Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
Each week, I sit down with the innovators and builders shaping the future of crypto and web3.
Growth isn’t a sprint; it’s a process—built gradually, step by step, block by block.
Let’s build something incredible, together. All onchain.
Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
Luis Bezzenberger - How Shutter Network Protects Against MEV
Summary
In this conversation, Luis Bezenberger discusses Shutter Network, an encryption as a service mechanism designed to provide decentralized encryption and decryption. He explains the importance of Shutter Network in protecting against MEV (maximal extractable value) and the challenges faced in the Ethereum transaction supply chain. The discussion covers the integration of Shutter Network with various chains, web3 Marketing with Peter Abilla, the customer journey, and potential applications in gaming. Luis also addresses marketing challenges and the need for better user education regarding the benefits of Shutter Network.
Takeaways
Shutter Network provides encryption as a service for decentralized applications.
The primary use case is to protect against MEV and front-running.
Integration with layer 2 chains is essential for Shutter's functionality.
The Ethereum transaction supply chain has centralization issues that Shutter aims to address.
User education is crucial for understanding the value of Shutter Network.
Shutter Network can enhance user experience in gaming applications.
The marketing challenge lies in reaching end users who benefit from Shutter's services.
MEV is a significant issue in crypto that can lead to financial losses for users.
The sealed envelope analogy helps explain Shutter's value proposition.
Shutter Network aims to level the playing field in crypto transactions.
Sound bites
"Shutter Network is an encryption as a service mechanism."
"The Ethereum transaction supply chain is broken."
"Mempool encryption could offer an alternative to this."
"We can only prevent front running MEV."
"MEV is maximal extractable value."
"Front running is bad because people lose money."
"The sealed envelope visual is relatable."
"We need more simple educational materials."
"Thank you for identifying our challenges."
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Luis Bezenberger and Shutter Network
01:44 Understanding Shutter Network: Encryption as a Service
04:34 Customer Journey: How Shutter Fits in Transactions
06:30 Integration with Layer 2 Chains and Applications
12:37 The Broken Ethereum Transaction Supply Chain
16:22 Feedback from Integrated Chains
18:18 Marketing Challenges and User Awareness
25:38 Potential Applications in Gaming
31:07 Branding and Target Audience of Shutter Network
35:35 Explaining MEV and Shutter's Role in Mitigation
41:35 The Sealed Envelope: Visualizing Shutter's Value Proposition
Follow me @papiofficial on X for upcoming episodes and to get in touch with me.
See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.
Okay, we're rolling. Luis Bezenberger, welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited. Nice to you. Luis Bezenberger is with Brainbot, which is a development house behind the topic for today, is Shutter Network. Before we get into the weeds of Shutter Network, tell us a little bit about you and how you got into crypto. Yeah, so originally I'm a finance background and I did some banking internships, would say originally. In parallel, I was always more sort of technically interested and it's someone that culminated me sort of starting in the crypto space. So actually via my bachelor thesis 2015, I wrote about blockchain kind of as a settlement and trading and clearing system. And that's how I then started in 2016 to work at this company called Brainbot, which I'm still with. And Brainbot is originally a core developer house, having started kind of this journey on Ethereum. So building one of the core clients back then, the Python client in 2014 of Ethereum. And then having kind of just been doing a bunch of other protocol level, L2 infrastructure level projects, and then Shutter is the current focus. Got it. Let's pivot to Shutter Network. Tell us about Shutter Network, what it is, and who the initial target audience is for Shutter Network. Yeah, so Shutter Network is an encryption as a service mechanism, I would say. So it's a network that provides encryption and decryption in a decentralized fashion. And especially sort of threshold encryption, which has this nice property of it being sort of unstoppable. it enforces the reveal. So we apply it usually to kind of commit reveal use case. also, there's also some privacy potential, but primarily it is not really a privacy project. It's more so in these instances where you need to have something encrypted and then forcibly sort of revealed. So kind of the primary use case that we've been seeing in the target audience is chains or tools or sequences that want to offer a level of MEV or front-running protection, and then we would apply it in this form of an encrypted mempool. So the basic idea there is we encrypt transactions and have the sequencer, the rock producer, commit to the ordering and to the inclusion of the transactions while they're still encrypted. So they don't know what's inside the transactions while they have to commit to including them. And only after that kind of... being fixed and being finalized and the inclusion being confirmed only after this will be decrypted. So that's the one sort of use case area in target group. So we work with, for example, a Gnosis chain and we work with an Optimism and we have an Optimism grant to work with those chains essentially on the protocol level. then we also have just a larger sort of array of use cases. one of them being, for example, a voting. So then we work with Snapshot and it is integrated into Snapshot as a shielded voting mechanism. So it encrypts the real-time results during the ongoing vote. And then again, just like in the MEV mechanism, it decrypts after the vote is over. Yeah. Interesting. Maybe take us through what might help the listener is if you take us through the kind of the customer journey of and where Shutter fits in the stack. And so if I'm a, let's say I'm a trader and I do some kind of action with, I do a swap. Where in the customer journey would Shutter Network kind of fit in a transaction like a swap, for example. Yeah, it's complex question for us because it depends on how and where we integrate it. So ideally actually, that customer, the trader, wouldn't even have to notice shutter. They would ideally just be protected because let's say it is integrated into Gnosis chain and they just benefit from its protection. That being said, depending on how we integrate it, so... One thing we're doing now is we collaborate with MEVBlocker and there for Ethereum L1, so we want to offer it for Ethereum L1, then we would potentially as a first step collaborate with MEVBlocker. And then the trader would use, if they already are used to using MEVBlocker, would see in their configuration options, they would see this more, even more private transaction route essentially. So if you're familiar with Flashbots Protect, they have different sort of options where you can configure kind of different privacy levels. So this could be another way where the trader interacts with Shutter, where they could see within MEV blocker, okay, this is the traditional private RPC. And this other option would be, have this higher level of kind of decentralized, actual mempool encryption, not just it sort of being private because you trust the private RPC, but you have this sort of added decentralized level of lower trust, less trust assumption, more decentralization. So I want to maybe explore a few things that you said. So you said that one of the target customers are chains. And so these would be kind of roll-ups, layer twos. And it sounds like that Shutter Network supports optimism, chains built on the OP stack, it sounds like, as well as applications. Is that correct? Yeah, so those are kind of two different products we have. The one is sort of the encrypted mempool on the protocol level. And the other one, we are now calling Shutter API, actually not released yet, we'll tease. So we call that Shutter API, and that'll be this more application layer focused product where you can just call the API to request encryption or decryption. And maybe we can address the first target audience, so the chains that integrate Shutter Network. What is that? I guess, is the integration? What does the integration look like? Let's say I'm a layer two blockchain, a roll up, and I want some level of MEV protection and privacy for my users. How does that integration work with Shutter Network? Yeah, so for example, on the OP stack, we are partnered with kind of most of the Volup as a service providers. So for example, Conduit and some of these others. and so presumably you are with one of these. And for example, Conduit, you would see the shutter integration being offered on their website. And so if they would like to... again, offer this kind of encrypted mempool for their OPStack chain. That's a way to get in touch with us. And then what we have is we have an OPStack fork essentially, or we have our own OPGath version that the sequencer would run essentially, and that would plug into, or that would connect to our keeper set and those, this encryption, decryption mechanism. So. So it doesn't mean the transactions are going to be sent to us or the Shatter Network. It would just mean they would receive keys from the Shatter Network. So they run the specialized OPGath version. And what would happen is users send encrypted transactions to their sequencer. And the entire sort key management is being done by our decentralized network of keepers. And that would be like a reveal key. Is that right? Yeah, so the user actually can derive the encryption key locally from an older kind of master key. So that actually doesn't need any interaction between these nodes. But then afterwards to reveal the, to decrypt and to reveal, that requires the kind of the threshold of nodes to collaborate and to generate the decryption key. And then that gets broadcasted. And then the sequencer in this case would pick up the decryption key and decrypt. But the important thing at that point, is available to everyone so everyone can see and ideally everyone can see at the same time the transaction contents. Now the field that you're describing is sometimes known as differential privacy. And I wonder, I haven't seen that phrase used on the Shutter Network website or in its marketing materials. And I'm curious, do you see it differently? Do you see differential privacy as something different than what Shutter Network does? Interesting. I'm familiar with differential privacy from the perspective of you can add noise on sort of data, right? And then you subtract the noise afterwards. And in that sense, it's a little different because we're not really even providing privacy, right? So it is really more so, yeah, commit reveal. So just temporary encryption using the threshold encryption, and then it'll be decrypted. afterwards. we're not even using that word privacy a lot because, I mean, some people would call it the mempool privacy, but yeah, it's a little bit misleading because it doesn't really provide anything in terms of anonymity or traditional privacy. I see. So what are the main distribution models for Shutter Network? Shutter Network as a service is provided as an option in these roll-up as a service providers like AltLayer and Conduit and Gelato and others. So if I spin up a layer to blockchain, a roll-up using let's say AltLayer, and then I choose shutter network as one of the services that I want. Is it a very hands-on integration or is that something that can be done kind of self-service? What does that look like? Yeah, unfortunately not yet self-service. So you would need to work with us a little bit. So again, we have an OPStack test net. So for OPStack, it would be relatively straightforward. Yeah, but essentially you just need to switch out your OPGath binary. But yeah, depending on whether you have done some other modifications to your OPGath that might require some integration. So I would say somewhat hands-on definitely. Yeah, so yeah. Let's go to the, I want to read something from the Shutter Network X account. The pinned account says something very provocative that I want to explore with you. It says, and this is a tweet from February 11. It says, Ethereum's transaction supply chain is broken. Maybe we can explore that a little bit. Because I think that that points to the problem that Shutter Network is a solution for. So maybe explain to us, what does that mean that the Ethereum supply chain is broken, the transaction supply chain? Yeah, so today's supply chain is really kind of a result of there originally being a lot of front running and kind of in the public, there was this public mempool, right? Before this PBS transaction supply chain. And that was just pure mayhem, Kind of the transaction, you send a transaction out in the public mempool, everyone can see it. And you just have this race of people trying to front run and extracting MEV front running or back running or whatever. So we had flashbots coming in and sort of building. now we have, and this culminated in this PBS transaction supply chain out of protocol, PBS, and propose a builder separation, meaning essentially a more organized market system around... around selling kind of this MEV, the MEV opportunity, right? So I think that's important to know as a background, right? So that's how it grew, is better than, probably a better than this, again, this full sort of chaos state, but it also brought with it sort of really a chain of, again, this transaction supply chain of sort of transaction supply chain intermediaries. that your transaction has to pass through until it's even kind of on the chain. So you have to send it through the RPC. It'll pass through the hands of kind of MEV researchers, relays, builders, proposers in the end. There's the transaction supply chain. And unfortunately, in each of these steps, there is sort of centralization vectors, and there is the opportunity to censor. And usually, you just have to trust each of them kind of. not to sensor and not to front run. So that's what we mean when we say the transaction supply chain is broken. It's because we sort of quick fix some of the front running or some of the chaos, but we introduce the really long chain of centralized intermediaries that each of them comes with trust assumptions and that each of them can actually, yeah, sensor. And now, especially on the builder side, we only have two builders, Beaver Build and Titan, who build sort of close to 90 % of all the blocks. And then there's a dashboard, Tony Wacheter from the Ethereum Foundation has a really nice dashboard where you can see each of the transaction supply chain, image intermediaries, and how much they censor. And it varies a little. I think it's been better right now compared to like a couple of years ago. But even the possibility of kind of very small amount of actors being able to censor your transactions, that I think is not optimal. That's not how we wanted to have the theorem and how sort of the entire idea of public blockchains is sort of to provide censorship resistance. And if we build this complicated transaction supply chain where each of the actors can censor in front run, that's really not optimal. And that's what we mean by being broken. With it comes this build-as-centralization problem and vector. And we think there is a set of solutions. And the encrypted mempool, I think, what we think is one of them. Yeah. of the chains that have integrated Shutter Network into its stack, what has their feedback been so far? Um So it's special because the one that we are live, Gnosis Chain is sort of what was key, a key part also in helping, and also kind of had the same sort of thought process that we had and Martin. So their feedback is positive, right, because they want to see that. And then the... the general positive, but then we are also, we do have some, it's not easy, right? It is a decentralized validator set that plugs into a decentralized threshold encryption keeper set. And there is kind of peer-to-peer communication complexity there that we're still in the final stages of ironing out, I would say. That's kind of some of the downsides of the negative feedback that's not 100 % working. perfectly yet. Yeah, I see Shutter Network almost like a, there's kind of a set of services like an RPC, for example, where when the RPC is working great, the users don't say anything. But when it's not working, everyone's mad and everyone says, you know, they're upset at the foundation that manages the chain. And so, I wonder if Shutter Network is kind of a similar service where if my transactions are MEV protected and everything just works smoothly and then your users don't say anything, but when people get sandwiched and they lose money, then they're really mad. Is that kind of a correct characterization, you think? Yes. Yeah, I think it's fair in general. I would say that from the chain's perspective, you could also look at it more kind of as a positive feature set. You have mempool encryption now, and you have detrusted your sequencer. You've taken an alternative sequencer decentralization path in this, right? Because... we need to think of why are people decentralized in Sequencer? It should be kind of about censorship resistance. So kind of like this mempool encryption could offer an alternative to this, because it also provides censorship resistance. then, but yeah, sort of in general, yeah, it is kind of like a security feature in a way that it, yeah, so censorship resistance, front-end resistance, usually you would, ideally as a user, don't. care about that until you only care about it in the negative if you get frontrun, right? Or if you get sensor. And services like that are always hard. I mean, because they're so valuable to the user, but they only really pay attention when it's not working. And so marketing a product like that is hard, especially to the end user. And when it's not working, they typically don't know that it's shutter network and they instead blame the chain. And so how do you deal with situations like that where you your primary customer, your primary user is the chain in which you integrate, but then there's also end users who benefit or not benefit from the effectiveness of Shutter Network. I guess, how do you deal with those situations? I think you nailed exactly sort of our marketing challenge, It's like, the beneficiary isn't necessarily the same as the one we're selling to. And I guess there's a number of answers right now. So I would say is one is on the marketing side is education, right? First, we're trying to help people just even understand this problem and try to break it down. We're excited to do a lot more. video content and to do a lot more infographic content, which tries to break down the problem in more simpler terms. Another aspect of it is we need to, I think we need to actually just get closer to the user as well on our side, sort of more vertically integrate in a way, which some of it. we are doing via these partnerships, I say, and then just working very closely with, again, someone like MeVBlocker, who is still also still like a little bit of a backend product, right? Because they're an RPC, but they're one big step closer to the user and the user makes the decision to change, to switch to MeVBlocker. So that's another step we've been taking, especially on this roadmap towards trying to bring that to Ethereum L1. And then one small thing or something very recently, think we're, I've been just experimenting with building sort of wallets or just building that ideal version of, because there's also like a big change happening in kind of UX, And to agentic user experience and having, not having a wallet or a Dapp or a Dex aggregator, but having, sort of a broker agent, right? And I think one thing we'll show as little, just as a showcase essentially will be this little agentic user experience, which is still fully local and would still have this transaction encryption component in it. So it's kind of like the antithesis to the broker agent where you give the broker agent your trading intent and then they can front run you. This one would be the agent that you own yourself, right? And that kind of lives inside your own node or your own lives inside your wallet, essentially. Then still sort of being able to offer the same UX, but having it with local and having it with encryption in mind so that it is working for you and not against you essentially. And we probably won't really build a wallet, but just building that little mini sort of app, I think is sort of again, an educational tool. showing people why this matters, especially in this age of kind of the agentic broker age. I don't know if you've seen this stuff, like for example, the banker agent on Twitter, on base, you literally people tweet at it, right? At banker bot, 5000 thick but tokens to this other person and it buys it for you and then sends it. That's amazing, right? And it's really fun. use it. I love it. But it really surfaces this issue of giving out your trading intent to the, in this case, even fully public, right? That makes it very obvious that anyone can even see the tweet and take three minutes, they have three minutes of time to front run you, right? But even if it's private, even if the agent's private, it's still not optimal because they then have this trading intent and they can front run you. So I think that's one way we're trying to address it by, yeah. making it more obvious, building little apps to kind of building apps as a marketing tool. Now with Chatchabte, it's very easy to build these apps, especially in this kind of hackathon 80 % way. yeah, and then the other big thing we've been doing is we've been also kind of splitting our attention into this a lot more simple product, this Chatcher API. which is not really dealing with sort of protocol level, transaction, supply chain complexity, but it is on the DAP level. And it offers just, again, encryption for DAPs or even Web2 apps. So a snapshot sheet of voting, but we also see things like gaming, where you have simultaneous move games that where you need sort of that level of privacy. Rock, paper, scissors would be a small example. that could benefit from this. then, yeah, and they're also building small apps to showcase how people would use this. Yeah, that's one thing we're trying to, how we address this fundamental challenge. You mentioned gaming. I'm thinking of, I've never really seen kind of poker fully on chain because obviously you could have people front running you and finding out what your cards are. Would a service like Shutter Network help enable fully on chain poker? Very interesting question. And I've built a little poker using Shutter. But I think Shutter in today's form doesn't solve the entire problem. So I think Shutter would cover sort of part of it. or depending on how I think, depending on how you think about the card shuffling. for maybe to simplify, I think you can. you could use Shutter to hide the card shuffling and then randomize and then give people kind of cards that they don't see what nobody sees until they're revealed, right? But that would be fully random. Whereas in real poker, you need to draw from a deck and you need to be sure that the card that one player has isn't the same as the other one, right? And that step... So you want to do properly that would require sort of computation over encrypted data. And that's not something that, that this more simple today's iteration of shutter with just their short encryption can solve. But we're looking into kind of extending it and we're looking at, think you had, you had a million on, on your podcast. that would be one direction we could, we could take or work with them. were friends with them or some of their team. we could develop Shutter in that direction, more sort of, more fully fledged MPC and or in this other kind of FHE direction where Shutter would still provide kind of key generation essentially, but then not for encryption decryption, but for this FHE circuit. So you could call it threshold FHE and then I could do. things like this in poker. I think it can still add a tiny bit of value. And I think we'll publish a little mini, again, just a mini sort of POC of this poker. But also from the perspective of enforced reveal of the cards. I think that's one, it's not the core problem I think that you described, but. a separate problem in poker could be that there are cases where you need to force a player to reveal their cards, or you need to force the game to reveal cards or the player to reveal cards, and that is kind of a shutter feature, right? You could forcibly decrypt. Probably not really solving the core full kind of encryption on... over encrypted data, like a subset of that. No, that's very interesting that when you mentioned gaming that I started thinking about what types of games would really benefit from something like the encryption. a simple example is diplomacy. If you're familiar with diplomacy. So it's a little bit like risk, but more about diplomacy. less about attacking, more about, I think it's a very nerdy game where people have to sit for days and have to negotiate and take over countries. But not more by diplomacy rather than attacking. You can also attack but yeah, it's more about this just really game theoretical collaboration or not collaboration and alliances and whatever. So my colleague Janik built a version of diplomacy called DAO diplomacy. So DAOs playing against each other. And in the diplomacy all the players need to move at the same time. So it's kind of one they all would, yeah. And then the next phase begins. And if you do that, again, on chain, as I said before, with poker, you would see everyone's as they do their move, right? And then people would be able to see, I already see their move. Let me restructure my strategy and my tactics. So that is a typical. That's a typical use case for Shutter and that's where we built a little prototype in the past. Yeah, simultaneous move games. So you would encrypt the Dow moves until the round is over. And then only when everyone has moved, only then would you decrypt and reveal everyone's Dow moves. I see. What about a game like, so there's a class of games called social deception where I think it's called murder in the dark where I'm the murderer, but no one else knows I'm the murderer, but I'm trying to bluff and tell people I am. I'm not the murderer so that they'll pick someone else to become the murderer. so like social deception games like that would would shutter network. Would it make sense to have like an on-chain version of Murder in the Dark with Shutter Network kind of powering underneath? Yeah, I'm pretty sure actually that. So I think another version of this is werewolf, right? Yeah, and that's something we've discussed in the past. And I think that would be a perfect fit for similar reasons as we discussed before. That's great. Let's switch topics to Shutter Network branding. If we go to the home page, I find that reading the headline and sub-headline kind of gives us, you know, viewers a sense of who you view as the target audience for Shutter Network. And I just want to read the headline really quick. So headline says, fairness isn't optional. And then the sub-headline says, Keeping crypto true to its roots, Shutter empowers dApps, DAOs, and chains with highest standard of privacy and fairness. What do you think of the headline and sub-headline? And do you feel that that speaks to the target audience? I would hope so. Again, I'm not a marketing expert and I'm especially not really an expert in breaking things down for... Breaking things down easily, to be honest. But... So... Yeah, I personally feel relatively strongly about this sort of back to the roots. Yeah. Um, cypher punk and ethos a little bit. yeah. And, um, so, so what, so one thing, yeah. And then one thing I would, I would always question internally is a fairness. that the best? Um, it is fairness and privacy is something that people, how much do they care about it? on some level, obviously, right. It's always, always something that. Yeah, if you ask someone, do you care about fairness and privacy? would say sure. But then if you ask them, do you pay for it? They would say no. So I think at some point, depending on who we target, I think sometimes we need to tell a different story and we need to talk more about. So another way to think about fairness is accessibility and it's kind of mainstream appeal. So one thing I would prefer is maybe saying something like leveling the playing field, not for sort of fairness sake. Obviously, yes, mean, obviously it should be fair as well, but not just about that, not just about fairness, but also if you level the playing field, you can have a lot more people play, right? You won't just have this elitist game of people who know exactly how to... use sophisticated MEV tools or protect themselves or whatever. But if you kind of in general level the playing field, you can hopefully increase the pie and get more people to play. And then you increase the value of the amount of transactions and you get more, just get more, more trading volume. You might even get more MEV. So what we're saying is, We can only prevent front running MEV. We can't even prevent back running MEV. So in this sense, we could even make the argument that then we can increase the amount of back running MEV. We could even increase the MEV search as revenue, the chain, if they can make it an enjoyable and kind of safe trading experience. So I think that that's maybe something I would prefer kind of in our messaging. to change in this way that we're, FANAS is good, but I think even better is connecting it in some way to leveling the playing field and then from there to accessibility and from there to hopefully getting more users essentially. Yeah, I think that makes sense. maybe we can back up a little bit. We've been using the acronym MEV. Maybe help the listener understand what MEV is and why it's bad and how Shutter Network can help prevent, reduce the instances of MEV. true, sorry, we jumped over that a little bit there. So, MEV is maximal extractable value. And it is the amount of value that can theoretically be extracted by censoring or by front running or by reordering transactions. And usually, ultimately by the entity that has this ordering capability. So, in... the Ethereum sense that is the validator who receive transactions from the public mempool and they can choose the final order within the block. Yeah, and by front running, for example, seeing a big order coming in that is a buy order, for example, for an asset that would definitely move the price a little bit. That's a classic front run opportunities where you can see, okay. If I slot in here, because again, I can order the transactions within this block, I can slot my order in, buy cheaply from the market, and then sell to this poor guy who already had committed to his transaction. That's the classic front running. And it's bad because people lose money this way. They get worse prices because they get front-run. They get failed transactions because it exceeds the slippage. then they get failed transactions. And maybe one level higher essentially is, I would say, is we solved this transaction ordering problem for long time. That's kind of the... the whole innovation of Bitcoin essentially. If you read the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi talks a lot about the clock kind of, you need a clock to order transactions in any way. So on this 10 minute level on Bitcoin or 10 second level on Ethereum, we solved that transaction ordering problem, but essentially we didn't solve it for sort of time scales below 10 seconds. And that's kind of where the MEV happens. And MEV is just, yeah, it's again, the value that can be extracted. And then other thing I would say is it is extremely broadly defined in crypto. So in the real world, wouldn't mix. So in the real world, you also have front running. It is actually illegal, But in the real world, you have arbitrage and you have high-frequency trading. And in crypto, it's all one thing, front running. arbitrage, liquidations, all are MEV. So that is sometimes a little bit confusing because arbitrage is, I personally believe arbitrage is positive, is good. We need arbitrage to equalize prices between exchanges and we need obviously liquidations otherwise, know, make it out as work. So that makes it sometimes a little bit confusing. Is it good or bad? No, arbitrage is not bad. Arbitrage is extremely needed. But front running is bad, would say. It's relatively clearly front running is bad. And again, that's why it's illegal in the real world. And then also, think also in general, also bad is selling order flow. That's where the debate, I think, starts to be a lot more nuanced and interesting. selling order flow is also sort of bad. And again, pointing to the real world is something that is actually banned in the EU. It's called payment for order flow. PFOF is banned in the EU. For example, Germany still needs to enact it. So it's still legal this year. But then at the end of the year, they have to also ban it. And that will hit a lot of these kind of cheaper brokers. very hard because they relied on, Robinhood I think in the US does this as well, they rely on selling the order flow of the retail order flow to market makers for the cheap trading fees, right? That's the whole value proposition. But yeah, and that's where you can argue more. This is some way good for the users because they get lower fees, but in the long run, it's probably not really good because the prices are affected and you are... Yeah, again, selling people's, you're benefiting from this insider information of the user's trades and people and these market makers make a lot of money. And well, it is a zero sum game. somewhere someone needs to lose money to work. And we can't really say that it is positive. Some people would argue, well, it information that you're putting into the market and that's what you're getting paid for. But on these timescales, like sub second, sub. 100 millisecond time scales, not sure how much really valuable information are you adding to the market that you should get paid for. Yeah, yeah, as you described that, immediately thought of Robin Hood because I think their entire business is payment for order flow. so, and I don't know this, but apparently they're probably not available in Germany then, right? Because of the laws there. I think they just have competitors here. So one in Germany is called Trade Republic. They have the same. And again, it's still legal this year. So they could have also entered the market until, but I think going from next year, it will be a lot harder for those type of brokers to, that they really have to rethink the business model. Yeah. So now going back to Shutter Network and how it helps reduce the problem of MEV. Tell us how it exactly does that. Yeah, on a higher level, very simple. On a higher level, you just say you encrypt your transaction. And this party that we just talked about, is in the real world, it's the exchange. In crypto, it is the validator, or it's a sequencer, depending on who kind of how you're trading. it is some transaction ordering authority. But they have to commit to the order and to the inclusion of transactions. while they're still encrypted. So they kind of receive a sealed envelope and they have to sort of stamp it. And that's where your trade is inside the envelope, right? And then they pass it on and only after this, doesn't get decrypted. So that on a very high level. And then the complexity is around making that encryption, decryption be decentralized. So trivially, could, the user could just encrypt with his own key. but then they could choose not to decrypt later. So if the user would encrypt and then decrypt at the end, you would have kind of what's called a free option. So you would then, if the price or something goes against you in those couple of, in that time, you would then choose not to decrypt. And that would break the system again, kind of. would then have like half of the trades would then always sort of fail presumably because people would just choose not to decrypt. That's why we need kind of a secure way to decrypt and to enforce decryption. And that's why we have this threshold encryption mechanism in this keeper set. I think the visual of the sealed envelope, you mentioned earlier about educating the market on the MEV problem and also Shutter Network as a solution. I think using the sealed envelope visual, I think is a very good because it's relatable to understand what that is. And I think it really help to explain the value proposition of Shutter Network. I like it as well. And I like this, you can have both, right? You can close the envelope, can put your intent in there and you also have to stamp it, right? And that's what the validator does. He kind of validates and stamps transactions. Yeah, that certainly helped me and I think it helped a lot of people. It makes it relatable. And I think a lot of things in blockchain and crypto is very, it's complicated. It's highly technical and we need more simple educational materials that will help them understand the value of the service and the protocol, the chain, the application and what it means for them. And I think simple stories like you just shared about the sealed envelope with the stamp. That kind of story, I think is really helpful. I agree with that. Okay, well, Luis Besenberger, thank you so much for sharing your time with us and telling us about Shutter Network. I will share in the show notes all the URLs so that people can become more familiar with Shutter Network. Thank you so much. It has been a really nice talk. As I said, really casual and I think you brought out all those topics that are so important to us and identify our challenges as well. And I think, yeah, really thank you for that. Thank you. Awesome. Have a good day.