to do that, then someone else is going to do that. nobody else, when we did it, nobody else did so. Now the target audience for ackinacki, as a layer one, will be primarily developers and applications. Is that still correct for ackinacki? I don't think so. uh Ultimately, everything will be like... um I don't think you build platform for developers. Nobody build platform for developers unless you're building compiler or development tool. But um if you do the platform, then you expect distribution. Developer expands distribution. Developer will come in truly only when you have an audience as a platform. That's what we've been... believers from the beginning. We are not going to go after developers because it's completely useless. Like uh you're not creating a graphic card and then trying to get to developers to do something with that. You actually get this graphic card into the uh people's hand and then you say to developers, listen, we have that people already using this graphic card. Like, why won't you develop for it? Right? ah Same with Apple, you're not doing the phone and trying to bring this phone to developers. No, you're creating a phone. You think it's a great phone. You create some applications that users, that will be enough, just enough for users to start appreciating the phone, the platform. Then you give away, like give away, you sell the phone, whatever. And then once you have an audience, developers will come to you. Like they came to Apple and said, like, we want to develop on your platform. m Apple didn't really, like they went after a few developers, very like key developers to get like the essential applications first, right? The most essential application that the users really want. And then the rest of the developers will just come. We have exactly the same view on that. We're developing the blockchain, the platform. We develop ourself, the applications that we believe will bring users to the platform. Once users are in the platform, the developers will come. Got it. Tell us about some of those essential applications that you're building for users right now. Well, first of all, OK, so we saw what can be done, of course, like how you can utilize it. Why did we do that? Why we needed this one second finality and stuff? So first of all, we thought gaming. Gaming is a clear ah kind of ah target for us. We believe in blockchain gaming, or at least the gaming where blockchain comes together with the game ah in some way or form. We know why, we all know why. every game create, games create assets. Like when you, we know that from here, without blockchain, they are creating assets, right? The trading of cards, the trading of uh like, you know, stuff inside the game. It's happened before the blockchain in there. So blockchain is just perfect platform to do that. And so, but in order to do that, when you talk about games, you need like... You cannot rely on architecture where you have a game, then you have a server, developer managing the server, and then somehow, somewhere, there are assets that you actually can connect to, but it's not within the game. It's not in real time. So we thought, OK, we get rid of developer server, developer control. We give the real decentralization tools to manage these assets by the user directly from the game in real time. Mm-hmm. And that's one of the aspects that you can use like ackinacki. It's a real time fast finality blockchain. You can connect it to your game. And so we developed the games. We had to develop game um in order even to demonstrate that that's what we did. So the first thing we did is that we said, um here is the game. Now that's actually interesting because when we thought about how to launch it, the best way to launch ackinacki and how to bring the users. We said um maybe we should develop something where users can participate in kind of securing the network. And so we came up with this design where um we take the finger movement of the screen from the user, take entropy from there, and use it to verify some random transactions. on the network, which adds to the network security. And for that, we're paying user 22.5 % of the network of the actual block rewards. In terms of tokenomics, ackinacki is not pre-mined token. There is no TGs or nothing like that. It works like Bitcoin. We worked actually very hard on tokenomics to getting proof of work, Bitcoin-style tokenomics, into proof of stake world, which was a challenge by itself. But basically, So that adds to the security. And we thought, OK, so now we can take that part where people need to move this finger across the screen. So what's the best way to move the finger across the screen so it won't get boring? Well, let's create a game. So the game which we created called Puppet Game. And Puppet is a toy of Aki-Naki, actually. It's like funny character. So the Puppet Game is a card game which we released actually last week. There is now in the tournament that will happen before the network launch, which we also announced. It's on 7th. Sorry, starting on 15th. And then people will play for prizes and they get to know the game and so and so forth. But yeah, that's one of the examples how, like, where it should be used or could be used. So that's one of the games. You mentioned a few other applications. Yeah, that's what we did. We did this game. It's a 3D game, It's inspired by Balotro, not exactly. It's multiplayer, and so on and so forth. And yeah, it's a Unity-based game. And we will open source it. So developers will be able to come and say, OK, so this is the game. Is this how you can build it? You can take that and build it. We have audience for our game, so you can introduce your game as well to work on Akin Akin. That's one of the things. Thanks. the game mechanics, how this game will ah show off the features of ackinacki that are not present on any other layer 1. You mentioned... Yeah, the whole game is on the blockchain. Everything. Like everything you do is on the blockchain. There are no intermediary servers. The whole back end of the game is on the blockchain. And so there's no latency, very, very crisp and fast. And people will be able to tell that it'll feel like a Web 2 game. Exactly. And for those that are just looking to learn and play and have fun, I imagine a lot of people that are going to be playing this game, uh they know something about ackinacki. And so they'll be looking out for those features and they'll probably say to themselves, this feels like a Web 2 game. Some people that will be playing it might not even care about the architecture underneath and they just want to have fun. Of course, that's the whole idea, that you don't need to feel that you are, you know, in some clunky other environment and then say, oh, I'm on the blockchain. So that's why it's so bad. Yeah, yeah. But that also presents a challenge because you do want people to know that it feels like a web 2 game, but it's actually on the blockchain because that's kind of the key message, right? And so how will you achieve that um when, uh you know, given the circumstances of they just want to play a game and they don't care about the architecture? It's well, because of course, like there are features there inside the game, like trading cards, like, because you play, okay, it's free to play. are no NFTs or stuff like that. But when you play, you create this, this trade, it's game with the trading cards. And so the cards are tradable. We released that part, actually, the creation of the card was released to our community, like six months ago. We created, they created tens of thousands of these. And so, yeah, so these cards, they will be all transferred to mainnet once we launch. And this part of the game is actually very much blockchain-based. And now you will be able to inside the game once you're playing using decentralized exchange right from the game interface. And this is just to demonstrate what you can do with in-game assets. in real time with all the trading features and like whatnot, ah trading collectibles and stuff. So you can actually like sit, play competitively very fast and so on, but you also can play relaxed and then doing some other stuff like strategic stuff, like again, trading or stuff like that with your in-game assets. Yeah. And you're hoping that you're familiar with the word beachhead, right? Where it's kind of the initial application, which will showcase all of the features of the chain. And you're hoping that developers will see that and then they will want to build on the chain. And so this initial game is kind of going to act like a beachhead, uh especially if it brings in new users, then the users become. very attractive for new developers because they're going to want to reach those users also. ah Do you feel that this game is going to achieve your goals? Well, I don't know. mean, of course, that's hard to say. At the moment, like we released, four days ago. At the moment, the massive response to it is very positive. People love the game, most of them. It's quite challenging, particularly on the higher levels. You need a lot of math. It's uh very educational. It teaches you math, practically. um And so you actually want your children to play that game, actually. I'm telling you, you do. It's also during complete game. So on the very high levels, you will need programming skills to beat the next kind of level. If you go very, very high, it's already very hard. Like our mathematician cleared block 161. It goes block, like levels, it's called blocks. So block 161. And I see there are some other people who also are kind of doing that. It's extremely hard to do. Like it's really, really challenging. He was sitting with Excel table counting probabilities, not joking. So like, so yeah, but then in the beginning, like on the lower level, it's quite fun and uh you know, easier, much easier. Yeah. Let's talk about the tokenomics of ackinacki. It looks like it's a dual token system. Can you help describe for the audience what I think most people are familiar with just a single token for a chain, but you have two. Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, because like if you think any chain which has a single token chain, um it always has this problem that the token you wanted to appreciate the basic layer token because of the security, Because if you stake, then this is your security. But if you pay gas for this, then you want gas to be like stable, as stable as possible because developers don't want... Well, we see what happens with every chain where the gas starts to shoot. So you either need to cap your kind of um basic value of your basic token, not going too much up. Or if you want to optimize for developers, or you kind of want it to become very, very expensive for developers once it's shoot up. Like it's just, it's just two, like it seems that as we're trying to kind of put in one talking to completely like different goals. And so we said, why we're doing this. There is no reason to do that. Let's just separate the two. So one will be like a value preserving talking to one which we which you stake, which goes up on value, which has a limited supply. And we, we hope it will go up on value all the time. Like that's how it's designed. And there are some special mechanisms actually to kind of design it very close to Bitcoin. um Because the challenge there is, like very quickly, the challenge there is um in proof of stake, you don't have the capital expenditure that you have in Bitcoin. The miners and electricity costs a lot of money you actually pay to mine. In proof of stake, you just stake your money. You basically just... You're only losing opportunity, but you didn't really pay. So we had to kind of mitigate that. hopefully we did, but it was quite challenging. But anyway, so one token is for value and security. And then we created kind of stable coin, which is not a really stable coin, um because we said, if it's a gas token, it doesn't matter if it goes down. We only don't want it to go up. Mm. So we need to cap just one side of the trade. And we say, OK, fine, very simple. We will have the price where always you can buy with this, you can always buy the token. Like you can always will be able to buy the token for $0.10 a stable coin, always. Like automatically, you transfer on chain. You transfer $0.1 USDT, you get one shell. It's called shell. You get one shell. Now, that's it. But we won't buy it from you for 0.10. If you want to sell it, then it's an open market. And so if you want to sell it below, fine, then the price will go down. But remember, price go down is not a problem. We're not trying to create a stable coin. We actually uh call it unstable token. Because you can only be sure that you can always buy it for a certain price. But you won't be able to sell it on that price. We actually still think that within this design, ah the token will actually be quite stable. But it's not like sometimes it will go down, but it will come back, obviously with the usage. Because the more you need to use it, when you sooner or later, you kind of deplete the demand and then kind of you will need to bring more and to bring more, you need to pay 0.1. or whatever stable price is. So it will kind of go down and then back down and back, depends on the demand, which is fine. So if the network is not used very much, then it means that a lot of these tokens will be sold. So the price will go down, means the gas will go down in price. And then you again want to use it because the price is so cheap. If the network is very, very kind of consumed a lot. And a lot of developers use this to pay the gas, and a lot of people use it pay the gas, then it's kind of going down. We actually have also another thing, which is there is a gas-free part, where the chain is actually a lot of times just give you to use it for free. The gas is paid only after certain transaction limits, after certain limits on your app. If your application consumes too much, the way to think about that is this. When you uh run a validator, you're already committing resources you pay per year probably, or like a capitalist venture affixed. Inside this fix, you already have this amount of course, like this amount of capacity. compute capacity and network capacity that you anyway already built. So there is no reason not to use it. So to pay gas from the beginning doesn't make a lot of sense. To pay gas constantly all the time doesn't make a lot of sense because it's actually going stages. Like there is this amount of capacity. It's like AWS giving you for free the servers. you go to, if you now open the account in AWS, right, as a developer, you get a, you get an immediately free server. How do they do that? Well, it's exactly the same mechanism because they have so many servers. A lot of them just stay idle. Mm-hmm. And so they can give you this capacity so you can start developing, grow, and then start paying. So it's exactly the same mechanism in our case, because we have this unused capacity provided by all validators. So up to this capacity, you can use it for free. All of people can use it for free. But if your application starts to outgrow this validation capacity, then which means validator need to upgrade the machine to keep up with the demand. Mm-hmm. Got it. you start paying, right? And if it goes down shrinking again, then again, like it's becoming free. And that's actually very user friendly. I you know, I've had, had this debate with a friend who was new to blockchain and his comment was, uh, you know, for me to do a transaction, I had to buy this token. And that's just a weird experience. but, but we don't really think about that because we've been in it so long, but he's exactly right. It is a very awkward experience to when in the web to space, you, you first receive value. before you start paying for something. Here in Web3, we expect people to buy something first before they actually receive any value. And it's just an awkward experience. And so what you're sharing about the Shell gas token makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's effectively a credit like AWS. Imagine like people playing our game and in order to start playing game, they need to pay. It's weird. Yeah. It's not only weird, it's not gonna work. Yeah, no, exactly. It would be huge barrier to adoption, absolutely. Exactly. So we don't do that. Like that's from the beginning. That's actually when like three years ago, I knew that we had to do that. Like it was very early in the design that said we need to get free. um part to the developer. And then also we need to create a system where developer can easily pay for gas of their users. Because actually what that's what you're doing as a developer when you like consume AWS resources, right? You pay, it's not the users pay. You take money from users somehow and then obstruct that and then you pay for servers. So we think that this is also a valid model where developers can start their application for free, grow, then When they grow, you need to understand how you make money. You, when I say you, by the way, it's not a developer, decentralized system, same thing. can then, by using this money to buy the capacity that you need and the rest is revenue. Yeah. Now you mentioned Mainnet is coming up. uh How are the preparations going for that? Are you nervous, excited, anxious, looking forward to it? All of the above? uh For lack of a better word. Pardon my French. I believe it. It's totally insane. We're working 24 hours. It's totally insane. And in the middle of that, we release the game. We're in the tournament. And then all the validators that need to run their machines and the specs of the machines are not easy. The network is ah very fast. You need a lot of coordination on the network side. We've announced some partnerships with Netix, for example, for peering. because the internet just... you cannot expect to come with a validation on the open internet and expect the network to become very, very fast. And we see that from Solana, by the way, and from other guys that are actually doing this now, working on that. In our side, it was part of the design from the very beginning, because we realized 1 million transactions per second. Just imagine what kind of network you need to run this if you connect all the validators with all the validators. And that you if you want to still have this fast finality. Because this is what trilemma is actually like. uh So you have in order to be decentralized, you need to have a lot of validators. But when you have a lot of validators, you need to transmit packet between all of them. So if you have 10 seconds, that's fine. Like a theory, you can create broadcast protocols. ah that will be hoping like and propagating the network by hopes and do stuff like that. But every hope, we don't know where it goes because we cannot control the network. So imagine that I go with one hope to validator in New York and then the next hope is to Singapore, forget about fast finality. So you kind of need to go down to the network layer, to the network infrastructure layer and think how you organize the infrastructure of this internet to actually work for being able to... have the decentralization without hampering the decentralization. So yeah, it's. You mentioned Solana is looking or is doing something in this space. Are you talking about double zero? Got it. Yeah. effectively doing kind what we did. But in our case, it's just part of the protocol. Oh, I see. I see. have proxies which concentrate traffic and getting the best routes ah for the internet, but it's part of the protocol. So validators have to like install these proxies themselves to be able to kind of, it's like it's replacing the broadcast infrastructure, what we used to have in like, you know, in Ethereum and everywhere else, where you kind of have this broad and Solana as well. You have broadcast infrastructure. Literally all the blockchains today utilize broadcast infrastructure. you're broadcasting the messages. Broadcasting is not the fastest way to get the message across. Okay, now um one question before I go into some rapid fire questions if that's okay. You mentioned the node sale, is that how you initially got your validator set? Okay, I see. And how many validators does ackinacki have now? Well, ah we sold around 5,000 licenses for nodes. So it's like software licenses. We sold them. So it's about 5,000 validators in general, we expect. Of course, you can delegate 10 licenses per one node. in the beginning, OK. But it's not exactly. uh delegation like you expect because in delegation normally you would have 10 x10 rewards for this server, not in our case. You will still have the reward per validator but you simply can delegate the node so you don't lose what we call reputation coefficient which is important part of the rewards. But you will mine less tokens when delegating everything to like one node. So with the time when someone start to delegation process is basically self-adjusting kind of mechanism of decentralization in the market terms. If you think that you actually want to optimize for infrastructure cost, you will delegate 10 per node. So will be less nodes. But once you think that the network is actually like you want more tokens and you want to optimize for more tokens, for mining more tokens, you will de-delegate, which means you will have more servers on the I see. So it's self-balances that way. When you have the token generator, so there won't be a token generation event because these are, these are. The first block, the rewards start with every block, and then they distribute to the validators, the current validator set. That's very interesting. So it's a hybrid model of mining and staking. It's not technically mining because you kind of don't really mine anything. still... You don't spend resources on stupid hashers. But yeah, in terms of rewards... The reward is not paid to the actual block producer. The rewards are based across the whole protocol because everyone participates. I see. Because in security, everyone participates. The block producer produced the block, but everyone else participate in. There are subset of nodes which validate the block, and then other nodes is applying the block. And they also, because it's multi-threaded, so there could be many more than one block producer as the network becomes more, will have more and more threads with more and more load. So more and more nodes we need to produce the blocks. I see. Okay, let's go, let's jump into some rapid fire questions. um Okay, what is the most underrated dev tool? Web2 or Web3? That's really hard to answer. Wow, you just overwhelmed me because I'm thinking like 20 tools. that because you mentioned Git earlier. Git is important, but it's not underrated. don't think Git is underrated. don't think Git, everyone uses Git. ah Poof, you would say AI, but no, um not in our domain at least. Like we use it for some reviews, but not too much because like you cannot write that kind of code with AI, not yet. um Docker, No, no, I'm just joking. I would say formal verification. Okay. Formal verification in general and what guys in Provendo are doing, automating formal verification. This is, I think, yeah, I think this is actually right. I this is the most underrated tool for, because like people, when you say, okay, you're building like mission critical application like blockchain, you need to be very secure because it can be like a lot at stake and people doing audits. Yeah, I remember uh out there called Formula Verification, is like immensely, providing immensely more for almost the same price as Audit. Yeah, I remember during the early Tezos days where there's a lot of talk about formal verification, it hasn't seemed to have been picked up by a lot of protocols as a yeah. they try all the time. There is talks about this and that, but we're doing that for the last five years. Like Preventa is developing these tools for, for, for async solidity, which they developed whole special language called Ursus, which translates this into the, into the kind of, uh, Coq, which is formal approver, uh, and, and, and verifies a lot of this is automated. So it's much faster than you kind of used to, because you used to have this, it was a very manual process that takes months. to just verify like a small program. It's not anymore. It's not anymore. Yeah, and with AI I imagine that's probably going to get faster too. Maybe. this thing's AI is not yet doing very well. No, we're not there yet. Yeah. Okay, last rapid fire question. And this could be in crypto or out of crypto, any domain. uh Can you think of like a hero or influence that you have that that helps you in your entrepreneurial journey or inspires you in your entrepreneurial journey? Yeah. um I had a lot over the years, like a lot. There were different people, different books which influenced me on different stage. um Can you tell us one? Yeah, Graham, like Buffett, Buffett answer, which is correct. think Dow of Capital is a great book. I urge everyone to read it because it talks about economics, um which you want to know. Obviously, it talks a lot about Austrian school, but um in general, I think it's a right view on how things work. which I think is very important, particularly in blockchain space where you kind of... a lot about economics, right? So this is important. um There was a lot of inspiration of like, I take inspiration from sports as well, a lot, um guys like Pep Guardiola, for example, or like the manager of like Manchester City, ex Barcelona, for example, like when you take like, it's sports in general, uh on a high level I'm talking about, particularly management sports. uh like managing the teams or things like that. I think I got a lot from that in terms of leadership and motivation uh skills that you definitely need when you go through the extremely hard times and challenging times. So that can eh help a lot, I believe. Yeah, I agree. Well, Mitja, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us and to tell us about GOSH and the ackinacki protocol that you guys are building and best of luck in the next few weeks as you guys march towards mainnet. Thank you very much, Peter. It was a pleasure. Thank