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Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention. Here, we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

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Hey everyone, and welcome to the ChainStories podcast. I'm very excited to have here our dear guest, Robert Viglione from Horizon Labs. Robert, it's a pleasure to have you here. I know you've been very focused in building Horizon Labs for a while, and it's around ZK and ZK technology. And in some of our previous podcasts, we have touched the surface of how amazing it is. Privacy preserving technology. I really came to learn more about what's been your work at Horizon Labs and how did you get here? What industry did you work before? And how did you find being digital assets? Pleasure to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. So I was an old Bitcoiner, I guess was my entry point into the industry. My early profession, I was a physicist, a mathematician, working for the US air force. So I was a military scientist working in what is today, the space force. It wasn't called the space force back then, it was just air force space command. And I worked on a variety of projects from satellites, radar systems, launch vehicles, you know, the rockets that shoot them up, which is by the way, super gratifying to see what Elon and SpaceX have been doing, which is pretty amazing on the rocket launch side. But I was actually living in Afghanistan at the time where I went I can't say all in on Bitcoin, but I can say half in on Bitcoin because actually at the time, I was following a blog called the Dollar Vigilante, which was basically this, this blogger out there, named Jeff Berwick, who was basically just ranting against the unsustainability of US deficits and debt and money printing and all that. And I bought into these arguments quite heavily back in the day. I could say I still do, but my mind's changed quite a bit. But they got me thinking heavily back then of, okay, I need to get my assets into gold in this new Bitcoin thing. And this was in 2012 when I first started finally pulling the trigger and going in on that strategy. I kind of regret the gold part, at least. But it is what it is. And at the time I started getting actively involved in the Bitcoin community from Afghanistan, holding seminars, teaching people how to set up wallets, teaching them what is this new Bitcoin thing, what are its implications? And then I was afforded the opportunity basically to kind of cut, you know, cut that career and go back to academia for my PhD. And that really just set the stage for the next phase of my journey in crypto. Well, Robert, that's fascinating. You working for the US government in the military, serving in Afghanistan. And you cross paths with the Dollar Vigilante, which for those listening is an anarcho capitalist podcast. It challenges a lot of the views, especially about the hegemony of the US dollars. So I wonder, when you were there, and especially within the military industrial complex, how did it feel to hear such extreme visions from someone that's very controversial? Yeah, I mean, I won't say that I agree with everything that he was espousing by any means. He ended up wrong in many ways. And the dollar's, you know, still going strong, right? And so the world's reserve currency, I would like to see Bitcoin, start to chip away at that a little bit. But not from the point of view of not being like a patriotic American, because I am. It was just more from the idea, like, this stuff was just really unsustainable from my perspective. Let's just impose, like, a macro budget constraint. You can't spend an infinite amount of money forever, right? Like, so we know that there's a boundary condition. We don't know what that boundary condition is. Dollar Vigilante was wrong on the boundary condition, although he probably did get a lot of views on his stuff. But it was at least a nice segue for me to just think more broadly. Okay, like what is going on in the world? What kind of macro geopolitical intersection matters? And then that led me to Bitcoin. And as you said, the dollar is still a mighty currency of the world, and I don't think that will happen for many years to come. What is your view in that aspect of being an unsustainable as Nixon debases from the gold standard, and it's been a free floating currency for years. As we go into the next 100 years or a couple of centuries, is Bitcoin going to absorb this unlimited money printing since it's a limited supply art currency. First of all, I'm not convinced that deflationary currency or fixed cap currency is good for a society. I'm not convinced of that. I do think that there are boundary conditions though, that matter in a sense of as soon as confidence in a currency goes, like you're kind of screwed. I think when it comes to the US dollar, maybe explaining its continued hegemony, I mean, how many years later are we at this point? I think it's like that parable of you don't have to run fast, you know, faster than the bear, just faster than your friend in the woods, right? I think that the US has just done remarkably better than most other parts or many other parts of the world, especially the industrialized world. And I think that that's reflected in the currency. So I don't think that the US Congress has been particularly competent. I think we've made a lot of geopolitical strategic, you know, snafus or whatever. I've done a lot wrong, but we've probably done less wrong or maybe more right than many other societies. And I think that kept us in the game, at least economically thus far. I don't see that changing a lot, especially because of I think the transmission of US monetary policy is going to go nuts with the next phase of stable coins. So I think stable coins are going to be amazing for the dollar. Yeah, actually, I share the same view as I think the dollar can even grow more with the new rails of digital currency through stable coins like Circle or USDT. And there's the whole topic with getting there, but going back into your career in that moment. So you're working there for the air force and then how did this transition happen? How did you decide, okay, I'm leaving this and going to the digital assets space and you, did you go on and found Horizon Labs? Yeah, so, what really happened there? So I actually made a transition before I got to Afghanistan. My previous job was with the space force, but then I actually got out. I guess what you can call a mercenary in Afghanistan. You know, I joke around and I would call it like a mercenary mathematician because the reality is I just did data science work for a variety of organizations over there. My core mission was helping with the IED or the improvised explosive device threat. It was just pervasive in the country, meaning basically roadside bombs or car bombs, truck bombs, you know, suicide bombers with vests. It was really like a endemic, the problem. And I went over there to try to help solve that. And then I ended up in a variety of kind of intelligence roles in the country. That, you know, I would say from an intellectual perspective, it was extremely interesting. And like the country of Afghanistan is absolutely beautiful. And I really hope that it ends up peaceful and has some modicum of whatever you want to call happiness, for the people of Afghanistan at some point, I think it's been a tragedy over decades. But, while I was there, from an intellectual perspective on the data science side, I just realized there was so much that I still didn't know. I thought I was pretty smart, you know, this physicist getting into coding and data science and stuff. And I did some really cool projects, but I still realized that there was just a whole body of knowledge that was still above my head. So that's why I decided to go back for my PhD. And like, I had just gotten married at the time and I was kind of an old guy, I was in my mid thirties already, got married and I had the option. I was working in like the Special Forces Command for the country at the time, and my option was I could in go back with an Afghan commando unit, or I can go back for my PhD, because I just got accepted to a program. You know, had I been five years younger and not married, I probably would have opted for the former, but I opted for the latter, and I had a blast in academia, actually. So that transition was pretty amazing, and I just went into it just, really appreciating the opportunity to just learn for a number of years without any other distractions, although crypto ended up being a big distraction for me, but I was able to probably my entire dissertation and research body of research into crypto. And my dissertation was a crypto finance at the end of the day, which is pretty cool. Well, that's quite interesting. And this just brought into my mind, something that I've heard for a while in the crypto industry was that, Bitcoin was considered ammunition according to the US military laws, and we couldn't export that. Not sure if you are familiar with that. I'm not about Bitcoin. I know that cryptography used to be considered export control, right, for armaments, which made sense, right, like coming out of World War II and the whole Enigma stuff and code breaking and then going into the Cold War, I get why the US considered cryptography to be, you know, export control. But clearly post RSA and that whole story about the founder of RSA kind of just, I think published it with MIT. Erick I think that was, your alma mater. So that's part of the history of like cryptography in the world, especially the US but as soon as it went public and open source, we just realized this stuff's math. You can't stop it. And Bitcoin is based on cryptography. So I can see that. Yeah, I think it's extremely interesting. I think it was actually Jeff Berrig that said in a lot of these episodes that you can't point guns at ammunition or codes because there's this technology that enables so much more and you just can't stop. And again, it's blockchain in a way through the cryptography. And diving into what are you doing at Horizon Labs with privacy. Do you see it powerful in a sense of what cryptography was during second world war or what this brought into our society. So it's a really interesting question because, you know, we've talked about Burwick, Dollar Vigilante, anarcho-capitalism. Clearly I come from an anarcho capitalist background, right? And I would say still philosophically, I'm an anarcho capitalist and I love the stuff that it's finally getting more mainstream attention with like the stuff that Milei is doing in Argentina and so forth. But, I came into this industry from that perspective, like that was my lens and it aligned with what we call like the cyberpunk movement. That bled into the early days of Bitcoin, which was using technology to kind of like further social causes out there. And one of those big social causes was the right to privacy. I fundamentally believe that every human being has a right to privacy in their lives. And the boundary condition for that right to privacy is probably to the point where you're doing something that's going to like, you know, harm someone else right? So like I don't have a right to privacy if I'm going to go kill someone and expect not to be held to justice for that. But if I'm making a financial transaction that has nothing to do with any kind of crime anywhere, I have 100 percent right to privacy is how I feel. So the first project I launched in that vein was when Zcash brought zero knowledge cryptography to market back in 2016, I was blown away. And I started getting involved with another ZK project. I think it was the second ZK project it was an offshoot from Zcash, called ZClassic back in the day. It was like the old days of crypto, like from the Ethereum to the Ethereum Classic battles. There was this kind of little community, you know, offshoot from the Zcash community that I became part of. And from that, we basically gathered a bunch of people together. They were really interested in the privacy aspects of ZK and we launched a project called ZenCash. ZenCash, we launched it in May of 17. Today it's still out there actually. It's having a bit of a resurgence, cause we're actually redeploying the technology and upgrading substantially the stack, but the whole point of it is to be a privacy platform. So it's going back to this vision that I will admit has been laying low over the last like administration in the US because it looks like we had a war in crypto. And that war in crypto was really unnerving to the guy who was running a US crypto company and wants to still run a US crypto company, right, out of prison. So, not being in prison, like staying out of it, right, to clarify. So like I am super bullish now that the war on crypto, I believe is over. And I think that we're going to have a resurgence of this narrative on privacy because people are going to realize, especially as like more stuff gets on-chain or just more important aspects of our financial lives go on-chain. We're going to need privacy. We're going to start demanding it in a big way. So that's what my company is all about. And we're tackling the value chain of privacy in a number of ways. We have two big projects right now. One is a continuation of that old ZenCash project. Today's rebranded horizon. And we have some kind of big stuff there and how we're repositioning it in today's market. The other project, which is brand new is one called ZKVerify. And this is tackling a very specific part of the ZK value chain on the proof of verification side at scale. So that's our contribution to this industry, amongst a number of other things that the company has done over the years. But we're very focused on privacy and just this class of cryptography known, you know, called zero knowledge. Yeah. And for those that are getting into this space for the first time and are not familiar with zero knowledge, could you give a brief explanatory of why this technology is so revolutionary in terms of cryptography? You can prove something happened without revealing any of the details behind it. So the simple example is I can send you guys money and like a blockchain could just automatically execute that transaction. And the world can verify that a valid transaction occurred, but not see that I sent you money or how much money was sent. So basically, the world could verify, like could run software and verify that a transaction was valid without seeing any of the underlying details. Now we can abstract that and take it way further. Like you can think of like entire financial, like time series of information going on-chain and a privacy preserving way, but you can still, the mathematical property of zero knowledge proofs is like one of the properties is called homomorphic encryption, which is basically you can run mathematical computations on top of the encrypted data without seeing the data. So the real life example here would be. I could have a time series of financial transactions from a small business. And without seeing any of those transactions I could calculate a composite credit score for that business as an example, right? If we constructed a circuit to be able to perform that function. So like there's so many other things we could do there. Everything from like privacy preserving ID, like a decentralized ID, which I think is huge and is going to be a big part of our future digital lives, to probably everything in between. Like an SDK that developers can use, or does this exist as an L1? Like, what was the format of the product? So for ZKVerify it's a modular blockchain is the product, and then it has RPC exposure, so that anyone that's running, like you can plug into a proof generation network like Ferma. Generate user ZK proofs. You can use an SDK to actually construct your application circuit, and then you could send the proofs via the RPC interface to ZKVerify. It would just verify it at scale as efficiently as you can. And send the result wherever your application needs it. Okay. And so you have validators that are keeping the chain alive and validating those. Exactly yep. In the validators are running the software basically that consists of a large set of proof verifiers. So there's a lot of cryptography that's been developed over the last, I don't call it like five to seven years in the industry from different types of zero knowledge proofs. Everything from Starks to Snarks and different variants of them. We write the verifiers into the software of the blockchain, like the modular chain ZKVerify. And then anyone that runs a node is actually batching all the transactions in and running the verifiers. And are they getting paid with like the fees that the devs are paying to run these transactions? That's exactly right. Yeah. And my take on tokenomics as well. So yes, they collect fees that devs are paying or users depending how the application is structured, but also there's a token economy. So there's a token emission and part of the mission is reserved for the block validators. And actually, yeah, the point I wanted to make there was, one of the virtues of a public blockchain is that it's a decentralized network. And the idea is you can't have a decentralized network without a continuous stream of automated payments. So you kind of need a token economy. There's different ways these days to kind of bootstrap networks, could use layers like EigenLayer. Another great show that you guys hosted. But like if you're going to run a modular chain, like we are with ZKVerify, the architecture is such that it'll have its own token and that token is used for rewards incentives to use the system, but then also incentive for people to run validators. What is the difference between like a modular blockchain and the blockchains that we've had so far? So the idea of modular blockchain, it's like a function specific chain. So it's a chain that can act as a module or a layer in a particular stack. And this, you know, the classic example and really the category creator I hear was Celestia. With kind of carving out the data availability or DA function from the overall blockchain stack. Carving that into a chain that does nothing but DA. And then that would be kind of what we call modular chain is just feeding a service into like a stack. Now, so you can do your DA but still settle on Ethereum is the concept. Same thing here. So for us, we're decomposing the ZK stack and the ZK stack has proof generation. You can aggregate proofs and then ultimately you have to verify those proofs. We're carving out the verification part of that stack and providing ZKVerify as like, technically it's a blockchain, but it only provides this one service. This is all it does. And it inserts that service really anywhere kind of horizontally across the industry. So that's at least how I look at what I call a modular blockchain is basically like a horizontally integrated service layer for solving a particular problem. Is that not considered a app chain? Yeah, you can call it an app chain. It's just the way that I think, and this could be a terminology thing, but I look at app chains is so the chain could have a specific function, like it's gonna be a gaming chain, it could be a DEX, it could be something like that. But that's some specific application that is performing there. So maybe it's a matter of semantics, but it kind of contains multiple parts of a stack for the application on that chain. And maybe it plugs into a broader ecosystem, but it's kind of like function specific, in terms of like application function. Whereas this is a service kind of like a technical stack and decomposing a service from the technical stack. So again, it could be a semantic thing, but that's at least how I look at it. I see, got it. So if somebody has a smart contracts on like an existing EVM chain, so they can program in the calls to call, right? Your product goes from the chain itself. Where are the proofs are they stored as credentials that are then on-chain or are they like local stored? So the dev would have options. The dev could store the proofs locally. The dev could store them on one that they're selling on. The dev could send them directly and store them on ZKVerify. The dev could use a DA layer like Celestia. So it's really up to them. How my team looks at kind of the future evolution of this industry is we look at it as like we need to play a website these days. You're not doing everything in a vertically integrated way You're pulling a variety of different services. You're solving a particular problem I think that that's the way it's going to be for many applications in blockchain one day. You can figure out when you're settling on you can pick your DA layer. If zk proofs are involved you could pick the layer that you want to generate the proofs. If you want to reduce the cost of those proofs, you can aggregate them with some layer. You can verify them with zk verifier, right? So like it goes in that vein of devs will just have like a broad palette of options that they can just kind of pull in services for. Nice. Let's talk AI. So Multicoin put out a report, just like a day or two ago on a frontier ideas for 2025. And one of them was agentic oracles. So using that to verify that data is actually provided by humans, right? As AI needs to be trained on human data, like you need to prove that the data comes from humans and that becomes more and more valuable data sets. I also think the inverse is interesting where you have all these like AI agent bots on Twitter that, you know, they have the automated tag from Twitter, but it doesn't mean anything like you can get that automated tag and you can still just be tweeting from the account. What does the market look like in the demand for? How can we prove that these tweets are coming from AI agents? So Truth Terminal, right? There was some hesitation at one point. People thought that like, because it was a spelling error, oh, is it fake? Is it actually just Andy just typing this? Like, what does the market look like there? I don't know. I can say this is actually the hot topic as well internally, where we're diving ourselves. So the way we're looking at it is we're looking at a position for ZKVerify is kind of like an intersection of ZK and AI in that if AI could be generating zero knowledge proofs or humans, kind of whichever side of that ledger you're looking at, and you brought up a great point that you might want to look at both sides. You know, whatever party you're looking at could potentially generate a cryptographic proof and then verify that proof publicly and that could be built into a system. That's how we're looking at it right now and it's so new. So when you mentioned the report was released yesterday, you said I think, it didn't surprise me because everything is just moving so fast in this particular segment. But my perspective on it is, and why I'm directing my team to dive in hard right now is because I have a sense that when we can see that entire DAOs are being created with agents and they're kind of fully operating with agents, I start to think as an investor or as a participant in this industry, would I even want to participate in a project in two years that's run by humans in a way, right? And like you say, run by decentralized semi humans, whatever. But still, like I might actually prefer agent based projects that have humans as guardrails and humans participating, but not actually at the core of the project. So I think that if we don't act quickly, we're going to be obsoleted. But we here I mean all of us. And that's why I think it, there is a deep sense of urgency here. And I will share that internally, we have different perspectives. There's some people that think it's really overblown hype. And we should just stay focused with where we're going. We also envision a world where, you know, like, just because of AI existing, because the marginal cost of content creation is basically zero, we think that can apply kind of like a large asymptotic towards infinity, and lots of content that's going to be created, that there's going to be a massive need for kind of provenance of information, which we think cryptography is going to play a really big role in and that's actually how we've been positioning ZKVerify this far. But the agent based stuff is really interesting and I think that we would ignore it at our own peril. At this point, we really have to dive in and get smart quickly. And I think the best way to get smart is to start using it. Yeah, for sure. I think that the AI agent current meta could just be like a gimmick, right? Like if it's just reply guy stuff, but I think what we're really getting out here is like machine to machine communication. And the importance of keeping that data right, secure, private, and then also verify that the machine wasn't hijacked, it wasn't intercepted that it's reporting everything correctly, and that it is coming from those devices or from AI. 100%. I think it comes back to our friend cryptography and in cryptography is going to be I think everywhere as part of these value chains. And I think that's the opportunity, at least from our segment of how we look at the market and what we specialize in. And I think we're just lucky in that we've been in ZK for so long. That we're just extremely well positioned. I will tease a little bit that we are looking at kind of launching our own AI agent stuff. It mainly is a learning exercise, but also I think that there's just a lot that can be done on the cryptography part of the industry that we just want to be part of leading. Yeah. Also on the homomorphic encryption side. So like, there are some projects that are on-chain trading agents or like investment DAOs. And then that also presents an issue because if you have a trading strategy that is generating alpha and is making profit, you don't want that to be on-chain, like publicly for people to see, because then people will trade that strategy to zero. The strategy is actually in fact being followed, right? So yeah, I completely agree. And so you're saying where do you fit in that, like tech stack? If the trades are happening on like Ethereum, how would they use you guys to keep those transactions private? There's a couple of ways that we're looking at it. So as an example we have one of our flagship projects right now that we're working with our partners is called Singularity. It's private DeFi play. So basically it's like a big shielded pool wrapper around public liquidity pools. So that people can trade in and out of the pools without all their trades being visible. So that's one way, kind of like you were saying with will probably be on the trading side. And from that perspective, I think that privacy is going to have an increasingly large role on-chain. And I think we just play naturally in there. You can still trade on Ethereum, trade on Arbitrum, trade wherever you want on Solana, and you can still make a privacy call to us. Now of course, depending on your application, you might have to build your circuit logic or whatever on the platform that you're trading on, but you can still call our service to make that process much more efficient. Yeah, that would be important. We're seeing more and more on-chain investments happening, more investment DAOs, more tools for that, in the Multicoin report they also mentioned on-chain securities. And now that's always been more of a regulatory hurdle than the tech is now like ready for that, but now with the regulations, we'll see if that can also take off, but that's also going to need privacy because these companies, when it comes to securities, not everything is going to be super public all the time. They don't want it to be that way. And that's why I think, privacy is just kind of a really large resurgent narrative here. And again, why we're positioning and getting ready to relaunch Horizon as a big privacy platform. How we do it is still a little TBD, that we'll be announcing and forthcoming in the next several months. But it's just the recognition that the market is going to need platforms that can handle this stuff efficiently and well and are built for it. Is the first product still privacy chain, like cash, like currency or what is it now? Given the war in crypto, the community via the DAO voted to not be a privacy coin. And actually voted to migrate the project to an EVM with privacy applications. So basically the core of the project now is building in ZK pre compiles into the EVM code. So it's actually a super efficient place to run some applications. Is there any concern that any of this stuff might get in trouble like Tornado Cash did if people are using it and you can't prove who your users are or what they're doing? Oh that's always a concern, especially for us being a US company. We're always concerned about that. I do think there was some nuance around the the Tornado Cash case, that has been kind of positive. But yeah, at this point, we've taken the perspective that if you're just providing the primitives basically for people to launch efficiently ZK applications. The community should be okay. Knock on wood. Very interesting. The question that came to my mind while you mentioned AI agents, let's say for example, a Nailed Care AI model. Would this technology enable to train an AI agent on real patient data without revealing any of the actual records and ensuring it's compliant with the US or European GDPR laws. Could this be the next frontier in enabling all these AI agent economy to actually exist in a way that we respect the data that's fed into these agents. Yes, 100%. It's just one of these scenarios where the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed. The tech's ready. Like we can actually perform operations on encrypted data today. It's just a matter of the regulations or maybe the litigation in the US are probably like so scary that we haven't seen movements in this area other than kind of very experimental healthcare. Like startups, but in terms of the big healthcare guys that have a lot of the big data we haven't seen it. And again, maybe our purview just is not seeing what's going on out there. But I would say definitively that the tech is here we just need to get it out there. Maybe that's too bold of a claim and that the data sets are so large, you know and there's probably like different ways of doing this stuff. Maybe you can FHE a large data set and performing operations, maybe in like a trust execution environment or something like that. But, ZK itself is just getting way more efficient now. And we're able to scale proof generating systems and verification systems like with ZKVerify just so much better than we've ever been able to do before. There's now aggregation services out there. So I think that it is kind of like Anna Rose, one of the big commentators runs a great podcast in the ZK segment of the industry. Her predictions for 2025 were also, were the same predictions for 2024 but didn't happen, was that the next kind of wave that we're all looking to see in the ZK segment is, we want to see applications. We want to see applications that are actually making use of the tools that we have. Because we've been investing years in the infrastructure and like underlying technology from creating brand new proof systems to aggregation layers to whatever, right? And all these things are there now. So now I think what we really need is we need a lot more investment on the application side for things like healthcare applications. Yeah, for sure. That makes a lot of sense. And you think over time, as all these AI agents are trained and fed data, like Erick said, all these Twitter AI agents, these machine learning algorithms are fed data from other individuals, authors, copywriters, this could be intellectual property, and there could be a violation there, could maybe ZK technology enable me to prove that this is actually my AI agent with my own data without revealing it to the market and then getting it copied or cloned to another agent and take my work. Yeah, so my instinct is yes. And like the mechanism there would be to have like a cryptographic tag on data as it's generated. Maybe the tag is appended by the hardware device that's generating the data or whatever. It works in both ways as well, because it could work in a restrictive way where, by tagging information cryptographically, maybe you can restrict it from its use and other training sets, or maybe it allows you as an individual the opportunity to finally, and we've been talking about this for too many years now, like own your own data and monetize your own data. And I think that that's an amazing opportunity for humanity. One of my friend runs a company called Sapien, which does tagging for AI, you know, training data, to make sure that the human beings that are tagging it are actually being compensated for it. But I think if we extend that one step further, the next kind of holy grail, I think for us, but anyone that wants to see like more like equitable, you know, economic outcomes, it would be really nice for people all over the world to be able to get paid for all the information that they're constantly generating in a way you can view it as sort of like a universal basic income, where if everyone generates data, and that data is useful, like in different ways of different organizations, it would be really cool if we can track who's generating what and comp them for it. Yeah, absolutely. And going on to something early that you've mentioned was, with Zcash, it came this new technology about privacy in the blockchain. And maybe you can explain this better to our listeners, is why did Satoshi never built Bitcoin with a preserving blockchain? And for those listening, Bitcoin is not private by any means. Every transaction is public. What was the technology was not available. Was it on purpose? So we could track everything that was going on. It depends if the CIA did it right. Which I don't know. I don't know. I doubt it. I don't think the tech was there. One could say, yeah, sure zero knowledge was there. Like there was research on that previously, but I think oftentimes innovations just come with people are cobbling together what's available for some specific purpose. And I think Bitcoin was just hands down so much more efficient and effective than the previous versions of digital cash. I mean, I forgot what all the different ones are that were cited in the original white paper. I was even looking at it and like at one of our earliest devs and came from one of the other like alternatives to Bitcoin. But they never caught on for a variety of reasons. And Bitcoin was the first one that was able to cobble together tech that had already existed like, distributed ledgers already existed, so that tech was there. I mean SHA 256 was very well established already, cryptographic standard. Like, all these things were using the idea of hash rate to proof of work to solve, prove that you've done something that, solved some problem. All these things were just cobbled together by Satoshi, in a very inelegant way, by the way, from a software perspective. But I think that that's how innovation often happens. And it was a blockbuster success. And I would say, change the world and it is going to continue changing the world. And on the margin then you saw different innovations, like anything you see some blockbuster innovation happens and then people realize, well, it's not perfect. How do we solve some of its problems? And I think that's what happened with Bitcoin, is that it's not perfect. And Zcash came along to solve one of the biggest problems out there, the fact that it's not completely anonymous and I think that from this the perspective of and I'll say for me personally, interacting with Bitcoin in the early days I treated it as though it was largely private and I think that most people in the community at the time treated it as though it was largely private and it wasn't until years later that the conversation started off that it's not really private because organization started coming along that were able to like correlate addresses with human beings. And it was that correlation that then got more widespread attention, which then surfaced the underlying problem of lack of privacy. Yeah, absolutely. And you've been in the industry for quite some time. I think we've been over, this is our fifth cycle in terms of the market. And in every cycle, there comes a wave of innovation, especially throughout the bear market where builders are super focused. Would you say ZK technology was one of the biggest innovations coming out of these cycles or there's something bigger? Other than meme coins, you mean. The other big thing out of the cycle that even surprised me. There were several things from, from my vantage point, which again is limited. ZK for sure is from the technical, like raw technology perspective is probably the most interesting thing that's come out of the last cycle, from a rapid maturity perspective. My wife showed me a picture of when I started this business, my hair was actually black, like it's largely white. But like back then I never would have guessed how the Ethereum L2 world would have emerged. So L2s really did solve a huge problem in the industry. And even over the last few years, just the emergence of kind of the OP stack and community and the Arbitrum world, is really nice to see how the technology has advanced so much. And one can say like in these worlds, it's not so much major tech breakthroughs as much as it is kind of like marginal, kind of improvements for the function that it's solving to just get way better and way more efficient. And we're seeing kind of function gains that are skyrocketing in terms of usability and so forth. That's been a really nice emergent surprise I would say, that from previous cycle to this last bear market to today. Probably two or three cycles ago, I would not have predicted Arbitrum as an example, but today it's rocking it and I think, really an amazing ecosystem or EigenLayer by the way, for that matter. There's more and more things like that, that are always nice surprises to see. Do you think we're still in a very early days, early age? I don't want to call it the stone age, but are we laying the infrastructure for the next financial world that we're going to live in 2060, 80? Without a doubt, I have zero reservations on that one and I normally give you an economist's answer, like on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Now, on this question, I think unambiguously, we are laying the rails for tomorrow's financial world. And it's going to be a way better world, in my opinion. And like, when I look at my daughter, who's five years old at this point, I think she will grow up in a world where she will think that the way we used to conduct things in today's financial system is just archaic, like we were dinosaurs. And you mentioned about L2s and I think that's was a solution to the bottleneck that we reached as an industry. Do you think there's another bottleneck? Is it the UX, UIs? Is it still the transaction speeds? What is stopping us to go and become bigger than traditional finance, than Visa, MasterCard, and on retail? I don't know if we've really hit the limits to scale on the technology side for that. I think we have like the social limits to scale thus far in that we've given this a lot more people to use the tech on a regular basis. Even myself, by the way. I would say for myself, I've been around for a while in this industry and I'm a relatively sophisticated user of crypto. I have a PhD in finance, right? Like you would think I would be able to handle my financial life a little bit better. But it is really complicated. It is really complicated. There are so many different options out there. And I think that probably the biggest issue from my perspective thus far that we need to solve as an industry is we need just a lot more seamless, like whether we call it chain abstraction or whatever, users just need to get out there and be able to very easily navigate this world. And from my perspective, I think the AI can solve all of this stuff. When I look at what do I need? I need an AI agent that is going to continuously monitor and navigate the very heterogeneous and complex and rich world of crypto and manage my money for me. I don't even manage my own personal money like in my traditional financial portfolio. I put that on automated investment accounts that just managed on an automated fashion because I know it's way more efficient than me just guessing along the way. Trying to keep track of things. We need that in crypto. We need the ability for people to just say look, here's my risk tolerance threshold. Here are my goals in life. Here's when I want to retire, take my, whatever amount of ETH and manage it for me for the next 50 years. And just like have the agents automatically working on that. Now there's a lot of safety and security, issues along with that. But I think that if we look at the underlying, like what's wrong with the infrastructure, well, security is always an issue, but we just have way too many stovepipes. We need a lot more interoperability as an industry. And that's why I think that the ecosystems like OP and Arbitrum are so good is because they're creating these clustered ecosystems that could be very interesting at scale. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, especially looking at the next decades of where the industry can go, having that interoperability between ecosystem and scalability, where we need to focus on continuously building. Robert, I was wondering if we could go back in a time machine to when you started this journey. There's one thing you could tell yourself, what would that be? Oh, man. As a founder, builder, as we have a lot of founders listening and they're currently starting their ventures or quitting their jobs. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So from like a personal perspective, I would say hodl is the best word in crypto. And it's really meaningful because my wife's a hodler. She's never sold a Bitcoin. And that's amazing. I traded in and out of positions too much in my career. So put that stuff aside from like entrepreneurs perspective. I would say, this industry has such a vicious volatility cycle that the key is survival. And there will always be the temptation when times are good and you're getting momentum to just constantly feed into that momentum and forget that things could turn on a dime. So the best thing that you can do as an entrepreneur here is to just make sure that you are always protecting your organization on the downside and always stashing away enough stable coins or cash so that you can weather any storm. And then finally, I would say the storm's brutal. So the storms here could be way more brutal than normal financial downturns and capital markets, and they last a long time. So from a startup's perspective, the ability to be able to survive, you know, a 90 percent plus down bear market that can extend for four or five years is probably a superpower. Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. And for those listening, just getting to this industry, imagine 2008, every four years on repeat, everything you've built, all the conviction. Well, it gets just crushed down. It's nuts, yeah. I'll just say our predictions, like we think we're sort of at the beginning of a cycle here or the start of a cycle. And we're a little bit more relaxed than we were a year ago, or two years ago. Yeah, it's rough. I mean, not only do projects have to deal with the market downturn, but also they have to deal with the fact that when the market does come back, it's usually for a wave of new projects. Right, exactly. It's very hard. You don't see very many crypto companies. Exactly. You know, the attention in one cycle that they keep the attention in the second cycle and the third cycle. You have to really double down on what you're doing and really think about what it is that, what you're providing and the value that there is in it and the demand for it. Totally. And on that note, the other bit of advice that I would give is, look to be part of accelerating ecosystems. And this is something that we've done wrong over the years. And maybe because it's kind of like a vestige of when we launched our first project in 2017, like we were working on in 16 the world was just different. Like we didn't have the kind of established frameworks that we have now the ecosystems were just different. Even Ethereum wasn't a big thing back then like 16. It was a thing for sure, but it wasn't the beast that it is today. So one thing we've learned is really like you should position your startup in an ecosystem that is accelerating in a big way again, like an example of that would be like the Arbitrum ecosystem or the EigenLayer ecosystem or some other ecosystem that has kind of agglomerations of talent and capital and interest, and be part of that versus kind of doing something on your own. The only difference there is if you're doing something truly, you know, called orthogonal to what's going on in the rest of the industry. Maybe like the movement based chains, like Aptos and Sui, like they were introducing something new to the market. That makes sense, right? But if you're not introducing something at the core technical level that's brand new, you should probably just pick an ecosystem that's accelerating and be part of that and figure out how to solve your product market fit problem within that ecosystem. With this you also mean in founders getting through an accelerator program or just an accelerated ecosystem? And if it's going through an accelerator program, what do you think about in terms of giving out equity in a company you're building? Another really good question. I meant being part of an accelerating ecosystem, but accelerators are always valuable as well. Now, the right accelerator could be valuable, the wrong accelerator just takes the tokens and, it doesn't really provide a ton of value. These days, I almost think of it, this is not a legal opinion, but we can almost think about tokens as a sort of equity in a project. Again, like our lawyers would would hate me for even saying that but in a way users for whatever reason are buying your tokens to be part of a project and, be part of the value proposition the project bring to the market. So these days if you're part of an accelerator program, they're probably getting a token allocation in your project and you really have to weigh this. I would be skeptical. Be skeptical of everything and everyone in this industry because there's a lot of people that want to get rich quick and are probably going to take a large chunk of your tokens without providing commensurate value. But there are really good programs out there and really good advisors and really good partners that you can have. And they're probably worth incentivizing with tokens or equity. Yeah, I think that's great advice and not quite familiar with the process you went through with investors or raising, but is there anything that you think is worthy to share with founders that thinking maybe reaching out to investors and investing? Should they give it out all the equity to one leading investor or should they diversify as in many investors as possible? And should they preserve their token and maybe develop more equity in the company? So what I've learned is, you probably want a lead investor who just is going to be the big advocate that provides social proof that your value proposition matters. So for us as an example on, our biggest investor, as an organization has been DCG. Digital Currency Group run by Barry Silbert. There's also a great scale trust for Zen, our first product that we got out there. And it was really great to have them on our cap table because they just went to back for us constantly or just constantly helping us out as a project. So if you get an investor like that, you're really lucky. In the ZK side of the market, as we go to raise money for ZKVerify and in the coming months, what we'll do is we'll focus on a lead investor that is just known for their ZK investments and like being leaders in the ZK segment of the market. So we get them as basically like what other investors to follow on the round will do. And ultimately people that like exchanges to list you, they'll look at that lead investor and say, are they credible enough? Did their research team do their diligence that actually cleared this project as something that's important, or not, right? And that's why it's really important to have a solid lead. Beyond that, I don't think that there is a massive value in having like 50 investors on your cap table. I would be a little bit more strategic about it. And these days, a lot of deals, probably most deals involve equity and token. So you really have to also think deeply about how you're structuring around. Are you doing equity plus token warrants? Is it going to be a pure token round and so forth? These are things that are really hard to think about. And I didn't think about them when we first raised money in 2019, we just raised in equity deals. And how do you sort of advise a founder to navigate between finding a great investor that not only puts capital on the table, but also advises, makes intro, and it's there to support? And you feel it's a reciprocal relationship. I think there's probably no better substitute than to talk to founders of other projects in their portfolios. So if you're launching a project that's related to five other projects in a VC's portco I would reach out to them. Founders are typically very generous and other times like extremely busy and just don't have the time to answer you. But if you reach out to 15, maybe you'll get a few that will respond to you and it'd be really good to get their perspective and experience that these VCs actually provide value or did they just take equity and kind of like, never respond or maybe even worse cause problems. So I think that's the best way to do it. But keep in mind though, you need VCs to endorse you, but at the same time, they need to invest in projects. So you're shopping for them as well. And you have to keep that in mind is that it's just not a one way dialogue here and ultimately once there's interest, there's like massive momentum and everyone wants to buy a land. So then all of a sudden your equity or token is actually limited in distribution. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of founders do struggle to get their first check and then they are pretty much open to anyone to come in and just write the check. Then you never asked, was this person writing the check? What is he going to bring to the table? And that can cause problems. And yeah, quite of a journey there. And regarding your vision for the next 5-10 years, where would you see Horizon Labs going or what would you like to be at? So I want us to make a measurable difference to bring privacy to the world. I mean, this has been my mission from day one, right? And mission before I started the company. So I would love to see that happen in a meaningful way. On the variety of other levels, I want us to contribute deeply to the advancement of this technology. Over the years we've done kind of off and on like different investments in core R&D. We've invented a proof system in the past, recursive proof system, contributed as co authors to hash functions. We're standing up a new research group right now to add more contributions to what could probably be seen as a public good in some sense of advancing the science and technology of it. But we also intend to monetize on the product side. And then beyond that I want us to play a role in what I think will be the the automation of everything. I think this Asian stuff is probably real, and is probably going to be the future and I want us to have a nice slice of that that we're contributing to, and probably on the intersection of ZK and AI. And one last question to wrap it up. If there is a scale to measure the current level of privacy, we are in our world from 0 to 10. Could you give it a number or somewhere where we can sort of assess the current level? Maybe that's me being too pessimistic. I just don't think that many people really care, is the problem. It ranges between, most people don't really care to, every organization is susceptible with the right, and it's not that organizations even need to be negligent with the right dedication and persistence, a hacker can hack any organization and they do and they have. So I think that just a lot of information out there, personally identifiable information has already been hacked and stolen and it's out there in dark markets. It's out there for criminals. And beyond that, I think also, we just haven't taken privacy seriously enough. And probably because it hasn't paid and people haven't paid the consequences deeply enough, the lack of privacy, unless you live in certain societies where you have none and you realize that you wish you did have some, but I'm speaking again from the privileged perspective of an American or European, right. That lives in a pretty open society. But still, I think privacy is just fundamental human right. We need to constantly advocate for it. Yeah. Robert, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me, guys. This was fun. And one last question, I forgot. Where can we follow you and learn more about your work? No, totally. Guys, I'm on X all the time. So it's Rob Viglione on X. You can reach me there. You can come to our Discord, Telegram groups, anything like that, I'm always around. I'd love to interact. Cool. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Thanks, guys.

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