Yeah, so I would like to explain what ZPLS is. So basically, oh it's Zulu's programmable library where we abstract SPD verification from Bitcoin maintenance uh to our programmable library. And this programmable library represents the portal between Bitcoin and Solana where the library would tell Solana that it is time to generate a Bitcoin address. It is time to verify, validate, lock, unlock your Bitcoin every time you're depositing. Got it got it now um The I asked about earlier about the Ethereum and Solana they're based on the account based model and but then Bitcoin is UTX Oh Tell us more about that because that that probably adds some level of complexity in in how you guys are Dealing with the cross-chain messaging Well, first of all, um Bitcoin is never meant to be programmable in many ways. It was never designed that way. Low TPS and incompatible with the smart contracts. That makes this job extremely tough. um So what we did is we had to put a lot of work to SPV verifications for our Solana, for our source of Bitcoin and implement numerical trees into Solana mainnet where um we are literally asking another blockchain to verify the POW mechanisms. So every time you deposit Bitcoin to the uh Bitcoin address that is actually being generated by Solana, it's a lot of work. Solana, they never had to verify, validate external assets, especially from other blockchains. Well, first of all, we're not a bridge because a bridge means you deposit an address to a protocol, they take your asset, burn it, and they give you another version of assets. But in our case, it's that we deposit Bitcoin to an address your asset never leaves the address. Instead, it will mint another version of Bitcoin to allow you to use it on web-based ecosystem. Got it. So what's been the hardest technical challenge so far? Because I mean, you know, I've interviewed lots of projects that have, um you know, that are working in the Bitcoin ecosystem, met with Citreya, which is the first ZKL2 on Bitcoin, and many others too. What are some of the big technical challenges that you've had to deal with in the Solana in Bitcoin ecosystems? Well, we didn't build Solana, right? So I think that was probably the biggest technical challenge where Solana wasn't following our design initially. So we had to do a lot of adjustments to make sure that Solana can verify valid Bitcoin transactions. I think that itself is a huge bottleneck. I don't think we have a competitor by far yet because there's a lot of work and a lot of understanding from Bitcoin Source Co. It took us almost more than a year and a to figure out How can we enable Solana to validate Bitcoin transactions overall? And here we are, we're using ZPL, working with Solana directly to validate all the Bitcoin transactions that are coming to Solana. What was the key insight that, I mean, you mentioned that, you it took a year and a half. What was the key insight that led to the breakthrough that you're able to validate Bitcoin transactions in Solana? Because that's a big deal. Yeah, if you guys are familiar with bitcoins, a lot of contribution on GitHub is actually closed source. guess there is only core bitcoins on GitHub is open source. The rest of lot of works, if you look at BSV, Bitcoin Satoshi Visions, or BCS, a lot of core work is actually closed source. Thankfully, one of my co-founders, he's actually one of the early contributors for Bitcoin projects, and he understands SPV verifications and also loves Elana. So we had a huge opportunities where he joined our teams and then we worked the way up from zero to one from scratch where we were able to rent through the test net. Obviously we failed many times, actually more than 10 times actually, for our test using Solante body picker transactions. But not too long ago, about eight months ago, we did it. And it took us two months to And here we go. About six months ago, we were able to capture almost 380 BTC from retail to institutions to deposit into salon through Mintz BTC. That's really cool. um Tell us the current state of Zeus network, mainnet, testnet, where are you guys? We are maintenance already. We're actually V1s. V1 where the average time of you deposit BTC to slot takes about 45 to 60 minutes. Actually, we are going to be live V2 about two weeks. We are cutting the depositing time, we're showing time as well, from 60 minutes on average to 30 minutes as well. And we're actually on the way to V3 where we want to the time to 5 to 10 minutes with the ZK compression for Solana technologies. So we have been constantly breaking the barriers, especially on a verification part. We believe there is edge, there is angle, there's huge opportunities. If you send a Bitcoin to Solana, it's faster than you send a Bitcoin to Coinbase. There should be a lot of opportunities in between this verification downtime. And uh how much Bitcoin has been deposited so far? At the peak, 310. We're still growing though. mean, Zeus is not the one that asked me to build a deposit. We are adding, I think as a tech layer, where founder developers are actually using our technology to build their own Bitcoin applications. If you look at blockchain applications, it's simply depositing with Shure overall. If now you can deposit with Shure Bitcoin natively on Solana, can be a lot of innovations. Right now there are about three more applications that are being built on Towsuze. We haven't announced it yet. By the time closed by the end of this year hopefully we should be able to announce O. There should be about 67 Bitcoin applications running on Slot through Zeus by the end of this year. And so on the website, there's DApps by Zeus Stack. And so these are applications built on top of Zeus. And then Zeus is the, I guess, the relay or middle layer between Bitcoin and Solana. Is that correct? Okay. So you've got Apollo, BTC Sol, and Lightning FI. Tell us about those. And that's pretty exciting that uh you guys are supporting other developers to build on top of Zeus. Yeah, so our idea is that we didn't want to monopolize everything that we were trying to build. Instead, we should be able to... build a composable solution that allows future founder-developers to build on top of Zeus as layers. In fact, we are going to be the first Bitcoin tracks ever on Solana hackathon next year, I mean by the end of this year, to encourage people to build next generation of Bitcoin application on Solana specifically. speaking of Apollo, Apollo is our first steps ever being built on top of Zeus. It's acting like a Bitcoin on-chain exchange where you deposit Bitcoin in there and it can mean ZBDC. And there's more than that. from the cash side where we are going to enable more version of Bitcoin to Solana. Imagine this, right? You're able to tokenize SPO tokens into many different forms such as mean tokens where you own way of version of Bitcoin as tokens. Then Peter, you're able to tokenize your own Bitcoin in Solana in the future as well. There should be something called Peter BDC. If there is adoption for Peter BDC, people want to it, why not? One's just as sure as one's one long events, right? You're not buying an every token cost one, and it's hard by Zeus. Essentially, you're buying one's one, packed up by a BDC option. And Peter BDC can scale down the options further across different deeper protocols for... or NFT, or means, where so on and so forth you can take off. Peter BTC, that's crazy. That would be cool. I'd buy that. um Tell us about the go-to-market. Now, Bitcoin is the first network that you guys are... That's kind of the first go-to-market network for the Zeus cross-chain protocol. um What other networks are you looking to um support? Yeah, we're already looking into LTC and Doge uh and Zcash. I mean, just by talking about Zcash, mean, sorry, Doge and LTC itself, you're already sitting at about $34 billion of idle liquidity sitting there doing nothings. I mean, uh if there's a way to unleash this dormant liquidity so-called from LTC and Doge to Solana, I believe the next wave of liquidity.com is not by meeting tokens anymore, but by real projects, by meeting that. think if you add Bitcoin, LTC, and DogeTogether, you're already looking at a trillion dollars liquidity.com potential point to slow just by even 1 % of that. We can surpass the overall TVL by Ethereum overall. um If it's high-performance blockchain that has been proven for last two or three years, we should unleash these domain liquidity from external blockchains such as LTC, Doge, and Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm seeing a trend in some of these ecosystems that have not been participating in DeFi and so there's a lot of idle liquidity. It's not growing and you know, I've met with a number of projects that are attacking this problem. One project is more markets and they're initially targeting the XRP market. and also the Cardano market because they have not been participating in DeFi, but there's a ton of liquidity there. um I also met with uh Doge OS, which is building an application layer on top of Doge and they're trying to do the same thing because Doge is a massive, I mean, it's a huge market, but there's really nothing you can do with Doge. so other than buying and holding, um And so I'm seeing this trend happening where there's a lot of idle liquidity. so there's trying to create DeFi applications that unlocks that liquidity. um How do you feel about zoos kind of unlocking that and succeeding in that space? Well, I guess a lot of layer 2s are still cold from the Bitcoin side. For the last two years, we have seen more than 20 plus Bitcoin layer 2. None of them actually succeeded. I don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Stacks, right? They're probably one of the earliest Bitcoin side chain L2 from the early days. But people have often underestimated the importance of having the right social layer for Bitcoin liquidity. Because you can have the best technology, but oh if no one's building on top of it or there are no users, where's the yield coming from? I think a lot of these projects are only relying on point systems or airdrops that are only serving as a short-term incentives for lot of Bitcoin holders. uh But if you're talking about on-chain activities, Solana is one of the only options right there that we're generating 90 % of the on-chain revenue compared to any other blockchains right now. And if there is a way to earn yield with your Bitcoin, I Solana is the right place. I think without Zeus, I don't think Solana would have this permission to solution to verify validating any big country's action coming to Solana. But overall, think Zeus is not here to overtake. or compete with CBBC, WBDC or XBDC. Instead, we are building more applications to really bootstrap these Bitcoin liquidity on Solana and then layer one horizons as well. um like you said, we are building BTC cell, StakeSold or BTC. We have LightningFi that deposit BTC into the BTC vault natively without looking into Solana DeFi. These are innovations that we are constantly preparing for the next wave of founders, developers that You don't have to build SwallowDepths on Swallow anymore. You can build multi-chain depths like Bitcoin depths through Zeus on Swallow. That's pretty cool. Tell us about the reception the Solana ecosystem has had for Zeus. Have they been pretty accepting and supportive? Very supportive actually. We have always been building Solana since day one. We actually joined the first Solana Global Hackathon in the late 2020. So we have been building our salon for almost five to six years already. So we're a lot of support locally from our salon communities, also from the user side for the equity providers as well. At the peak, we have 300 BTC from retail, not institutions, where it's not a pure TVL place anymore. It's purely by retail from the community. And that tells us that there's still a demand from the salon side and it's still growing. The time that I started Zeus on There is only 742 Bitcoin part on Solana. mean till right now we almost have like 7 8 thousand Bitcoin, right? You're literally talking about 10 to 20x of growing from the last two years in terms of the equity ratio. So oh I'm very excited. oh with lot of innovations and applications that we're currently building, we believe that in the next three to five years, everyone's going to own Bitcoin in the words. And then once they have this Bitcoin in the wallet, they're going to figure out how can we earn you on top of it. And then think Solance, with all of that, would be the first choice. Yeah. m No, that's really exciting. And I'm really encouraged by the fact that there's a lot of retail participation versus just the Bitcoin whales and the institutions. um What's the plan for institutions? this, um know, their requirements are a little bit different. They have regulatory issues that they have to deal with and also reporting issues or reporting requirements. um What's the plan for institutions? um Funny fact is that I actually got a call with one of the Bitcoin strategy companies in Asia last night. I mean, I'm pretty sure everyone is knowing the fact that phase one of Bitcoin strategy companies, have companies issuing debts, accumulating as much Bitcoin as possible in the cheaper price. In the phase two, we're going to be seeing is that how can they utilize this Bitcoin equity or Bitcoin in their reserve? and providing sustainable yield to whether stockholders or believer or advocates. So a lot of Bitcoin strategy companies has actually come to us saying that if there is uh sustainable way to earn yield with their Bitcoin Reserve under their listed companies, historically speaking, there has not been a successful Bitcoin application yet that really takes off from any other layers except or the network were ruined on the Bitcoin uh maintenance. But if there is a Bitcoin DEX, if there is a Bitcoin focus bar lending specifically on Solana, I think things could change drastically is that I think a lot of institutions are very interested in depositing or parking their Bitcoin to a spot where it's transparent, permissionless, or less ambiguity, having less ambiguity in terms of providing their yield. I think SLAA is probably the best place as far as I talked to lot of institutions and they're all very interesting on the solution that we're providing right here at SLAA. Yeah, to a degree you guys are kind of competing with centralized exchanges, right? um That are kind of hordes for Bitcoin. um They're hoarding a lot of Bitcoin. m And I think one of the reasons that that works for institutions is because they have kind of, they have custody requirements, which is kind of a little bit, I guess, anti-permissionless in a way. And so how do you deal with the custody issue and also the, you know, being permissionless in that case for uh institutions? I think that's a good question. So a lot of entities, are looking for licensed custodian partners to depart their assets, especially with their Bitcoin assets. We are currently working with Cobol. They're also licensing companies in Singapore as well. It's that they are providing one of our MPC modules for use. So meaning that um if you talk about the way we talk about how Zyu is providing the infrastructure layers, we are more like a hybrid approach in some ways that the custodian part, we work with listed companies or custodian companies that has large amount of Bitcoin that are currently working with such as Anchorage or HexTrust, lot of these companies already. But moving forward in the next year or two, we are also building our IMPC as well. want to be this, having this kind of balance between institutional custodians versus Zeus custodians as well. And if you talk about the future as 100 % decentralized permissionless, I wouldn't say so, because obviously within this cycle, we're seeing more trap by people coming to the space already. are likely the audience taking the approach where the hybrid approach are existing, where They believe in the permissionless part on chain, but also want to have insurance where does the custodian come from. If it's coming from a listed company or a listed company in Singapore, trusted partners, they're likely to depart as well. I guess the good part about Zeus is that we are permissionless in terms of luck and unlock. So if you deposit Bitcoin through Zeus and any other applications, you don't need any permissions to withdraw. Right. So but on a Bitcoin side, obviously it's part by the listed companies, MPC solutions. But I guess a lot of institutions like that part that they don't need permissions or approval to withdraw from Solana through Zeus. But whereas Coinbase, right, in many ways, you still need KYC, KYB, and it's not supported by many regions currently as well. So oh I guess there is still a competitive niche where Zeus is providing right here competing with all these centralized exchanges. uh such as I talked to one of the micro strategy companies in Asia, they're not supported by Coinbase through Zeus, oh Apollo's, they could potentially mint a raw version of Bitcoin to salon and leverage the YELL on top of it as well. There's institutions, there's retail, but there's also Bitcoin whales, right? And we saw one recently, uh last week, I believe, um and worked through, think, Galaxy, and they sold a ton of Bitcoin. I don't remember the exact number. um I wonder how appealing Zeus would be to these Bitcoin whales. you had any interactions with any old miners? I talked a lot on miners. Obviously, they're known for diamond handed, aka never sell their Bitcoin, just keep mining, keep building more. But we're seeing more adoption moving forward. Interestingly, I got into Bitcoin sectors, on-chain sectors through RainBDC. Not sure if know the protocols, RainBDC back in 2020, 2019, nine theorems. So everyone hated the protocol, especially Bitcoin miners. But through 2023, 2024, we have Bitcoin layer 2. And a lot of miners actually start depositing Bitcoin, whether it's TPL play or not. But they're willing to give a try on incentives part. And I think in the next two to three years, we're going to see more Bitcoin killer applications launching on different blockchains. Pretty sure a lot of miners, whether the size is small or minor, or mid-size or big size. there will be willing to deposit some BTC into a chain and then to gain more Yaw on the balance sheets. think 70 % of Bitcoin miners right now are listed companies. And listed companies are the only way for this company to gain more attractions and revenues is through different platforms and blockchains. And when I think about Solana, think Zeus is probably one of the best choice right now. Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. When you start talking about balance sheet and revenue, there's a lot of just idle Bitcoin, right? And the only way to really unlock that is to, you hopefully price goes up. And so while it's idle, it would be great for some of these companies, especially the publicly traded ones to actually have some revenue. You know, just a different source of revenue, I guess. Tell us, you mentioned earlier about Doge and also about Litecoin, LTC. What's the, I guess, what are some technical challenges or the go-to-market plan for those ecosystems? And do you have to do much different, do you have to take a different approach from what you have with Bitcoin? Well, they're all UTXL assets. It sounds easy, but they're still built differently in terms of mechanism and on their blockchain layers. There's still going to be lot of work in terms of tech-wise to solve this issue between Solana and Doge with LTC. But on the go-to markets, I talked to the Litecoin Foundation and Doge Community Driven Foundations. They were pretty excited that a lot of these miners retail, they've just been holding into They're a doge into Robinhood wallets or Coinbase wallets forever. But there is a way to not through a bridge. If there is a way to permissionlessly transform their doge to whether Zee doge or PDA doge, doesn't matter. Anyone can tokenize doge and many different forms through Zee's to earn even 1 % 2 % of yield on their holdings. I think we are seeing at least $1,500,000,000 of first wave of idle liquidity coming to Solana. I think we're just going to kick off on theirs. If Doge and LTC, BTC are coming to Solana natively, I think a lot of the perks on Solana will also start taking these assets as well. You can start borrowing lending. You can start supplying your Doge, LTC, BTC as well. That's something that we've been closely in discussion with Solana Foundation that we have to unleash these idle equities in order for Solana to surpass the TVL with Ethereum. That would be huge. mean, there's so much liquidity in these ecosystems that I mean, they're massive market caps, right? um That's just sitting there idle. You mentioned earlier about the community. ah You made a comment about points and incentives. What's the approach for uh adoption? Are you guys using any points programs or incentives to bring in, I guess, uh short-term interests? We have zero point systems in many ways. I'm a firm believer where those points could not be sustainable in the long run. Essentially, you're just selling your position in gains of higher TVLs. And once the incentive is gone, all the TVL will be dismissed as well. But instead, think we took a much novel approach where our incentives are to sell our communities. know, the ecosystem robustness is providing the most sustainable YELL. Whether you like it or not, lot of blockchains right now, the YELL is coming from Airdrop or PointSystems, right? So we didn't do any incentives on ZBDC actually. A lot of retailers just want to be in ZBDC. We're against hedge against the ZBDC positions, where you just like the permission and solution that we're trying to provide here. So I think overall, if you ask me, what is the biggest incentives to work with Zeus or to provide BDC into the Zeus ecosystem? I think small arms of blockchain is probably the biggest incentives for us. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk around mercenary TVL, which comes in and then when the point system's over, then they leave and then they hop to some other ecosystem that has a point system. And so the uh mercenary TVL is I think very problematic for projects. So it's encouraging to hear that you guys are not participating in that. But it's also really interesting that there's still participation despite there not being kind of an incentive to do so. um And that's un-incentivized participation. is huge. um And that's kind of how you get closer to product market fit is where people participate, even when there is no benefit for them to do so. um And so that's huge. So kudos to you and the team for that. um Tell us like long term, how do you see the Zeus community? Like who's part of it right now? And how do you shape kind of like the future? Well, our feature is we're pretty focused on our roadmaps in a way that we're very committed to build more Bitcoin applications. We have built Apollo, BDC, so we're soon going to be building uh Lightning 5. And then more importantly, we're launching the first ever Bitcoin DEX on Solana for Bitcoin Rappers as well. I mean, as more innovation come up on Solana, hopefully more people build on top of Zeus as well. going to create this flywheel effects, especially on Bitcoin equity on Solana, that we want to bring more players like we're in our rooms that you can potentially participate on Solana as well. That type of a play that could happen on Solana. mean, if people are okay with depositing BTC to buy rune or we're in our within 60 minutes or 50 minutes or so, mean, Solana's UX is going to enhance this mass adoption where there's speculation, usage, yield. innovations. think running our Solana just makes everything far more superior and novel as well. So Bitcoin DEX, I think that's something that we've been happily focusing on. Also, by the end of this year, we're hopefully launching V3 papers. We are able to use the ZK compression technology from Solana to cut the deposit, verifying time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes or 5 minutes or so. I think when you have this edge of sending Bitcoins to Solana faster than sending Bitcoin to Coinbase, a lot of things are going to change. lot of things can change. 85 % of Bitcoin trading values are still heavily depending on centralized exchanges. Once this deposit was through time, our cutting down to less than 5 to 10 minutes. A lot of people will start choosing perps or MMs or DAX on our current existing as well to sell or buy Bitcoins. Yeah, a DEX would be amazing. That would be, I think that would be a huge unlock for all of blockchain. um Cool. um Tell us about the, is Apollo, BTC, Sol, and Lightning, is that being built by the Zeus team or are these external teams? It's all in-house things actually. We have almost 40 developers at this point. We're still hiring, still building. We believe the fact that if nobody has clue how to build, we should be the one building as well. Yeah, I like that approach um because it's really, it seeds the ecosystem. ah Even though the Zeus team is building these applications, it still seeds it and gives ideas to other developers that may want to build on top of Zeus. I think it's a really great idea. um How'd you get into crypto? You mentioned earlier that you've been building on Solana for four or five years. How'd you get into crypto at the beginning? Funny thing is, actually got into crypto in the late 2015 through my first startups. I was doing a VPN business in Dubai. And at that time, there were a lot of people who want to pay Monero. Actually, I didn't know about Bitcoin back then. I actually knew about Monero and Zcash, uh where a lot of real tokens are so cool from the early days. And that's how I got into crypto industries. And then I sold the first companies and then started a payment company in Singapore. And then we also deal with crypto to create a car service. That's how I began my, went through careers in their early days. And then I sold the second companies and moved back to Taiwan. And then I was wondering, right? I I was, I was chilling and taking easy and I sold Solana and then take a close look. I was like, this could be another version of EOS, which made a lot of disappointment for my early days. you know, the more I got into it, The more I got very excited about the tech, about the people. think at the end of the day, you can always have better technology every year. But what makes Ethereum and Solana irreplaceable is the social layers. It's the amount of people that are committed to the layers, building, transforming, improving in general every year. So I'm very excited, not just for Solana, for Ethereum as well. think the whole industries are not just crypto natives anymore. combining Web2 and Web3 and finance boys and all these people are coming to the space. No, that's super exciting. uh Before we end, what are some last things that maybe you could share with the community on what Zeus is up to and how people can get involved? Well, follow us on Twitter. We've been posting a lot of updates on a daily basis. Stay tuned for the next Bitcoin application that we're trying to build, which is going to be the first ever Bitcoin-focused Bitcoin DEX on Solana. We're going to change these idle equities, transform into uh much more higher utilization rates. And we're also going to be working with uh other IMMs, such as Workout Radiance, Meteor Rots. So I think this Bitcoin DEX is going to be game changer for lot of Bitcoin depositors or Bitcoin users. In general, think we're going to provide one-of-a-kind yield for lot of future Bitcoin holders as well. That's exciting. Well, Justin, thank you so much. ah Zeus Network is aiming to become the default cross-chain messaging layer, not by adding more abstraction, but by letting Solana do what it does best. So speed, UX, and composability. If you want to learn more, check out zeusnetwork.xyz and follow Justin at DAP, I-O, Keeper. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me.