Welcome back to the show. Today we have Shiv Shankar, CEO of Boundless. Excited to have you on Shiv. Excited to be here. Thank you so much. um Look forward to a great conversation. Um, we had a Reka on, uh, who's on your team a couple of months ago. Uh, a lot has happened since then at the time, um, there was no Kaito leaderboard for boundless yet. And, um and we had just, a lot of our conversation was around ZK and, uh, whether, uh, it's the right time for ZK. And, um, and I kind of want to explore some of those today, those questions today, but first I want to get started with, um, you and I have a common history. um You know, you were at Amazon, I was at Amazon. I'd love to hear from you, kind of like what lessons you learned that you have, you know, that's become part of your, um you know, daily operating, um how you operate daily at Boundless. Yeah, think, yeah, great to meet a lot of Amazonians in Web3. think um we always have a few scars to show, um but it makes us stronger. um All that said, think companies like Amazon teach you a few things about the business, as it were. um Amazon never had the sexiest product, but they did always have the product for you. That's worth remembering they that there is a company out there that is so customer obsessed That that it's part of their lingo. Even if it grammatically doesn't make sense They say stuff like from a customer obsession point of view doesn't really make sense What they're trying to say is like, I don't know how to solve this problem for this customer I'm trying to sell says this to no vanity projects. No vanity metrics uh It's just a focus on what people want and how do you get there as fast as possible? There's a phrase that I learned Amazon which I use every day in my stand-ups which is decision velocity. Not decision speed but decision velocity. Velocity of course having a sense of direction as well. Always be pointing at where you want to end up. Your not star, your OKRs, what have you. Every company is free to use their own system of managing their goals but roughly they all amount to the same thing. You should know where you're headed. Make sure your decisions are taking you there and how quickly can you make these decisions. We are a decentralized network of boundless. And it's part of our internal philosophy as well. I don't want to be in every single conversation trying to make every single decision. But actually find capable people who cannot just execute, but can also make decisions and stand up for them. That's something I like to empower people to do as well. um You hire the smartest and the best people so that um you give them latitude to make mistakes. um Explain to them when they get it wrong uh what you would have done differently. Sometimes some mistakes can't be avoided. That is also part of the humility process as well. It's like, you're exploring new space. Yeah, we're going to screw up something. And that's okay. As long as you went about doing the right things and learn something new, that's fine. And giving people the latitude and just reminding them that not to back off. um The idea isn't to make a mistake and become more cautious, but to learn from it, become uh anti-fragile, be stronger and make decisions even faster. So you actually create a group of leaders, right? So you and I probably have leadership principles tattooed on our backs. um And the whole point of Amazon having leadership principles is like everybody is a leader. That's the, you know, go ahead phrase. It's you have to empower people. So these are things I actually live by. There are a things that Amazon does, for example, that isn't applicable to us. Amazon is a giant company has hundreds of thousands of employees has unlimited budgets. We, while frugality is based in what Amazon does, the level of frugality or the level of resource minimalism that we have to deal with is of a different scale. So there are some day-to-day decision-making that I have to do, which is maybe different from what Amazon would do. But ultimately, I'm also Seattle-based. So it's in the water. It's hard to escape some of these things. yeah, hopefully the team is actually taken to it. I have a young team. I know you spoke about Rekha, her colleagues in marketing for sure, as well as a lot of our engineers. have a really strong work ethic. Hopefully, whatever little experience I've uh working at Microsoft, Lyft, all these places is helping them structure their own days a little bit better. um is more effective than someone who works hard but is also conscious of time management. um Those kind of folks are basically unstoppable. They are the 10xers. Yeah, hopefully, I can grow a few more of those and that always helps. No, I always look back to my time at Amazon. was there um really in the early days. um I was in a number of roles, kind of a rotational program. um But I ended up spending most of my time in supply chain and logistics and in couple of different two pizza teams where we developed at the time, it was called Fast Tracked. And it was really an experiment that lasted for a number of years and then the Fast Track experiment later became Amazon Prime. And really the main research question was when an order drops, can we get it out same day without having to put extra resources to it? Which was a really, really hard research question to answer. And so we had to do a number of things both on the technology side as well as the process side to actually make that happen. And that was really, really fun. uh like factoids for your viewers here. There are more Amazon Prime members than there are people with like cable connections and phone lines. I don't know if people even know these phrases, but like the downstream impact or the value, the lifetime value of a customer who is a Prime customer versus like a regular customer is like 50, 60, 70 times more. It's all kinds of like things there. Like Amazon really did actually... in my opinion, invent this sort of like membership thing which has contributed to that bottom line in like an amazing, amazing way. It really, it's massive. It's a massive win for Amazon for sure. Let's get into Boundless. For the audience, if you could describe Boundless in uh kind of a relatable way um and maybe help kind of add some flesh to what zero knowledge is and what you guys do at Boundless. Sounds good. So there's a few different ways to look at it. Let's say you are uh Web3 native and you understand some of the pre-existing protocols out there. A lot of ways, Boundless is similar to Chainlink, where Chainlink brings oracles to every chain, brings the key to every chain. We make it accessible for every chain, on every chain, for every developer on that chain, for every application on that chain, and for every use case on that chain. That's one way to sort of look at it, especially if you are fluent in Web3. If you are not, and maybe you want to take a step back and even ask the question, well, what exactly is ZK? How does it really work? It's basically a way for you to encrypt computation and compress it and represent it with a proof. What that means is, let's say I run a really large, I take a gigantic number, some 300 billion digits or whatever, and I need to prove that it's a prime number. Try doing that on chain. The gas cost will just explode. You'll just be paying, you know. Firstly, you won't be able to do it, but even if you did, they could have to spend thousands of dollars on gas. But all you really need to prove is such a big number is a prime number or not. What would you do? ZK allows you to run this computation within um the ZK context. I'll explain what that is in a bit. um And get that proof, and the size of that proof is tiny. And you can just verify that on chain. Now, your gas costs are basically verification costs, which don't, it's like a few hundred gas or whatever. It's like negligible. That's, and now you can replace that competition with anything. It could be something for your DeFi app, something for, you know, logging in, like managing records, looking at things, doing any kind of math. And when any kind of feature that you want for the application can move all of that off chain, run it inside the ZK context and just submit proofs. Now, the reason why I'm saying ZK context is till RIS0 came about, which was, you know, two, two and a half years ago, the way you actually do ZK computation is you have to write these circuits to represent this computation. And when I say circuits, it's actually circuits. There's like gates and stuff, and it's very low level. There's maybe like 200 people who can do this at production scale. There's a few PhD grads who can do it for funsies, but you can't really execute in production. So inaccessible, right? So you have 200 people who can do it, 100 people who can audit it, 300 people just having fun at the top. The ZK VM is what the Zero brought forward. A way for you to represent your... logic in Rust or just a high level programming language, making it accessible to anybody who could learn how to program or already knew Rust. And that was translated into a circuit. That meant anybody could do it. And hence was born this notion of ZK at scale. Because still then, for example, Polygon actually wanted to have a circuit to represent EVM state transactions, a ZK EVM circuit as it were. Famously, they spent Hundreds of millions of dollars. I think somewhere in the 250 to 350 million dollar range acquiring every major researcher They could find put them under one roof and told them write this one circuit and they all spent two three years doing all of this When we brought forward the ZKVM we assigned it to two or three engineers over a couple of weeks and we did it So that is the order of magnitude of shift Where you three hundred fifty million dollars every researcher in the world coming together one circuit I'm not saying it's two guys, it's like two of our best devs, but even then two guys, just, know, for a couple of weeks and they have a ZK AVM running. That's the big change that we brought forward. Now that we've empowered anybody to be a ZK developer, how do you actually bring ZK proving to everybody? Now the interesting thing to remember is running these circuits can be more computationally inefficient. They take thousands of times, they're thousands of times slower than regular computation because it's There's a layer on top of the regular computer that it needs to operate. Bringing that computation to every chain is important as well. So Boundless does that for you. So let's say you are a developer on Ethereum, you have a need to run some kind of program and some kind of inputs. You call the smart contract, give all these inputs and say, I'm willing to pay 0.0004 ETH or something for this computation. need it in a couple of hours. The Boundless protocol finds a prover for you. gets the proof done and lands that on chain. You just run with your life. You don't really need to know anything about ZK, how to run this hardware, do any of that. You just say I need this proof and the computation is done. There is no, there is no limiting factor here on the scale of the computation. Hence the term boundless. You can put in as much computation as you want. A good example of this is Eigen that occasionally wants to do these 2 billion gas worth of computation, which is basically impossible with 30 blocks. You can't buy it. Literally, you would be attacking the chain. So it's not possible. It's not feasible, but they can just offload all this computation on boundless and for a few dollars have those in place. This allows every chain to scale. So a lot of your viewers might be hearing a lot of talks and writings from seeing a lot of writing from Vitalik about how to scale the chain. This is literally what they mean. Currently Ethereum is extremely secure. Nobody can alter it or attack it. but its computational power is about the same as a Raspberry Pi. You can't make it go faster. If I add another million nodes to validate Ethereum, Ethereum is not going to x faster. It's the same. Whereas um if you add more and more computation to boundless, you are able to compute more, you're able to send more uh requests to boundless and have them served and add more computation to Ethereum that way. So since we were talking about at Amazon, the way to think about this is this is EC2. We are building the EC2 of the blockchain world. And the fact that we are available on every single chain allows us to serve all the chains, which means, again, the cost is subsidized by different chains. So Ethereum is launching on Boundless today and Solana launches tomorrow. Since all the demand is aggregated into Boundless and Boundless is not an L1 or an L2, costs continuously go down. This is what we want to see. um The more computational power that is available to people, the more complicated or rather um attractive applications people can build. And the more they can do that, the better they can build businesses, the more the size of the ecosystem and the pie goes. I appreciate you sharing that. A lot of people when they see the berry and the narrative and the branding around boundless, um it's quite elusive because the berry is very relatable and it's fun and it's cute, but underneath all of it is really, really a lot of heavy lifting, technical heavy lifting. When you think about your various audiences. You've got chains as one of the top audiences or go-to-market. Then you've got developers. Then you've got community members that really appreciate the Barry narrative and the branding. em How do you manage the messaging to each of those audiences? Yeah, I think that's been the most complicated part of our journey. shout out to Rekha, Sanky, Kashri, all these folks who help us do this really well. I'm pretty right-brained. So I'm way more powerful with a whiteboard than I am with my tweets. So if you sit with me for like two hours, I could probably explain a lot of things much more clearly. um we have this challenge where we're trying to um change minds, perceptions, change businesses and change how things are being done. And in the meantime, make sure we manage expectations as well. This is revolutionary technology, so it's going to be advancing at a uh hectic pace, which means like anything I might be telling you today in like six weeks time, 10 weeks time, might become defunct. That is the rate at which ZK has been advancing as well, which is why these metaphors help. I think uh when I'm talking to folks, uh it's actually easier for me to work backwards from where we want to be in two years, five years time, because that is a vision that people can share and it's probably not going to change. And from there, work backwards to where they are in a comfortable language that they want to hear as well. So the vision for if you are a chain, if you are a developer, user, or anybody, is the same. It's like in five years is where we want to be. And what I usually tell people is like, oh, a world where there's quite a lot of applications that you're using on a daily basis on your phone, on your browser, um which protects your data, which protects your identity. You don't really know where your assets live. You just know that it's in an um environment like a chain where it's BFD secure and nobody can change um the underlying value of your assets without your permission. um Your UX is as smooth or even smoother than it is today. um And uh you have multi-chain assets, all of that stuff, your regular finance, you're able to pay for coffee, you're able to pay for your mortgage. Everyone gets along with that message. And after that, working backwards to like, if you're a builder, how do you build it? If you're L1, what is your responsibility in making this come together? If you are a user, the notion of like berries and everything else makes it playful and how you can help us. build an ecosystem of these applications. Because I think if the demand exists for people saying like, hey, I want to be more secure. I want to be quantum resistant. I want lots more features on my applications. I want things that are connected to my um existing applications on my phone. I want client-side proving. These sort of demand, oh if we create the demand in the user level, it drives the application builders there as well. So that's what I try and do. I'm not saying it's always successful. A lot of folks uh jump. a few steps and then they find like, wait, I have a lot of pieces missing. And the answer is yes, there are a few things left for us to do, um which is part of the journey. If all the pieces already existed, like we'd be in the future um and know, boundless would already be successful. We have a few more things to build and put out there. You know, even the going backwards, I mean, that's clearly an Amazon kind of influence that you have there. um The branding is really interesting, right? Because it's very relatable. And I talked to Rika about this. uh But the technical heavy lifting underneath is really, really pretty special. your comment earlier on Polygon and um what they attempted to do, I believe they've sunsetted their ZKEVM product. I could be wrong there, but I believe that's the case. um It's really, really hard to build. inboundness appears to be of leading the charge there. um Why is it now the right time for ZK? um I ask that because I've interviewed a number of ZK. I used to work for a project that was in the ZK space, Oasis Labs. And um like ZK has been around for a while, but now feels like the right time. It feels like things are converging and it feels like it's actually like the right time now. um Am I right in thinking that? 100%. So ZK has always had this curse of being too early, mostly because the technology is so promising. In a lot of ways, AI is the same as well. There was a while when all we really wanted to talk about was theory and all the other things. And then what happened there? There was a lull and now we're back again. um But uh in ZK's case, because this allure of unlimited. computation, unlimited scaling was um so strong. People jumped on it quite a bit early, which is good. It does provide eyeballs. It does provide funding for more research, for alignment on what is possible, what is not possible, what is the most important thing to do, and so on. But now it is actually in a state where it is usable. It is accessible to everybody. The costs have come down tremendously, like 1,000x performance improvements. It is accessible on hardware. You can run it on AWS. can buy it on hardware and run it. And then there is also the fact that there are glowing endorsements from Vitalik and Justin and, you know, Justin Drake, who's a key researcher at EF, all of these folks as well, because they were planning, and if you look at their plans and go, you know, scroll through their Twitter for a while and go back two, three years, their plans accommodated for ZK to be at a certain state in five, six, seven years. And we've speed-run that by like, you know, two, three X. We're ahead of their expectations on every front and going even faster. And this is basically meant that there is glowing endorsement from them, which is like, hey guys, we need to snarkify faster. Clearly these guys are ahead of the curve, which is a good thing. That there is now a technology available packaged in a form that is accessible, easy to understand, easy to audit. Enough sort of duplication of the work exists now with like more teams such that you're not like, oh, you know, if Shiv has a cold, like ZK work comes to a halt. stands still now that that will ever happen, but it's now fragmented into like multiple teams were doing multiple forms of research, more funding. We see funding, all of that is like started happening. It's a live and thriving ecosystem worth taking a bet on. um So that's happened now. So ZK is now having its moment in a lot of ways people want to call it ZK summer, ZK winter, all of that stuff, but like it's um ZK is here, ZK is being adopted. ZK is going to be powering key parts of infrastructure for scale, for interop. And we are showing this live in action as well. One of the key things for me is ZK is theoretical enough that I can keep talking and people will just get bored and be like, here's a little bit of money, just go away. But I don't think there is much value in that, that maybe like calls back to some era when this was possible. But I think the... real path forward is showing. And that's what we did with mainnet beta as well. Like Boundless team completely skipped the public testnet part because we wanted to show what we could do with live funds um with giant proofs on a live network with thousands of provers and be completely decentralized from day one. There is no aspirational goal with Boundless. We're not going to be decentralized in some time. We are already decentralized. In fact, we turn off our provers all the time. for like days on end because we just like, hey, like, unless we're trying out something, we just keep our provers off because we have like thousands of GPUs, thousands of provers online. We're already doing all the proofs. We're doing 40 trillion cycles a day. This is way, way more than what anybody expected. um Our hope is to like, I have like really, really crazy OKRs for the team. I'm trying to get into quadrillions of cycles and all that stuff as well. And we want to... really be able to offer all of that, the network's uh ability to take shocks, um handle any kind of uh fraudulent activity, dismiss them, it's been so surprising. um So my background as a leader or an executive is mostly in markets and market design, m either ride share or digital services or physical goods, all that stuff. And I actually thought to some extent, I've seen all of them. I've seen all the markets, there's nothing. new left for me to see. But the power of markets on Web3 or crypto is unbelievable because here's the thing that somehow I knew and I didn't realize, which was when I was working at Lyft, you'd launch a market or when I was at Grab, you'd launch a market and like stuff would happen. It'll trickle down to our data systems. know, the executives make a decision and then we like implement something and that's the loop of like improvement. in a completely open marketplace where people can look at the code, see what's happening, manage their own interface with the market, write their own code. And they are so empowered to do all of these things. The market evolution has been insane. The cycle is speed running at 100x where people are finding more and more opportunities to like anticipate failures, get ahead of that. We're doing like 99 % SLA on a bunch of like, you approving system with like 2000 random individuals that we can't identify and talk to. That is insane, right? Like, uh I actually thought that would be our biggest headache. We seem to have just just brushed aside that problem. And we are going we are merely on our path to three nines, four nines. um That puts us in the same league as Amazon and AWS. um We are oodles cheaper than AWS and proving. um I think uh the Median cost of proving on Boundless right now is zero dollars. Because of the tokenomics, everybody just sort of like working with the tokenomics are like, yeah, I'll just do it for free. I don't really care. I'm offering, or Boundless is offering free compute to everybody. um Jevin's paradox is going to kick in when I'm offering such a high utility service for free, people are going to take it up. More and more people are going to fill it up with like their needs and you're going to see an explosion in applications. um I can't tell you how excited I am. Let's talk about that. mean, you your description of the markets, very interesting because when I think of Boundless, you know, it's on the one side are the Provers, right? And then on the other side are the clients or customers and in Boundless's case, it's chains. uh How were you able to grow the Provers side of the market so much? Like, what was the go-to-market there? So the Provers are the, so it is a two-sided marketplace, but it's important to remember it's supply driven or rather like Prover driven. So we've had extensive conversations with our Provers for the longest period of time. Of course we ran our own centralized proving system called Bonsai for like two years now, where we offered basically a RESTful API. You can just use the API to make a call. We did see through billing to AWS. We didn't take our time. We were like, hey, AWS, you know, this is what it costs. You can just pay that. Or some people were like, ask for discounts, for discount, whatever. We just manage that. But it taught us a lot about running ZK workloads in the cloud. What do you need? How do you scale? How do you get the best performance? um How do you parallelize your jobs? What is the best combination of hardware and software? And that's been something, nobody's going to appreciate that unless you're a prover. Because you're just like, so I want to be a prover on Boundless. What do I do? Is the first question. And we're like, OK, that's great. Welcome to the team. Here's all this stuff that's open source that you can use. We give you two critical pieces of software. One is called the broker, which is the client that talks to the market and helps you bid on things and figure out what you want to bid. It's all configurable. So you can maybe say, oh, I only want giant jobs or I only want small jobs. So here's my bidding strategy and this what I want to do. In fact, we have a hedge fund company that is having a ton of fun playing around with it right now because they're like, this is our bread and butter. So it's kind of gamified for them. They love playing around with that. And then we also give them even more critical piece of software called Bento, which allows them to manage their fleet of GPUs. um I can't tell you how complicated that is. um It's one thing to have a bunch of GPUs and just use them. It's another thing to take a job, break it up into parallelizable bits, spread it across the workload, make sure everything is working really well, put all the proofs back together, make sure your utilization is as high as possible so you're always using. know, spare cycles and so on. We give all of that away. Now here's the weird thing. Some teams took that and improved that as well. This is the power of the open marketplace. They're like, yeah, I can do a better job. Go ahead, do a better job. Our job as stewards of the network is to make sure there is a baseline amount of software that we give everybody that allows everyone to be competitive, but we can't possibly stop anyone from being better. And already people have, there's a, and the lower here is like, there is a... student who just graduated high school, I'm told, congratulations to him, I still don't know his name, he's a non, who's been dominating the proving charts with a very, very small setup. He's kind of bored, I guess, and he's been playing around with it, and he's become a really, really good prover. So having these conversations with the provers, having a customer obsessed approach brought like, hey, like you want to launch, what does it take, where are you getting stuck, making sure your time to onboard is under six hours, make sure we are able to debug, identify the folks we want to work with. have regular check-ins with them, um answer any questions they might have. Make sure their out-of-the-box experience is great. But then after that, when they start modifying things, make it really clear in the documentation what is a little bit iffy. And if they want to do it, it's fine. But we can't support it if it goes down. Or where are the areas of improvement? Have a clear roadmap in front of them. All the right things create that transparency, and people start trusting you. Here's the second kicker here as well. The way we've designed our tokenomics is extreme. extremely attractive to people who have GPUs. And there's quite a lot of people who have spare GPUs now. We reintroduced this concept of mining, we call it ZK mining. And what that actually allows them to do is, irregardless of the level of demand, keep their GPUs running hot, make sure they're always providing computational services. And we have a new primitive in our network called proof of verifiable work. It's essentially proof of work, which is the Bitcoin style um consensus protocol. have a layer on top that basically allows us to tally up all the work that anybody has done on the network and distribute emissions in an equitable way. The key departure here from Bitcoin is there's always one winner per epoch in Bitcoin world. In our case, everybody is a winner. Everybody who participates gets a share of the rewards based on the computation that they do. This completely changes the fabric of why people value a token. That's why we're seeing this massive subsidy effect as well. um There is in a world where you're willing to just do the computation because you're mining. And like, if someone pays you even a little bit more than zero, you'll just be like, I'll just compute that too. And that's what we're seeing. um Yeah, we're able to attract the best and brightest in terms of approvers from East Asia, Middle East, Europe, North America, South America, all of it. I'm really happy that we have a global coalition of approvers. um There are also teams. who are thinking of building, you know, compliant approver pools and so on and so forth. So they can offer even more bespoke services to clients in like different countries and so on. This is again, great news because for folks who like, you know, are from the business world, they'll see this as like us creating SKUs of our services that we offer at different price points for different kinds of customers. A lot of people in our industry now are talking about product market fit, which is fantastic. But the next conversation after product market fit is segments. uh Distributing your product into segments, identifying the most marketable, highest ROI segments, growing them and so on. We had already moved to that stage, which is both scary and exciting. So you described the supply side of the market and that's really exciting. An additional question there is what is the percentage of professional provers versus mom and pop provers? Or how are you segmenting that side? Yeah. So obviously I don't know the skill level of everybody who's participating, but I can tell you that is a tremendously large number of people who have like small setups for all. And this harkens back to the BTC days, right? You're, I was in my dorm, mining Bitcoin. have a gaming computer mining ZK coin. I think that's what's happening now, which I love. ah My dream I was saying, and obviously there's no guarantee or whatever, all the caveats. It's like, some kid is paying his like, you know, tuition in college. using the ZK coin that he mines would be, I think I would sleep really well the night I hear that that has happened for at least one person. uh But that's really sort of like the distribution we see. And that's fantastic. This is something that ETH aspires to. Ethereum wants to aspire to a point where like people are all proving from home and whatnot. We're already there, um which is fantastic for our network. um It gives us a true sense of being distributed. um And actually, I don't mind sharing this with you know, folks as well. Like my goal ultimately is to vanish. Like I'm a professional hire. I'm not a founder of Boundless. I was hired to professionally manage this network to a point where we are successful, fully distributed, um completely autonomous. And there is no need for like a central team to do anything. And once that happens, we will all fade into the, into the void, do lots of interesting things. I look forward to a day when I am competing with the other provers as a peer to peer or like building businesses at off-bound list. That's really the goal here. Yeah. m I love that. And people kind of miss that point, right? Especially in crypto where there is uh right now anyway, just kind of a bias for um kind of, it's almost like a money bias where there is uh projects with teams that kind of stay on for a long time. But really the goal is to dissolve and to become fully decentralized and there is no team anymore. but it's like everyone. oh every person I talk to who's landed here like more than like three, four years ago, um that is their expectation. um And the way we set the chessboard up, is too enticing for people to stay on forever. This is why like founders stay on forever and so on. um I'm not going to say that all of us are boundless, are like just hippies, just walking around. um I am a capitalist. But I also think even from a purely capitalistic point of view, the networks and protocols that have survived the longest have flourished are the ones with the least amount of centralized control, either directly or of mindshare. And the more decentralized and community-owned you are, the better it is for that protocol to ultimately succeed. um I'd much rather, you know, if I have a hundred ZK coin and much rather each of them be worth like thousand dollars, I think like a few dollars and I have like lots of ZK coin. It's way better if there is actual community ownership of people who find it useful, who participate, who build a top it. um And it's like really, really sort of broadcast across the world. That is my ultimate goal. um Once we actually, you know, move towards a point where we we have main net and we have TJ. This is really the only thing I'm chasing is how do we make ourselves a completely self-sufficient protocol that doesn't need human intervention, except for like somebody needs to, I don't know, like print out something or whatever, like the basics of like running a foundation of like two or three people. And all of that is like, even how to vendors, how do we get to that point? And how do we all like have a grand, we are all fired party and leave. And that's really the goal here. um I've seen multiple chains suffer from this. uh Let me give you another sort of example of why this is necessary. I've already come to the point where we're already here where the market is out innovating the builders. My product team and I couldn't have foreseen a bunch of things that are already happening on the protocol in a positive way, where people are iterating even faster um than we could have. Clearly, we are not the best decision makers for where this protocol should be headed long term. Short term, there is incredible alignment. um We want to make sure it is protected from um people from it getting attacked or like it going down and making sure there's enough, excuse me, enough decentralized governance in place. But once that's done, what is the job that I'm doing um except maybe just collecting money and trying to like offload? um, you know, tokens or do any of this like financial arbitrage and all that stuff. That's really not the job that like any of us signed up to do. We're all aligned on this mission to like create boundaries, make it a self-sufficient protocol, and then participate with our friends outside. uh, get along with all the other provers and like compete or like build businesses, like really participate as like, um, peer to peer peers in the, in the network. Let's talk about the demand side. You mentioned that chains are uh the primary customer on the demand side. That's a unique go-to-market because other ZK projects, think, initially serving applications versus chains. Tell us kind of the thinking behind that. Yeah, so there's two or three things here to consider. One is like, don't really sort of say no to anybody. um Chains are, at this point in time, the hungriest set of folks who are willing to move the fastest. This just happens to be true. um It is part of um their agenda and also, in a lot of ways, they are uh generally well-resourced, have um internal knowledge of ZK and are able to judge what is the best ZK technology. When you go to an application team, um if the application already exists and it's out and people are using it, what we are telling them to do is um change everything about their application right now. The sales cycle, as you can imagine, goes on for a reasonable amount of time. Let's say you go to someone else who is going to build a new application. This is actually an easier sell. It's like, use our tech. And we actually do do that a lot and see a lot of success with that. With L1s and L2s in particular, when they want to evaluate technology, they have in-house expertise and we are extremely confident in our ability to convince anybody who knows what they're doing um about Boundless, about the underlying ZK stack, about our security credentials, where we are headed and our roadmap and the tokenomics and all that as well. They're able to like drop that space and um we are very, very confident in our ability to win them over without having to do any sort of... ah lubricate the deal with like um outrageous amounts of grants and stuff. I'm not a very strong believer in that kind of alignment. um I think grants are important when you want to seal the deal or you want to like sort of make sure that people want to like lower the risk of adopting new technology. That makes sense to me, but sort of depending on it as a semi bribe is a lose lose for everybody who's involved. And from that perspective, Once you actually have L1s and L2s on board, it's actually easier for newer applications to also trust newer technologies because, as an example, let's say Optimism, they're going to do their research, they're going to talk to us, they're going to spend six months going through everything. And if they're convinced, the chances are they are going to be able to do better due diligence than a three-person startup doing a DAP. These are important things to consider, especially as you onboard more folks. We also have limited resources. I would love to hand every project. using Boundless and engineer from Boundless, but I'd be out of engineers in like a week. So we can't really reach out to every single one. So there is a little bit of like arbitrage involved as well. um What I will say is that we are making it easier and easier for apps to self onboard. um Obviously for larger protocols, there's a lot more bespoke work. So maybe the focus might be more on the L1s and L2s, but to be honest, this story changes every two months. My bet is by October, I will be telling you the opposite story. And you'll be like, well, you just came on a podcast a couple months ago, you L1s and now it's businesses. I'm like, yeah, business changed. I want us to be nimble from that respect as well. Also, there are only so many L1s. And I think I'll be very honest, all of them are talking to us. There's no one left, no L1 you can name that is not talking to us. I think the sales arbitrage is really meaningful because once Boundless is integrated with an L1, every application on that L1 can call and use Boundless versus having to work with each application individually. And so I think the sales arbitrage is really brilliant. um Tell us about the, um I guess, if I were an application, I guess two questions. Which L1s does Boundless currently support? And you mentioned Solana earlier, and I'm curious about that. And what is the process if I'm an application developer and I'm building on a chain where Boundless is supported, what does that look like? And if I wanted to add some kind of ZK functionality to my application. Yeah, so those are great questions. um So from an L1 perspective, we support Ethereum, course, base and a bunch of other, all the EVM chains, we either support them or it's very trivial for us to provide support because they're all kind of the same setup. Solana is the next big step we're working on as well. We have a lot of grand plans in like unifying interrupt between Solana and Ethereum and how we do that and how we actually interrupt, how we power interrupt between these L1s. So that's something we're... chasing. um If you are an application developer, there are two or three ways. I'll focus on Ethereum first because that is possibly the more clearer answer. um One is, let's say you already have a bunch of smart contracts out there. And what you want to do is basically run those in a ZK context. We have a library already available for you. It's called Steel, which allows you to just run your contract inside the ZK VM. And it can take as much computation as you want. There's no gas involved. And just write the proof back. run the smart contract off chain and just drop some approves. That gives you instant access to ZK. And the way to actually run these things is through Boundless. it's a smart contract to smart contract call, completely native if you are a native experience, if you are a developer on Ethereum. There isn't anything new you need to learn. um It's the same as saying like, just call a contract and like submit a bunch of inputs and just wait for some. approved to land and then you just can continue with whatever it is that you are doing. This is very important to us that we offer a native experience to every developer. Part of onboarding here is not just onboarding applications, but onboarding developers as well. um Microsoft was really good at this with MSDN and Visual Studio and all these things where they hooked into people. um Everybody who went to college and learned a little bit of programming, all of them just happened to know the Microsoft Stack really, really well. um We're hoping to build more standards. The way RIS0 and Boundless actually operates is that we aggressively push back on ideas where we need to do custom things. um We want to build on a top of standards as well as implementing new standards. um There are currently 30 odd ZKVMs out there. All of them, or at least a majority of them look like clones of RIS0. The reason being RIS0 made the right choices. platform choices to use RISC-V, Rust, and a bunch of other things to build a top. On Boundless as well, we want to make sure so much love and effort has been put into making the EVM execution logic work and the execution layer work, smart contracts, all that stuff. We want to build a top that so that you don't have to start from scratch and learn a completely new thing. We will keep evolving this, but the idea is to not um scare you or take you into a completely new thing and be like... learn this new skill and or else, right? Like we don't want to act that way. It just adds to the onboarding cost. We want to keep it as simple as possible for people who want to onboard and use ZK, who don't need to understand what it takes to actually run large clusters of GPUs and so on. A good example of this is now every developer on earth has the power of AWS at their fingertips. um Kids from college can build an application that could scale to a billion users. Just like that. You don't need to understand anything about EC2, managing clusters. You just like, oh, I just use DynamoDB, it just scales infinitely. I just use EC2, it just scales infinitely. And you just put the credit card in and make sure your business is running so there's money always flowing in and then you pay your operational costs. That's really the mindset of abundance that Web2 developers have. Never will you see a Web2 developer saying like no to a feature because it might be too computationally intensive. They're like, yeah. I think it's fine. Everything's fine, right? And we want to live in that world with Web3 as well. How does somebody go, oh, I want to build a new feature. Yeah, I built it and I wrote it in Rust and I'm just calling boundless to prove it. I get 99.9 % uptime. This is great. Like the feature always works. I handle my errors gracefully and I have a million users and I'm making money and I have a business. Great. That's where you want to end up really. How are you dealing with the educational aspect? Because a lot of developers, when they think of ZK, they think primarily scalability and privacy. But there's a lot of other use cases for which applications could really benefit from ZK. What are your thoughts around educating developers on the potential of ZK and how they could use it in their own applications? I mean, it's possibly the biggest and least talked about challenge. A lot of ways um the blockchain conversation, mean, the ZK conversation is sometimes subsumed by the blockchain conversations. Like, oh, ZK is a thing around blockchains. It's not true, ZK is his own thing. Just happens to have properties that blockchain likes. um It's the cryptography part of crypto. um So it's um really, really difficult for people to sort of understand the latent power of ZK systems and how important it is for the future of the web. So I think the educational aspects, the first thing I want people to realize is the potential of ZK. Then people get more interested. um There's two parts after that. Either you understand enough mathematics and computer science to actually dive deeper into the cryptography a bit, which is fine. It's actually quite limited in scope. Not everybody's going to pick up this level of math. The other one is like, how do I practically use it on a day-to-day basis to build my applications and so on? I want to focus on the latter more than the former. The former, course, like just go to university or like there's like ZK courses offered by Dan Bonet and a lot of like amazing people that you can always go to. First is understanding the scope of ZK. So one example I gave people, especially it's a little bit futuristic, is how computer science systems are actually designed today, the client-server model. I don't know if everybody realizes that like when you log in or do something or put out your SSN or whatever on your web page or filling out some form, all of this data is encrypted, put over HTTPS and send to the server, whether it's decrypted, analyzed, stored. Have you ever wondered, well, my computer is pretty powerful. Why don't they just, you know, compute all of this locally this way? They don't have to hold onto my SSN and so on. The reason why they can't do it is they can't trust computation outside of their network. It's literally that any side of computation that is done outside of computer you control, you shouldn't trust. They all, I don't know what if it's malicious, what if some of this computation is wrong? ZK actually provides a way for you to keep your information closer to you, do some computation on it and submit a proof that a server can trust. Which means instead of leaking your PII, your personally identifiable information to every single hacker once a week or even twice a week nowadays, You can just keep all your information to yourself on your device, which is literally the most secure thing you can do. um Once people realize that, oh, whoa, that completely changes everything about the internet and how I deal with it and how I live inside it and how you now have a personal firewall, people's minds start opening up. They see the possibilities are endless. um If you are a VC, something I tell VCs because they like hearing this quite often is, um Quantum computing and AI are the shiny swords. Blockchain and ZK are the shields. um There is quite a lot of attention being paid to the swords and now there's a lot of attention being paid to the shields as well because as you democratize such advanced technology such as AI, quantum computing of course costs a ton of money but like AI is democratizing like you can have like rogue nations now that can have advanced AI teams. um to attack people, to attack companies and so on, you need to start thinking about how are you building your defense. Not just at the state level, you do want a firewall at the state level, but also at the personal level. So you are able to keep your own data secure if you are a responsible person and so on. So once people start realizing the scope of where we're headed, the applications start flowing. Now, there is uh a level of conversation that we need to have with developers around What are the tool sets that you want to use to go over solve this? How do you want to solve this? What kind of applications you want to build? What is the design pattern of these applications? Because everything is going to change again. It's going to be a much more involved conversation. We're there for it. What we want to do post-EG is like especially m higher on that front. um Training is sometimes viewed as like a direct one-to-one thing, but it's more around like creating a mechanism for people to sort of go from zero to three, and then from three to 99, they go by themselves. I was there when the Apple ecosystem exploded with Spotify. Before that, it was all just Apple's own applications. Second Spotify happened, everyone realized, holy shit, like everybody has an actual computer in their pockets now, and we need to build lots and lots of things. You didn't have to understand how GPS work. You didn't have to understand how this hardware worked. You just figured out how to live inside this like, ecosystem that Apple provided and build lots and lots of interesting things. We want to do the same thing. It's going to take, I would say, like another beat. ah But I would imagine sometime by summer next year, we are already looking at the next Spotify. We're already looking at the next big thing in Web3. ah I will be willing to bet, and I think I am betting quite a lot of my time in my career saying that ZK is going to be the key feature that enables this. So yeah. Yeah, it's a tough problem, right? It's really kind of like a developer relations kind of thing where application developers, they have an idea of what they want to build, but giving them kind of that vision of how ZK can be helpful and how you can use ZK in your application is really a big problem. And I appreciate you sharing that you agree and that Boundless is looking at ways to kind of solve that. um Let's talk about like the stage where Boundless is at. You mentioned TGE um and maybe give us a sense like where it is. Yeah, so Mainnet beta has been running for a bit. We're extremely happy with all the success we've seen. We raised over $1.4 million from the community just to prove the next thing and so on. m We're stoked to see the level of excitement from provers, from people who want to build applications. So that's great. We are, I would say, the order of weeks away from our Mainnet, um which is where we want it to be. Um, there are of course, like technical goals, but also operational issues with like going, you know, full PG. It's mostly the operation stuff to be honest, like, um, the life of a CEO is part-time podcaster, mostly operations guy. Um, and it's, it's, um, that's where the devil's in the details. Um, we, need to make sure that we stick the landing, not just on the core technology, but also on people's expectations of excellence, that, people have come to expect from us. So yeah, a few weeks and we're out with that. And then after that, like it's off to the races. We want to learn, we're working with a bunch of exciting partners. The announcement pipeline is overflowing through the dismay of folks like Rekha who are like, when do I get a break? I'm like, 20, 27 maybe. So we want to keep highlighting our partners, folks who doing incredible new things and keep working with them. So it's going to be, it's going to be action packed. all the way to the end of the year. But know, TG is in the order of weeks. Yeah. I asked this a very guest that has an application that is kind of a B2B type application. I'm curious, when will you stop talking about boundless and instead be talking more about the applications building using boundless? That is such a good point. From my perspective, I want to shut up about Boundless sometime at the end of this year. I think I want to move towards a quarterly cadence of like, hey, last quarter, this is what we built. This is what we're building. Next quarter, this is what we built. This is what we're building. Some revenue numbers, some folks, some sort of details for people to hold us accountable. But beyond that, really not talk about Boundless, but almost exclusively talk about the applications. that are using Boundless and Blockchains to do interesting things. um So for me, like one of the things I would say is like, I'm really laser focused from my personal point of view on people building businesses and not just applications. um I have a bias towards businesses because businesses have an eye towards being alive long-term. And, you know, working with these folks to make sure they understand what a business model actually looks like. um Some teams I would say like lean on me and my CEO Joe as well, who is a lot more experienced in how you build an application, how you build a business, how you build revenue, how you build a what is growth hacking. Some teams come with too much arrogance in like, I'm all, I'm all this and that. And I came from Stanford and MIT or whatever. And then they fall flat and they realize like, can't sell pure innovation. It needs to be packaged and then made into a high utility thing. I was, doesn't work. I want to focus on that. I want to focus on people who understand the concept of utility, um who are working on things that lots of people will find useful um and really keep pushing on that. Once we have two or three of those, the cycle will just take off. If I get a application that is serving 10 million people and generating $100 million in revenue of which a trickle of that is like a profit and so on, that's it. My job is mostly done at that point. It's about keeping the ship together. making sure the product managers and the engineer managers don't fight and all that stuff. It's just running the middle stuff because people have already identified product market for you. They've identified like, oh, this works. What we really lack in Web3 is a blueprint ah of how do you build a business? um I think in a lot of ways what we're doing with Boundless is maybe the blueprint for how you build infrastructure, how you build a cloud business essentially ah in this space. But how do you build applications is something I'm very interested in as well. I actually think there's quite a lot of parallels here of how you actually build for the open web and build it in such a way that you make money. Just a factoid here, like when I, my first real job ever was at a company in Sweden and we were funded by the MySQL guys who had just sold their open source database company for a billion dollars. This is the first time this has ever happened. And they were very, very excited at that point, which is, this is like way too. long ago, don't want people to be able to figure out how old I am. They were like really big fans of like, we should build open source stuff that can make money and sell things. So this model has actually existed. um We just need to convert some of the conventional thinking with where we are with Web3, the power of the token and the markets, put all that together. And I feel like we can build completely new systems and businesses that might even give our former employer. for them. um Two last questions. You mentioned about uh helping application developers kind of build a business. What's the role of Boundless and also the layer one on which the application is built? Because let's take Solana, for example. Solana has a lot of support. have product support, go-to-market support for applications building on Solana. um How do you work with teams like that to help the application team build a business? Yeah, so firstly, it's like peer-to-peer connections, which is like actually talking to them. I actually am more than happy to spend dozens of hours with the right team going through the business model, rewriting it really if it's necessary. Because I think the... I have Vibe, launch token, make money. It's not a business model to me. It's a thing. I understand what it is. I understand why it works, but it's not a business. It's a cycle that will keep contracting in size until it manages. uh It'll have the occasional burst, but it's definitely closing out or phasing out of our um zeitgeist as more and more people lose money on these things. um The idea of a business is always to be um on the up and up towards growth. How do you, for me personally, it's like talking to teams about not just taking in more capital, more grants, but using that capital for growth hacking, understanding what growth hacking is. Companies like Meta, um AWS, uh and lot of other sort of like players have made it very obvious um through either talks, examples, business case studies, or whatever resource you have access to. I have laid out how you actually grow, your way into being a billion dollar company. um And a lot of those same frameworks apply in Web3 as well. You are free to ignore them, which a lot of people have, um and you are free to grow on vibe only, but that is very brittle. What you want to do is always acquire users. you are, if your underlying dynamics is users versus people who are mentioning you, you are in a much more stronger foundation. resilient to cycles of doom and despair. And that's something I try to educate people on as well as like help them acquire their first thousand users. I think the whole point of every foundation should be how do you help people acquire their first thousand or 10,000 users? Like don't just give them money. I don't think, I don't believe in just throwing good money after bad. Are you, is your plan to get thousand users, 10,000 users? How do you plan to get there? What can we do as boundless as uh innovators in this space as any L1? How do we help you get those 10,000 users? If you are able to answer that question for you, I'm very happy to spend a lot of time helping you get there. Because all we need is five. And then it becomes the playbook and everybody's doing it. And there will be some minor changes for Web3. We are going to be marketing heavy for sure in our industry because the eyeballs are Your first 100 users are definitely going to come from Twitter. But how do you get Elon Musk to try your app? How do you get Satya Nadella to try your app? These are important things to consider as well. Aim big and you'll start hitting those goals. So that's really the way to go about it. And it's time intensive, which is why a lot of projects shy away from it. But we actually see a path towards becoming one of the major pillars of Web3. um And we know that that journey is not going to be achieved on cruise control. We're gonna have to get in there. So we're ready to do that. Last question, is there a book or movie that has really, really inspired you that continues to inspire you every day? That's a great question. uh So my answer to this is like uh that is this historian, his name is Ramchandra Guha. He uh chronicles Gandhi. He actually teaches at UCLA. He's one John Stewart and all that. He's a very uh mainstream historian from that perspective. He has like this detailed write up of Gandhi before he became Gandhi. So uh it's called Gandhi before India during his time in South Africa as a lawyer and, you know, trying to find his own sense of self. in what is going on around him and how he can help people. oh In a lot of people's minds, Gandhi is this finished product, great man, um compassionate, um doing the right things for the right reasons in the right way. um But obviously he wasn't born that way. There was a period of time when he had doubts, when he made mistakes, when he had biases, had prejudices, he had to overcome all of that. That journey to me is much more... um encouraging and um useful to read about. um think reading about great men, one thing you get is like, okay, that is how great you can become, but how do you actually craft that journey and how long does that take and the trials and tribulations you need to go through? um I go to that book. It's a really long book, but it's worth going through. It reminds you that like, you know, uh and I say this with the utmost and deepest respect, like, he was wrong. quite a few times as well. He had to like make mistakes and become the great man that he is through hard work, through recognizing his own faults, being self-critical. um And that maybe like seeds this thought in your head that like, how humble am I? um It is very easy to get titles um and try to uh maybe follow people who have done incredibly well with that title. So right now I hold the CEO title and I might say like, look, this is Elon Musk, this is something else, the pictures, but they've all done an amazing amount of work, not just to get there, but like what they've done afterwards. It's a quick reminder that like the title is, if nobody cares about the title, like you gotta like constantly be learning, go into every room with like the assumption that you're probably wrong um and really listen to people. um My team, um I say this to them all the time to their faces. I am yet to deserve such a good team. I don't feel like I've put in enough work on myself to deserve a team that is so good. I hope to live up to them and live up to their needs. And I'm trying to work on it as well. And I ask their forgiveness when I am not excelling at my job and I hope to do better. um But I think, that's something that always lives with me, which is like, man, like Gandhi had like a really hard journey to get to become who he is. Like, you don't have much to complain about. So like, let's, let's, you know, just work in a little bit more silence. No, I appreciate that. uh One of my favorite movies is actually Gandhi. I don't know if you've seen that. It's like four hours long. So good. It's fantastic. um mean, like, if you remember the train scene with, everybody, like, those are, people. That's, a real set. um It's a favorite of mine as well. uh Yeah, it's also someone I look up to all the time in the back of my head, in a world that is filled with people who are shouting at each other, going on crypto Twitter, having arguments about random stupid things. It keeps reminding me that there are people who have to deal with real shit and we have to keep it real and be like, okay, I misspelled something on Twitter, relax guys, it's just what we do. Well, what I love about the movie is it's a really good reminder that each of us is a work in progress. You know, and I agree with you. I mean, when you think of Gandhi, you think of kind of like the finished product, but he had an entire life of mistakes and our self-reflection. um And that's all of us. Well, Shiv, thank you so much. And we're excited for what you and the Boundless team are up to. um I will make sure that in the show notes, I share all the links. And thank you. Yeah, thank you. I was there.