Transcription
10 years ago, we believed that in 2030-2035 will probably be the doom day. Something is going to be produced by humanity that will break the cryptographic algorithms. If you ask me now, that is 2025, I don't see this happening in the next 5 years.
But there is a question mark here.
Costas Hulkus, the co-founder and chief cryptographer at Miston Labs, with 15-plus years in cryptographic research and blockchain security. He's also the author of "Hashware's Proofs in Winterfell ZKP."
She had to explain to her mom, "What is a cryptographer? What is cryptography?" We have to understand what the word means first. It's a Greek word. "Crypto" in English means something being secret. And "graph" means I write. So, I'm writing something in secrecy. And you know that Facebook cannot read your messages because there is some encryption. This encryption is a job of a cryptographer.
That's something that most people still don't understand about the network.
We invested a lot in innovation. Many of the features that you see are very, very unique in the space came from Sui, that eventually is the driver of all of the adoption of new tech to protect against problems of the future. I don't think this is appreciated yet.
You mentioned being at Facebook and then you decided to dedicate your life to Mist Labs.
So, I wanted to create something by myself because otherwise, if I stayed at Facebook, the only way to shine and use my technology in real life was to acquire someone and do the same thing as I did in WhatsApp payment. So, a startup like Mist is probably my only option to apply things that I do for humanity. There is no other way.
What's something you think is uniquely bad at?
Uh, good question. Hi everyone. This is the little bit that I know none of you like that can help us make a huge difference for this show, and we want to take it next. 71% of the people who regularly watch "When Shift Happens" have not subscribed. And so, all I'd ask you, if you want to make a huge difference, is the following: If you've seen this show before and you like it, help me, help my team. Hit the subscribe button, and we'll continue to build this show for you. Thank you. Con is off. We're going to survive. The penguin will too.
Let's do it. That's good.
Imagine I live in Dubai. Yeah. And now it's too cold. [laughter] It's fine. Well, in Dubai, you have a lot of malls, so you're probably used to it, too. Maybe they're a bit less, uh, hardcore as here.
You cannot imagine that some people have vitamin D deficiency because they don't go outside in the sun.
Well, I... even if it's hot, nobody goes out.
I can imagine because I live here in Singapore and [clears throat] I'm not out. I'm just all the time inside working, like all of us, I guess.
Yeah, all of us.
You're Greek?
I'm Greek originally. Yes.
Yeah. So, I was born there. Well, the temperature is not as hot as here, but it's, uh, during summers, I believe even hotter.
35, 40.
Sometimes. You can keep the habits of going to take some sun every day.
Mediterranean habits.
You don't do that in Dubai? [snorts]
I don't know. Um, I don't enjoy Dubai because I'm not so many times outside, just working.
Mhm. When I have time, uh, typically there is, you know, all of this, uh, time difference between the US and, uh, Middle East, which I need to stay and stay inside while Dubai is like an all-day city, all-night city, never sleeps. I still need to find some spare time to do that. That's my problem with Dubai. Nothing else. I think the time zone is a big difference.
Probably one of the good places to be actually in terms of time, time difference. Dubai, because Asia is very brutal for, for the USA, right? It's very late all the time. You go to sleep 2, 3 a.m.
But because we're, um, West Coast, like California, imagine the time diff is pretty much half a day.
It's half a day.
It's half hours. Almost half a day. Yeah.
Yeah. So, basically, basically when you're done, they're kind of starting, right? I mean, you're not done, but when you're supposed to be done, they're starting.
Exactly. Exactly. And the company is quite, um, like, because it's American-based, the headquarters are in Palo Alto. Yeah.
And you know, as a co-founder, also, you have to interact with the people there. Of course, everywhere, but there, it's a bit more common.
Yeah. I actually went to the office.
Uh, you've been there?
Yeah. It's amazing. I love it.
Uh, there was Adeni, there was, uh, Sam, there was, um, Evan.
When was that? Like a year ago?
It was in March.
March.
Amazing energy in the office. I left so energized. It was amazing. Loved it. I saw on your LinkedIn, you're actually based in, uh...
I was, I was based in Palo Alto until last year, and then I moved to Dubai. There were many reasons. Imagine, we're five co-founders. It's quite different from other companies.
So, we had to spread, uh, to not kill each other.
No, it's not, it's not killing each other. It's, um, you have to, because I was Greek, it was by far easier for me to go to a nearby place, like a neighboring, neighboring country in pretty much the same time zone. And it helped a lot because the culture is not very different, right? I mean, you know, Eastern Europe, then you have like the Middle East, and then you go to the rest of Asia. And I'm creating a couple of teams across Asia in general, and Dubai helps on proximity. So I can fly to Vietnam, I can fly to Korea, I can fly to different places, even Europe, Eastern Europe, easier than in the US. California is too far, my friend.
It's so far. I mean, I know.
Far. You cannot do anything. I mean, you need 5 hours to go to the closest different cultural place.
I know. I know. Uh, I'm going back again in a couple of weeks. I'm not [snorts] looking forward. [laughter]
Yeah, it's, it's good to be there, especially if you're coming on, um, some Silicon Valley company. For me, for example, it was quite a career change being at Facebook.
For sure. But after a while, and after you get used to it, you realize that you're losing like some parts of the world and how they're evolving because you need to travel a whole day.
Mhm. Also, I felt when you wake up there, like you have a trillion messages because everyone already went through their day, and it's like it's giving you so much anxiety. You're like, "Holy [ __ ], I don't even want to open my eyes this morning." Whereas in Asia, it's the opposite, right?
Yeah.
People kind of wake up when you go to sleep. Okay, whatever. I'm just going to look at this later tomorrow.
True. That's why we don't sleep in California. [laughter]
That's where you learn.
Talk about this as well.
That's where you learn to not sleep, right?
Yeah. I sleep with naps. I'm not kidding. I'm sleeping with naps for the last, uh, almost eight years. I'm not sleeping like fully five, six hours in a row. No, it never happened.
Tell me more about that. So, you're the Winston Churchill of crypto.
Um, I'm trying. Do you know why? Why I tried all of these things? I had a professor, uh, back in Greece. This was later on, 2001, 2002, where he was a mathematician, and he told me the trick of whenever you have a problem, just don't sleep well, and maybe by the time you wake up, uh, randomly or suddenly, you will find the solution. So, I literally exercised this, um, um, this way of thinking. And I had, I don't know, four or five ideas from my PhD came from subs, sleeping. And [snorts] I followed this practice for for a moment. It's not healthy. Nobody should do it, by the way. But at the same time, in some short periods, it's helping a lot. Even, even in Sui, if you can see some of the innovations we have happened because randomly I woke up during the night, and if you see my wall, I do have, um, some markers.
Mhm.
And very quickly, I grab the marker and I try to write in the wall. I have like a small whiteboard. Sometimes I'm even writing. I wrote a couple of times on the, in my wife's neck because you don't, I mean, you wake up, you, you, you're not like fully conscious yet. So, it's like anagrams. It's you're writing in a, in a very specific way where you write wherever you can think. And some of these ideas, I remember in the morning what I was thinking at night, and it happened. Zk-loin is one example.
But you have to write them down.
I have to write it, otherwise, because I didn't remember it. Absolutely. I didn't remember it. Yeah.
Yeah. [snorts]
So, I cultivated this for a while, and then, um, it became a habit. I now try to change it gradually.
Where's that going?
It's change your eight-year habit.
Yes. But at the same time, it's not healthy.
So, you have to, you have to find ways. Now, by, by the time I'm getting into a car, all of my team is here. The first thing I do is I have to sleep because commute in Dubai, I don't know how it is here with traffic, it's quite intense. So, if you have to travel like for 30 minutes or 1 hour, it's probably the best time for me to take a nap.
Um, and then, yeah, you do it a couple or three times per day, four times. So, you're sleeping three, three hours.
How did you realize that you, that it was not healthy? You start to feel some things physically. I, I earned some weight, especially after I broke my leg. And it's not only this. I mean, everybody is just sitting on a desk and coding, you know, designing, uh, having to take a few calls, not sleeping well doesn't help, right? You, you don't have like the stamina to go to the gym. You, even your diet is a bit more, uh...
You eat [ __ ]. You eat crap because you have these cravings because you're underslept.
Yeah.
Exactly. And I also have two kids, like five and seven now. One of them is Kryptos, by the way, the older one. Um, we will have this discussion, but this was the diff, the most difficult algorithm in my life. It's not crypto. The most difficult algorithm was to convince my wife, name our son Kryptos, which was, yeah, as you can imagine, quite intense. Um, because there is also tradition in Greece to give the names of grandparents to kids, and we changed that.
To Kryptos. Kryptos. Kryptos with a K, because in Greece, we don't have C. The letter C doesn't exist. We have gamma. [snorts]
How old is this Kryptos?
He's 7 now.
Mhm.
You grasp this card before you grab the card.
Yeah. [snorts]
I... It's a Solana Visa, I think. Right. Payment is coming, my friend, everywhere.
It's a Cast card.
Yeah.
Uh, Cast, one of the sponsors of the podcast. They, uh, it's basically paying with your stable coins, right? You don't have ramp, you just pay, Apple Pay, done, very easy. I just use that all the time.
I think most of the chains, Sui also has, um, some card providers now, and I know I can imagine like payments coming into the space by far faster than we expected, just because crypto as an asset is typically an investment for most of the people. So we had to switch to something else, and [snorts] stable is the most obvious thing to do, right? So we will see many, many card providers actually issuing, uh, helping people to, to transact with converted crypto into, uh, digital fiat like USDC, USDT, all of the USD, um, and then eventually use them to purchase stuff. I'm expecting though many countries, even other currencies outside the USD, to get into the game very, very quickly. Otherwise, they will stay behind.
We just had one here in Singapore, XGD. Do people use it?
Well, it's just, just started between Coinbase and one of the biggest banks here, I think.
And, uh, yeah, we'll see.
It's about adoption, advertisement as well, marketing, I guess. Um, you have to convince, I don't know, all of the restaurants starting with this, because this is how people typically engage with, um, everyday like purchases, is either grocery store or restaurants, and all of the rest are coming afterwards, right? And probably some, the big supermarkets like Amazon. By the time we have it there, I believe it will be the, the beginning of stable coins is the thing to, to transact. Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. I'd like to thank our friends at Jupiter, the DeFi super app. Anything you want to do on-chain, from trading to earning yield, you can just use Jupiter. Personally, I'd recommend getting the Jupiter wallet on either your laptop or your phone. 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the competition. You're going to love it. Thank you to the awesome team at Castard, my go-to card to spend my stable coins directly with my Apple Pay to buy anything, food, coffee, hotel night, or plane tickets without having to use a bank ever again. Absolutely. I mean, for me, couldn't be clearer. I live my life in stable coins. The business is run on stable coins. Every expense, people are paid in stable coins.
Yeah. Planes are booked with stable coins.
This is true. [snorts]
Well, we started from the very beginning. Imagine, I'm in the space since 2009.
Very, very early. [snorts] By the way, I met my wife in a crypto meeting, crypto gathering.
Wow.
Um, I was in my, I studied in Greece, and I had some collaboration with France, Paris. Um, my job was always to be a cryptographer.
If you had to explain to your mom what is a cryptographer? What is cryptography?
It's, it's very simple. By the way, we have to understand what the word means first. Like, it's a Greek word. So, I'm Greek, I can probably explain it. "Crypto" in Greece means something being secret. And "graph," "grapher," "graphy" means I write. So, I'm writing something in secrecy.
So, what do you have on WhatsApp? And I was part of WhatsApp, by the way, on the team, just after I left Libra, the project at Facebook. And you know that Facebook cannot read your messages because there is some encryption. This encryption is a job of a cryptographer. So, we're building systems so your messages can go in secrecy from one place to another. In the WhatsApp case, Facebook cannot read your messages. You know WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook. So, Facebook can now cannot read your messages now because some algorithms there, some mathematics, protect your messages from being written by someone else. So, this is one part of cryptography. And the other part of cryptography is typically digital signatures. So, when we see some QR codes and there is a government that put a signature there, it means like we're replacing the handwritten signature with a digital signature. This is also the job of a cryptographer. And if we go further, so one is encryption, the other is digital signing, the other is privacy in general. So, you will see all of these concepts, oh, zero-knowledge proofs, and a few others that are having to do with quantum encryption and all of this stuff. Cryptography is evolving, right? So, we always have a job. Something new is coming, and then we're working on more complex algorithms, more complex, uh, properties. So, you will see very quickly, for example, that you go to the grocery store, and sometimes they ask you, "Oh, you cannot buy this thing. It's more, you have to be more than 18 years old or 21." You need cryptography, right? I prove to you by not showing all of the identity that I'm more than 18, but I'm not giving you anything else because this is what you need. Why do you need to know my birthday? So, a cryptographer is doing that, uh, this stuff, mathematics, algorithms for protecting the data being transferred, uh, without someone, like, witnessing what's happening, and signing and privacy. This is what it is.
Mhm. [snorts]
I have many questions, but two come to my mind based on what you just said. The first one is regarding WhatsApp.
Yes.
You said Facebook can't read WhatsApp messages.
They cannot. [snorts] Yes.
But how secure or encrypted are is my WhatsApp conversation? If I think about a government, for example, and when we know why Web3 exists, right? And when we know that the government has so much power on most of these companies.
I [snorts] don't know what will happen with any extra rules in the in the future. But at the moment, what's happening on your WhatsApp is your phone locally, locally in the device, you are creating a key, a cryptographic key. This means that even Facebook doesn't have access to this private key. Nobody. When you want to chat with someone else in WhatsApp, the other person also has the same. In cryptography, we have this concept of public key encryption, which means that I create some secret. From this secret, I create an identity of my secret, and then because you know the identity, you can send me a message. But if both secrets are staying in the device, Facebook doesn't have access to them. So technically, they cannot do anything about the encrypted communication. There are a few issues here. For example, how do you know that WhatsApp, when you want to connect with someone, is using the identity of that someone and it's not using the identity of something that is inside WhatsApp and probably they can read your messages, right? Playing the money in the middle.
So, here you trust the software, and the software is a binary that technically, um, um, we agree that Facebook is not sitting there. You have to trust this.
That's a problem. It is a problem, and this is why decentralized encryption, and we recently had something on Sui as well, um, is offering, in my opinion, better, better guarantees regarding the visibility, the transparency. If you see an address, a Bitcoin address, an Ethereum, a Sui address, a Solana address, you know that the private key is owned by that person. Otherwise, I mean, you interacting with them financially, you know that there is a private key there. There is a secret key. So there is no intermediary. There is nobody. So technically, we can have end-to-end encryption even between addresses.
Mhm.
So, we will see, uh, very soon that all of our wallets eventually will support encrypted messages between people, either because you need to send a receipt. So, when you buy something from a restaurant, how do you connect this now with a tax system, right? There is nothing. So, maybe we will see the advancement of payments. We see now with credit cards here or debit cards, you might see the next step will be that even the receipts are going to be on-chain, because this is by far better for audits, by far better to defend against AML, um, you know, KYC, and other stuff. But you need encryption. I shouldn't see that you're buying from Walmart or you're buying from Amazon and what you're buying, and privacy in general is coming.
Um, one of the issues, because personally, I'm also working on, you know, if you are an expert on privacy, typically what's happening is some institutions or some governments, they're asking you, "What is the next step?" One of the problems banks are facing is everything in crypto is public, great for transparency, but at the same time, it's not the same privacy you have on banks. So, if you buy a car, let's assume that you buy a luxury car. Why do you want other people to know about this?
Mhm.
Right? Yes. It's electric.
You see a lot of people want other people to know about...
For this particular one, maybe for this example, yes, I was, I, I was wrong. But you never know, right? Sometimes you want to stay incognito, or you want to not associate your address with this particular car, because people then will see, "Oh, you're also donating there, and at the same time, you have a car, and people are dying in the war." You know, it's, it's quite complicated. So, I believe all of the, all of the stuff we have between the banking systems at the moment are coming into crypto. Eventually, in the next few years, I believe, I don't know, probably five max years, I think three to five, most of the transactions will also have some part of, um, encryption inside them. So, you will either not be able to see the amount, you don't know exactly how much, uh, money is transferred, maybe with some access to the auditors and regulators, but not for the generic, general public. Yeah, it's, it's going to be the, the same, because there is, um, there is, in my opinion, some, even when I was at Facebook, you know what was the biggest challenge? How do you convince the regulators on one side about privacy, and the regulators on the other side about transparency? Some regulators want to protect against anti-money laundering, right? You need, you need to do something. At the same time, the other regulators want to ensure that the user is not exposing more than they should. And this is conflicting, right? And this is the reason when you mentioned about WhatsApp, why some governors are going against end-to-end encryption. There is a privacy element. At the same time, they're afraid that if we allow full privacy, there will be an issue. I don't know, with all of these terrorism attacks and other things that we cannot do anything. I mean, secret services cannot work. So, there will be a balance somewhere. In my opinion, I don't know what the balance will be, but the cryptographers are now pretty much recruited to find the solution on these problems.
You said our job as a cryptographer is constantly evolving. There's always new challenges.
100%.
Can you debunk the one of the biggest worries of Bitcoin people, Bitcoiners, or I would say, one of the biggest, uh, arguments for Bitcoin detractors is quantum computing.
I was expecting this. So, now because we talk about that, you're probably one of the best-placed person to say, "Hey guys, should we worry about that, or should you say, 'Hey, we know how to evolve. We're humans, and this thing will evolve with the advance of quantum [snorts] computing, and therefore, don't be too worried.'"
Um, so, what's happening on quantum, uh, safe algorithms is the following. Um, I was personally involved from the very beginning, right? I started publishing on quantum-safe cryptography since, um, I don't know, 10 years ago. And even now, as you can see, Sui is publishing a lot of stuff about the quantum, uh, protection in the future, right? When it comes. My personal opinion, as as Costas, it's not there yet. So, quantum threat, yes, there are some, like, news that the technology is becoming better and better. One of the problems with quantum computers is how to handle the noise, because you are talking about, you know, subatomic, like, you know, molecules and all of this stuff. It's, it's too, like, it's in the microspace, right? We, we don't know how to control all of these things. But 10 years ago, we believed that in 2030, 2035, will probably be the doom day. Like, uh, something is going to be produced by humanity that will break the cryptographic algorithms. If you ask me now, that is 2025, I don't see this happening in the next 5 years.
But there is a question mark here. There are two things that happened in society that we have to take them into account. It's not so much the fear that a quantum computer can break Satoshi's coins, because, you know, Satoshi's coins in Bitcoin, which is a big amount of, uh, the distribution of coins, are exposed. The public keys are exposed. Technically, if there was a quantum computer and it can break cryptography, the first protocol that will be attacked, it's not Sui, it's not Solana, it's not Near, it's, it's Bitcoin, and it's these particular addresses of, uh, Satoshi, which is a lot of money. So, someone getting all of this liquidity can actually, you know, go the market up and down, pretty much a big whale, and we will start realizing there is a problem. The question mark where that I mentioned before is the following. The National Institute of Standard Technology and many institutions and secret services and like all of these agencies across the world, they say that it doesn't really matter if we will find an attack with quantum computers by 2030 to 2035. If you want to transact with the government, either because you need to make bank payments, you want to have the stock market on-chain, you want to do, uh, e-commerce, and all of this stuff, you have to support quantum-safe algorithms. It depends on what will happen with the technology. Probably they're preparing themselves. If it happens, let's be ready at least before it happens. If they say 2030, 2035, in my opinion, this means that they're actually proactive, and this will not happen before that. Also, I don't see from the hardware vendors that are doing quantum, some of the claims are a bit overstated, right? This doesn't matter, though, because there is another thing, which is the second part of the question mark, which is AI. All of the analysis we did in the past about the progress of humanity on many sectors, not only cryptography, not only quantum, but all of the things in in our life, we didn't take account that we created almost a different species. We now created something that probably it can accumulate knowledge by far faster than the human brain. Which means that we might have a leapfrog event in quantum computing just because AI helped us to think about it. So, how do you predict us? Because AI, the AI of this form, like ChatGPT and Gemini and DeepSeek, is only 2 years old, and you see the how it progresses, right? I mean, can you do your job without AI anymore completely, just as a regular human? It's impossible. Mhm. You have a competitive advantage using AI, which means that the scientists who work on quantum computers, they will use AI now to see if they can break something, do some better science, just because they have more knowledge. So, [snorts] all of the chains, in my opinion, should start the migration now until 2030. So, that's my personal view. It doesn't mean that it will be broken, but because we have all of these interactions, and now with Trump, that yes, it's, it's, it's getting more institutional and more like players from Web2 are coming. I was also in a robotics conference last week, and I see also the AI industry coming into the blockchain, and eventually there will be agentic payments, but these payments might be with Stripe, these payments might be with all of the regular banking systems. You need to comply eventually, otherwise crypto will stay in a silo. So, because of this, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Sui, Solana, and all of the big tokens, in my opinion, should invest into getting quantum-safe, and we did it at Sui. Uh, not sure if you are following my posts, for example, for example, two months ago, I think it was July, um, my team invented an algorithm where the previous addresses, not the new ones, imagine Satoshi's address, but for Sui, can be quantum-safe just with a single click of a button using, um, an interesting technology that is called, um, post-quantum zero-knowledge proofs. But this doesn't apply to Ethereum and and Bitcoin. So, Sui, Solana, Near, and whoever is using an algorithm called EDDSA are better at the moment, are better placed for quantum safety compared to the ECDSA, uh, chains, which is Bitcoin and Ethereum and all of the EVM. [snorts] So, it's happening. We have a dedicated team working on this, and Sui will become quantum-safe, at least for addressing, like, new addresses that are quantum-safe in the next couple of years. We already started. It might be even earlier than two years.
So, don't be afraid for now. In five years, we should talk again. What you should be afraid is maybe if we don't do it now, we will have some problems interacting with the rest of the Web2, um, business.
Are you aware of, uh, Ethereum or Bitcoin developers working on that?
There are. Yes. Ethereum Foundation gave, um, a grant. In my opinion, uh, they do, they're trying to do something towards this direction. Um, I think, I think his name is, is Jako. He, he's also someone that I, I see him in conferences. He's a good guy. Um, he's also one of the guys who is working on this zero-knowledge post-quantum security. Mhm. Um, Solana is also having some people in their community who are working on, uh, creating new address types that are using quantum-safe keys, and Sui has done all of the work in the last year, in my opinion, the most robust one with results. I think the others are initiatives that they are starting to explore this stuff. There are some very, like, old chains like QRL, Quantum, I don't remember what is the name, um, but these, in my opinion, they are not like some of the top blockchains in the world. We don't have a quantum-safe blockchain, uh, in the top 20. Even in the top 40, if I remember correctly, there is nothing. So, Sui is, in my opinion, leading this, but everybody started. If you see the tweets and all of this stuff, they're starting giving some funds to people to explore. It's typically on big universities. The problem with most of the companies that I see today, I will say Solana as well, I think they are lacking very strong teams on cryptography. So, they have to rely completely on the community and the and the universities that are, that things are slow. And I can tell you for sure, because I worked for Facebook, I was in Silicon Valley for 6 years, and I know exactly what it means to go either academic or very slowly if you are pretty much as a public sector employee. Facebook is not public sector, but it's not a startup. Things are slow. The reason that we left Facebook was because we wanted all of this tech, even the quantum stuff, to happen faster, right? And you have to be a startup to contribute faster than you need to give 100 approvals from the managerial staff, and then you go up to Mark Zuckerberg or David Marcus back then to give the okay. Facebook launching in two months. You cannot make algorithmic changes. It's too expensive. But a company like Miston can provide an on the Sui ecosystem a solution that has been trained by some of the best people who used to work at Facebook and Google and Apple, which means we can move faster. That's why you haven't seen yet, uh, any big organizations like Google or Facebook by themselves, not us that we left Facebook and we created, like, the technology for Sui that we adopted, that they're not there. There is nothing in the top 50, 100 that you see FAANG companies, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft having a blockchain, because they cannot. The cyclists in crypto are one of the narrowest in the space in the whole business sector, and this is very, very fast for all of these slow-pacing companies.
Absolutely. How do you, the same happening at Mist, becoming slow because too big?
We don't allow this. We have, um, and this is pretty much a lesson we got from the Libra project. I personally had 20 ideas at Facebook that they were sitting in the shelf just because I couldn't apply them. We were launching for one year. Costas, don't take paternity leave. We're launching. I didn't take paternity leave, and the next month I didn't take paternity leave, and the next month I didn't take. I lost my paternity leave for 12 months. I didn't take a single day.
How did your wife react to that? After agreeing to name the...
Saved me, saved me, you know.
Yes. No, Kryptos was the first one. He was already 2 years old, 3 years old.
But you already gave in on that, and then on the next one, there was no paternity leave.
I didn't take even on the first one for other reasons. I used to work for another crypto company that we were launching again and again. R3 Corda, I think now they do something with Solana. [snorts] Um, but it was one of the first, uh, startups in the ecosystem. Um, Facebook had, uh, this particular issue of, uh, Libra was almost ready technologically, it was ready to launch, but because of this, you know, politics and regulations and all of this stuff, we had to wait until we get the green light. But this happened for a very long period, which means that many of the people pretty much burn out, because imagine if you're having your algorithms and you cannot, um, actually put them in public, then what do you do? Most of the folks in in Silicon Valley are very ambitious for their career, right? They cannot wait 3 years until you learn something. So, Mist now is learning from all of these, uh, examples of the past. And imagine Evan, the CEO of Mist, used to work at Apple as well, having one of the biggest teams there, and then at Facebook. Um, we are creating smaller teams, smaller teams that are acting independently, because otherwise you will get into the same problem of being a very large organization that is like sluggish. You're not moving fast. For instance, I have a hacker team now, and you will see a lot of things happening with robots and AI coming into Sui, and this team is, uh, four people, the core, and then we have other people around it, but we work completely independently. And the cryptography team, it's another team that is working completely independently from the rest, and even the promotion path and everything is, is running in a different pace, otherwise you will be public sector, I don't know, until when. But, um, I think it also helps that we open the doors to universities, and some of the folks are exposed still to the new generation, and we're operating like this, while if you work at Apple, believe me, most of the stuff is closed source, you are not interacting so much with the, with the rest of the community, so you stay, you stay in a very small cycle, and, um, for me, this doesn't work in crypto. That's why Apple is the slowest one in crypto adoption.
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You mentioned being at Facebook, then working so on Libra, then on WhatsApp, and then you decided to dedicate your life to Mist Labs and to building the Sui network.
Yes.
Why? Because I want, by the way, um, I was also coming from a low-middle-class family in Greece in particular. Faced a huge issue for me, right? I'm talking about me, why me? I'm in Sui now, and, and Mist, um, we had capital controls, we didn't trust the banking system. Even now, we needed a change. And that's why you see so many Greek people to be very successful in the crypto space. Like, even the, uh, Cardano head of research, like the cryptographer, is Greek. Um, we have two Greeks, like me and George Danzis, in the team. There are so many others, like, even Paradigm, the CEO of Paradigm is also Greek, George Georgios. The CEO of FTX, or one of the co-founders of FTX, is also Greek. And imagine a very small country, how is it possible that so many Greeks are there? And there is a reason because we felt it in our blood. I mean, the economy of Greece was pretty much destroyed. Even now, it's trying to recover. And at the same time, all of us invested our time instead of being doctors, medical doctors, which is my case, I wanted to be a medical doctor. I stopped. I'm a dropout of medicine to go into security and payments. Um, I want to change that narrative. I want to have like a better ecosystem where even people who are unbanked or, um, I don't know, they don't have privacy. I have the ability now, and there is a vehicle with Sui and, and Web3 to, to achieve this. Facebook was obviously a step that you need to do, because if you go to Silicon Valley, your perspective on how you're serving two billion users who have these requirements, who want privacy, at the same time they want visibility, you know, they also want to, to have their social life there. It was one of the biggest lessons I had in my life. Um, and you need to go that route, in my opinion, to understand that, okay, I've seen the, uh, the mid-size companies. I've been in Paris, as I told you, then in the UK, then in the US. Now, I've learned how it is to run for two billion users. But I realize that all of these companies, even Facebook and Google, are struggling to create a new product. Facebook acquired most of the companies. After Facebook, they acquired WhatsApp, they acquired Messenger, they acquired Instagram, they acquired Oculus, everything was acquired. And pretty much the same is happening with most of the big guys, the big guys, right? So, I wanted to create something by myself, because otherwise, if I stayed at Facebook, the only way to to shine and use my technology in real life was to acquire someone and do the same thing as I did in WhatsApp payments. I had to work on encrypted WhatsApp payments. For a moment, WhatsApp tried to have Libra wallets inside WhatsApp, but of course, Libra never happened. But, um, this was my job. So, a startup like Mist, headquartered in Silicon Valley, extended across the world, is probably my only option to apply the things that I do for humanity. There is no other way. The other things are very slow. You have to go through that route, but then you need to build something of yourself to to put your ideas into practice.
What do you, what's something that most people still don't understand about the Sui network? What you guys are trying to achieve and do?
I think, um, the, the biggest mis here is, we invested a lot in innovation. Many of the features that you see are very, very unique in the space came from Sui. For example, login again with Google and Facebook, and automatically you have an account. Why was Sui this company? Do you understand by yourself why this invention came from Sui? Because this team worked at Facebook. We know that the average Instagram user cannot remember a password. There is no way. How do you expect, um, like all of the other chains fighting, "Oh, I want users from Solana, and I want users from Ethereum, I want users from Near." No, this is not the case. This is a mistake. We're doing a mistake. We're recycling ourselves. You need to get the average person that is having a social network account. But for these people to come, first, you need to know their behavior, and the second is you need to help on the UX. So, Sui helped a lot on the UX, and we have a wallet called Slash, that has 8 million users, at least, I mean, this was a number before that, that many of them are using this "Login with Google" and you have an account. And, and something that we did, and I think this is not known, is this is a protocol. If you want to create another wallet that uses this algorithm, you can do it, and another wallet, and another wallet, while most of the inventions are creating startups in other ecosystems. So, there is Magic Wallet, it's a startup. What if Magic Wallet goes away and nobody has now "Login with Google" and Facebook? Well, for us, is everybody can do it. We're offering algorithms to the system. The same thing with the quantum. You know, the algorithm that we invented about quantum protection of existing algorithms can apply now on Solana, can apply on Near. So, Sui is inventing things that eventually is the driver of all of the adoption of new tech to protect against problems of the future. I don't think this is appreciated yet. Um, somehow we're leading the innovation, but because we're having too much, and there is also the DeFi ecosystem that pretty much dominates everything at the moment in the crypto space.
Mhm.
The fact that Sui is the most innovative is only known in a small circle, and now the institutions, of course. But we need to do a better job, in my opinion, to advertise it properly. Like, Sui, for example, is now leading the way of robots coming into the blockchain, because if you see what happened this year with all of the innovations in robotics and agenting payments, and you see, we had a deal with Google about Google picked Sui to be the tester for the agenting payments. There is a reason that this is happening, right? I mean, it's, it's also the fact that this team came from Facebook is giving an extra, like, check mark. Um, when you're a government, for example, and you want to build something on on crypto, can you go to a team that hasn't delivered anything in the past? And this was their first project, and I'm talking about all of the other projects, right? Solana, for example, I have Ti. Ti was a good engineer in, uh, even in big organizations, right? But at the same time, imagine getting five directors from some of the biggest companies in the world coming into crypto, bringing all of these, like, energy and innovation. And that's why you have new features that didn't exist before. Don't be surprised if we will lead privacy. We already do. If we lead AI and and robots, if we lead the quantum, um, you know, evolution of the blockchains, this is happening. And because Sui was developed by people who were from Silicon Valley. So, if people learn this, imagine if you are a governor, you are a minister, and you want to do something, I don't know, for for a particular reason in the country, like a new stable coin, a new, um, a new real estate, and so on. Where would you go? Imagine one mistake and you're dead. You could go to the team that knows how to how to ship. And in my opinion, this is the biggest advantage that we haven't advertised properly. Only at the very beginning, and then we focused a lot on making the chain faster, the fastest in the world, making the chain, uh, very robust. But at the same time, down the road, we missed to remind people that this is pretty much a Facebook team that created all of this stuff.
What do you, what's something you think is uniquely bad at?
Ah, uh, good question. [clears throat] In my opinion, um, it's, it's related to the previous topic. Um, we, we have so many features that whenever we have even presentations, we try to pack everything into 15 minutes and 20 minutes, and this is impossible. Now, I, I personally struggle to to fit 40 features that do not exist anywhere else in the world into 15-minute slides. There is no way we can do it. So, we have to split and and change our approach to go to different audiences for for different reasons. And accept that even if on this one, you are the best, you don't include it in this presentation. Only include two or three features every time. Otherwise, it's quite complicated for people to understand all of the 40 things that you're doing better than the rest. This is one of the, of the issues that every innovation-focused company is facing. You, you drive most of the sectors, but because it's too many, it's too much information for...
The for the people to absorb. And we, it's good that we are five co-founders at Mist, at least. But Miston is not the owner of Sui. We were the creators of Sui, right? So we have to spread our, um, like our influence and our, uh, incentives to everybody else to do the same. So you have smaller, like, um, communities who are advertising different things each time, not all of the 40 together.
Mhm.
Because even if I ask you, I mean, you are in the space forever. If I ask you to at least the, the 30, 40 things that Sui is better than the rest, you cannot remember because it's too many. And you will tell, okay, it's, it's a very fast network and you have DeFi. But this is only 3% of what we do. So, you're saying, "Hey, we have so many things we're good at, but I still struggle today to see, um, to have this one thing that everyone, normies or everyone in crypto, remembers or knows Sui for, right? For example, Bitcoin, digital gold. Ethereum, DeFi and NFT, like that's where it started. Solana, casino, right? Like people, people like casino chain, right? NFT chain or whatever, uh, Tommy would say stable coin chain or AI chain or whatever, whether it's true or not, right?"
[snorts]
You're working on all these different things. Where do you think that this big mainstream breakthrough will come for, where people will say, "Is this the thing blockchain?"
You're looking for a super app, right? It doesn't have a super app, you will tell me. But it's, it's always like in the top for many things. Even DeFi is one of the best in DeFi. Do you know that? Do you know, do you have this in mind that on DeFi, Sui is probably having the best progress and on the developers?
I see all the charts published online. I see, uh, I mean, I talked to to Sam. How do we get more developers into into?
But you realize on the developers, it's having the best progress than anybody else, which means something. So.
But, but, but this is if you kind of go and really look at what I'm talking about, like the people who don't look, they're like, "This is the blockchain for," and therefore I want to be exposed to that, right?
Exactly. What I personally realize until now, and I can give you an example. The example is the Greek stock market. They came into Sui. Do you know why?
Because we are very good at many things.
And they said, "We have to to roll a dice. We don't know exactly which of the topics we're going to be good at." It might be the casino part because people are gambling and they will also buy stocks because every average user on on crypto, they do everything. They're spenders.
Then I should go to Solana. But I cannot go to Solana because Solana, it's only this. What if people want to do DeFi? You're also having a touch of DeFi of Ethereum. So I have to also be on that. I have access to DeFi. And at the same time, what if I want, um, instant, like, uh, settlements and all of this stuff? I cannot go in Ethereum because it's too slow. I cannot go in an L2 too because again, it's the same silo. The problem that the stock markets are facing, you know what it is? Do you know a card called Revolut or Venmo or all of these like neo banks that are coming into our world? You can, you don't need the regular banks anymore to to pay someone outside, right? But they are killing economies. Why nobody from from a small developing country will buy local stocks if by this card of Revolut or this application, you have access to American stocks, right?
Everybody will buy Google and Apple.
Right?
[laughter]
Why would you buy a Greek bank stock if you have access to these things? Why would you buy an Italian stock if you have access to to that stuff? So, even if they are helping a lot on on the average user, they are killing the local economy and the previous, uh, state-of-the-art, which means that they needed to go to a place where they can see developer growth. Of course, they have to dig in and we had to pitch about that.
[snorts]
So they consider us at the moment the one that has access to all of the things that you mentioned. I mean, even on the gambling side, there is DubLab. There is a company that is competing with what Solana is doing, right? It's not the top at the moment, but we have this, like, audience. There is also the audience of institutions, as I said, like the, the Greek stock exchange. I'm now traveling to a few countries that are coming. I was in Egypt, um, like two weeks ago, and there was an article about how Egypt can get into, like, blockchain technology. Imagine an African country eventually investing into that.
But the reason is because we have, we're in the top three of many sectors and there is an increase on the development community by far better than anything else out there. Yes, if you're asking me, there is no super app in Sui yet because it's a general purpose blockchain, but it's good at everything. There is a nice feature of Sui that not many people have it, not many chains have it. It's, um, there is no silos in Sui because you are good, even if you're not the top in all of them that we mentioned. You're not creating silos. You can take bets. So you don't like this, or you want to also attract gamers because originally we tried for gaming, right? If you remember Sui when we we started, fastest network, very low latency, technically you can do games on Sui gaming. I don't believe we do have competitors. So it is one of the of the sectors that Sui wins. The problem with gaming is it takes time because all of these game studios to create a new game, it's about, I don't know, two, three years to be able to to reach the place. We're only two years old.
Mhm.
So all of them are going to show up, uh, in the next few months, and some big names you will see. And in that sector, I believe it will be the one that we're winning. But robots, for example, even now, if you ask, what is the best chain for robots? In the top 20, top 30, it's Sui. It's just emerging. Emerging markets on the other side, DeFi, we're one of the top in DeFi and and people are making good yields and they are also doing trading and all of this stuff, and it's fast.
You need to have 0.4, 4 seconds, 0.3 seconds for transactions because we have some benefits on DeFi that do not exist elsewhere.
[snorts]
Um, but as you said, there is not a single place. If we exclude gaming, I believe because gaming, there is no clear, clear leader, but the industry is still adapting. But if it, if we see some big names in the space, it will be definitely on Sui. But because Sui doesn't create silos, it's giving better bets for companies. And this is the reason that you see on development on developer side that Sui is progressing better because all of them are typically pivoting every six, seven, eight months and they're trying to find a new market. You cannot do this in Solana. You cannot do this in Ethereum easily. If for some reason you want to also focus on gamers and DeFi users at the same time, what is the best chain? You don't know.
Right?
While Sui gives you the access to, okay, the top three, top five. Yes, it's not known for this, but is it, is it good to be known for this? Is it good that the that Solana is a meme and gambling site? How are they going to get the governments, right? There is an issue and we see institutions coming. So Sui, in my opinion, is well suited into this space of many industries from Web 2 are coming now and they are looking for a place where they can access different audiences. At the moment, that one is covered by Sui.
Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. Thank you, Trezor, my favorite cold wallet to store my crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to order a Trezor wallet and sleep well at night too, you can use my promo code WSH10 to get a 10% discount. Thank you to our friends at SUI for supporting this show. SUI is a scalable Layer 1 blockchain that's fast, secure, and affordable, built by previous Facebook developers, and that delivers the benefits of Web 3 with the ease of Web 2. Big thank you to Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a crypto specialist asset manager with more than $15 billion in client assets across 30 plus crypto solutions, including ETFs, index funds, alpha strategies, staking, and more. However you like to invest in crypto, Bitwise has something for you. You wrote AI powered three made the most advanced progress in agentic AI and robotics anywhere in the crypto world. It's no longer research, it's culture.
Yeah. What is SUI doing at the intersection of crypto, AI, and robotics?
[snorts]
Uh, 100%. By the way, Sui was the first one last year that we created some AI algorithms to protect against attacks, vulnerabilities. It was presented along with Google in their, uh, next, this is how it's called, conference in Las Vegas. And then Google came to our base camp to also present with us that Gemini can be used to detect the vulnerabilities for crypto, DeFi, crypto payments, and crypto frameworks. We identified some of the best attacks in the world, as you can see, some of the insolvency problems of crypto exchanges and some other bugs that exist out there. We found them first. It's not a, um, a project that can find everything, as we see, there are situations that people can mess up. Um, but we invested a lot on AI for security vulnerability detection. And I'm telling you, as a hacker, AI in the hands of a black hat hacker is probably the worst weapon we've ever seen as humanity. Hackers before that, they only had some very basic tools, maybe some more sophisticated, but like targeted. Now with AI, imagine what the hacker can do, right? You don't need to know anything about the codebase. Everything is open sourced in in blockchains, which is pretty much a problem. And this means that everybody can train their AI against attacking DeFi protocols, gaming protocols, and all of this stuff. We are trying to be in the front line of creating anti-hacking AI. So we're using this. The project is called Bagghdar and Bug Radar. A bug by bug, like it's a bug, I want to to kill the bug, right? And
[snorts]
it's doing really well and we have a specific team working on this. So AI and security, now agentic payments.
There is a reason that Google came to us when they did all of these announcements about payments.
[snorts]
Um, because we already work with Bagdar. They know that we have a specific team for AI. And very recently, we also hired, I, you were not in Korea, I, you were in Korea. No.
So we also hired Theo, who is the head of Mark Zuckerberg Foundation at the moment. He will be an advisor to us, and he was one of the co-founders of Uber AI Labs. He was also staff at Facebook and in, uh, many different places. Imagine Sui is investing a lot on getting some of the biggest brains of Silicon Valley into AI. So you will gradually see, this is, this is an advisor of what we're doing, not a full-time employee, but you're seeing like big names from AI coming into the Mist and Labs family that will help on AI in general.
Now, because of this, we also try to have some some features that enable robots to also come in.
Um.
I saw I saw the robots everywhere.
You saw the robots, right? And do you know why Sui and why not?
Yeah. Why and not anything else?
Tell us.
Because Sui has a few benefits compared to Solana, for example. The largest block on Sui is about 130 something kilobytes, which is quite big. In Solana, it's, I think, 1 to kilobytes or something. If you want to attach a lot of information by the dog, including, you know, telemetry and how it moves, uh, in in space and all of this stuff, you need slightly larger messages than before. And Ethereum and Solana cannot offer. So technically, the fact that we have larger blocks helps a lot. AI agents who are typically requiring more data than the the usual, the casual one. It's not just a single payment anymore. They want to use a blockchain that supports it. Sui is in the good direction here. The nice thing is that in this 130 plus kilobytes, you can fit 1,024 transactions, 123, uh, different transactions. So it can say in one move that I moved here, then I turned left, then in one transaction, then I did this, and I took this camera footage and I upload it on Walrus and so on. So the fact you can do larger blocks and you can also use Walrus to store bigger files because Walrus is a storage layer of Sui, technically.
[snorts]
It's like an ideal combination of having AI to report both their activity, but also their files, whatever they are producing from camera footages and everything, onto the blockchain. Previously, there was not such a solution, right? We had IPFS, but for IPFS, you had to improvise. At the same time, you cannot get the same guarantees as Walrus. Walrus is fast and it works with a very fast, uh, coordination, uh, network. And robots require latency sub-second. You are working with a robot in the street of Korea, in in Singapore, right? It will be here, by the way, the robots are already here. I I flew with them. And you need the lowest latency possible because it's a robot. I mean, it can harm people if you if you leave it like, uh, you have six, six seconds to control it. In Bitcoin, this is 60 minutes, right? This cannot work. So these are one of some of the things that helps a lot with Sui. The other thing is Sui created also this concept of tunnels. Imagine as Bitcoin has this light link tunnel, maybe you know about this, so people can do off-chain transactions.
And the same holds for Sui now, but these are programmable tunnels. So people, I can rent the robot and for 5 minutes, this robot belongs to me. I can control it with my wallet. And because it has some functions for compressing the transactions in the tunnels, you can now control it off-chain. You don't pay gas for every move that you're doing on on the robot, which means that the robot is very cheap to have it. So one transaction to open a channel and rent the robot, the robot, then I can control it as much as I want with digital signatures, and then I go and close a channel. So we will see crypto fights, crypto betting, crypto, uh, races, um, all of them with robots. Imagine two robots boxing, right? And then people are having a prediction market on top of it. The robots themselves can also use the Seal and Walrus. Seal is another protocol for encryption to store the data, and then you can sell this data or you can provide permissioned access to the data because it's your data, but it's also people's data. And then you can have all of these cool things all in one package because of this unification. And it's the reason that you asked me before, what is Sui good at? Sui is good at having all of the features from different, um, uh, like places. It's easier to create a DocuSign on Sui than any other blockchain because DocuSign needs encryption. You need, um, login with Google and Facebook because this is how most of the people are logging into DocuSign. You need to also have large files and you need to also have very robust signatures, even against quantum. Where do you find this? So it's, it's a global infrastructure, in my opinion, better suited than anything else to bring more complex technologies. And the same is with robots. Robots is new, but they're large, the the data is large, yet.
So they need a place where large data, very fast, can flow into the chain, and then encryption. That's why robots are coming on so faster than the rest because Solana started earlier.
[snorts]
But I don't think Solana invested a lot on having a particular team internally focusing on that. They, they, they typically gave it to the community. And we said, okay, we can drive it by hiring some experts to advise the community a lot more than, uh, others did. So we can inspire them with SDKs and we have people even like me writing code.
[snorts]
For the robot engineers to actually put their robots into Sui. You cannot do it the opposite way because it's slow. I told you, academia, it's slow.
Wow. Well, I interviewed the five, uh, co-founders of Mist.
You have all of them?
Yeah. Now you're the fifth one. And I have to say, you're all great. I mean, Evan was the best, but after today, like, you're the one who made me the most bullish.
[laughter]
So.
I'm the nerd of the followers.
I mean, you're the nerd, but you're also like, so passionate. Like, we can feel the.
The passion and the energy. Well, that was amazing. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you.
And we have so many more things to talk about that we'll talk about in part two, hopefully over the next couple of months.
Of course, let's do it.
Thank you so much for doing that.
Thanks a lot, Robot.
[laughter]
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