# Ameen Soleimani - OxBow, MolochDAO | Web3Privacy Now - Amsterdam Meetup 2025

- Speakers: Ameen Soleimani
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 13:50
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ZYsiidDiuPM
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYsiidDiuPM

## Description

Ameen Soleimani, a longtime friend of W3PN, joined us at our Amsterdam meetup to share insights into his work and explore how to strike a balance between privacy and regulatory compliance in today’s evolving landscape.

Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info

Ameen on X: https://x.com/ameensol
0xbow.io: https://0xbow.io

## Transcript

[Music] So, hi, I'm Amin Solmani. I'm currently employed. I have a job again. Uh, I'm the CTO of a company called Oxbow. Uh, our tagline is, uh, onchain privacy without the terrorists. Uh, it's a hit really. Um, raising money from VCs closing around. I like it. Uh raise your hand if you've heard of uh Tornado Cache. So I also helped with that. I used to run a DAO called Mullik Dow. It gave a bunch of open source grants to different projects. This is cool. It was a nice little um one of them was Tornado Cache. Uh so we gave them all of their initial open source grants and then uh after it became far more wildly successful than we anticipated because we launched it when ETH was like $100. Um we we were somewhat naive when we launched it. People came up to me and they were like you know bad guys are going to use this. No, get out. Like I'm going to use this for personal privacy like me and my friends, right? Um then ETH hit like $4,000 and North Korea hacked a video game for $500 million and started running hundreds of millions of dollars through tornado cash. Uh Alexi is in, you know, was in prison here. He's out on bail. So that was a big problem. Mikda tried to come to his defense, emptied the treasury, supported their legal fundraiser. Uh he he lost his case in the Netherlands. He's out on bail pending appeal. So supporting his uh appeal uh legal fundraiser now. Um Roman, same story in the US. He's also out on bail pending his trial with Trump. There's some hope that uh you know we might be able to politics our way uh into some better outcome. Uh there are some promising developments. Uh I know you know Trump might have pissed off basically half of the planet. Tariffs, no tariffs, tariffs. But uh one of you know he did free Ross and uh he did under the under him the department of justice did put out a memo that said that developers should not be held liable for the crimes of the users of their systems which I think is pretty important and so um yeah they also said and any ongoing cases that are not aligned with this should be dropped. So I'm happy about that. um trying to get, you know, best outcomes for those uh developers. Sometimes we forget the human cost, you know, we're like, we're gonna do a revolution and then we're like, a [ __ ] now my friends are in prison. So, um so I'm a compliance guy now. Uh after the tornado cash stuff happened, uh we tried to figure out a way to not have North Korea bring their money into the system. And the paradox of privacy for the good guys is that you need surveillance to figure out who the good guys are. I know chain analysis is probably not a very popular uh company in this room. Uh we have a you know lovehate relationship uh with with them. they're a a necessary part of the ecosystem in terms of figuring out like when a crime happens the people who are responsible for sorting it out uh use that to figure out where the money goes and how to not you know have it impact other systems. So, uh, we integrate with them and we, uh, basically have a privacy tool that allows us to track, uh, when, you know, it's semi-permission in the sense that anybody can deposit and pay us a vetting fee, but you're not guaranteed to get onto the white list and only people who we approve to be on the white list are allowed to withdraw privately. Everybody else is allowed to withdraw publicly back to their original address. It's kind of like Berghind, you know, you wait in line, but you might not get in. uh and we might bounce you. So, um that's that's my full-time job now. It's uh live. Uh we're about to remove the deposit limits so that you can deposit any amount of money. Uh it's called privacy pools.com. Come find me. Sorry, hit the mic. Come find me today after this and I will personally whitelist you. You have to tell me that Kim Jong-un sucks. Uh so that I know that you are not North Korea. Uh, but if you do that then you're good. I assume none of you guys are North Korea. Raise your hand if you're from North Korea repres. Oh [ __ ] this guy. So, um, we'll, you know, uh, vet all the transactions going through that and keep people's money separate. So, um, that's that's what we are up to. We're trying to promote the narrative that privacy uh, is for the good guys, should be for the good guys. has always we've always been trying to build it for the good guys. Uh that was you know always our intention and hopefully that somehow helps uh Roman and Alexi too. Who who here has heard of Virgil Griffith? I got like a handful of you. So he has actually worked at the Ethereum Foundation and he went to North Korea for a blockchain for peace conference. This is a total scam. Uh it was like him in a conference room of 30 North Korean officials. uh and they were like, "Tell us about your blockchain." And then he came back and went to the FBI and gave them his phone uh at his request um without a lawyer. Don't ever do that. Um and uh they took his phone and found some texts and uh prosecuted him for conspiracy to violate international sanctions. And he plead guilty and got five years in prison. And he just got out and I just had dinner with him. He's he's not like out out uh but he's like almost out. He's like in a halfway house in Baltimore uh you know for good behavior and like anyway um I had dinner with him and he had an interesting thing to say uh something I haven't heard before and something that I I starting to internalize and he said that the cipher punks were not ambitious enough. uh and having a person who just got out of prison for uh getting [ __ ] by the man for you know five years uh say that you know it's not always about fighting the man uh sometimes you have to believe that you can build a better man uh and he doesn't mean like a you know man in terms of man or woman like he means uh the man that we're all you know fighting against uh what if we aspired to do better uh what if we built the rules that we believed what if we built rules that protected our right to privacy uh and so that we didn't have to be criminals or that you know privacy was not something only for criminals. Uh and I think that's worth fighting for. Uh and I hope that you know when you you talked about lawyers and how uh we want to bring legitimacy to this industry. I think that's an important part of doing so is uh creating systems that kind of maybe work within the existing regulatory frameworks but also make the regulatory frameworks what we want them to be and what best protects people. Uh try to have less data honeypotss uh that can eventually get corrupted when the wrong people lord over them. So uh I think uh his very personal experience with the law also you know reflect some of our um maturing as an industry. Uh this isn't 2017 anymore. uh we've done a lot of things uh for ideological reasons uh and had to learn from the examples uh you know of reality uh and trying like I I didn't expect to be a compliance guy uh in my career uh that was not that's new thing for me yeah I go to conferences now that are like regulatory and it's like me and a bunch of lawyers and department of justice and CFTC fins and and SEC I'm like so my friends who made tornado cash in there who is this um so yeah it's a it's an odd uh setup um but I I think uh generally speaking privacy is uh very important you know not just financial privacy obviously that's a lot of you know in blockchain land where most things are money oriented that's where it ends up being first, but Tornado Cache was basically the second zero knowledge proof implementation in human history. Uh the first one on Ethereum uh and it was meant to be like the MVP. Uh this is like let's just see if this works, you know, like this is rad. Uh holy, you know, wow, you can have shared secret state amongst people. Like that's wild. Um it it is magic. uh you know it's like I don't even I I really don't know how it all works uh like the math behind it. Every room that I was in of people building zero knowledge proof systems everybody's smarter than than I am. I'm like um always learning but the the power that you can get from this. So people try to talk about for example putting democracy on chain and having like onchain voting and this is like Andrew Yang in I think 2020 maybe earlier but whatever that election was and we were all like freaking out like that's like the worst idea I've ever heard. Uh like everybody can have their votes publicly visible for everybody else to like spy on them and and see how it's going. Uh but uh there are like you can do it better and so I'm gonna give a shout out to uh RMO distributed lab. Um they're building cool stuff. Uh I met Olex in Kiev. I went to ETH Kiev with Tallic like last year I think around this time. I don't know maybe a little later. Um, and they built this awesome thing that uh allowed them to troll the Russian election. get picked because they basically have a zero knowledge proof of a specific passport so that you can verify that your passport is authentic that you are of age that you and and like the way you know it's authentic is because the signing keys that the passport issuing authorities use to au you know authorize the the passport are public and so you can verify the signature and then you can verify the signature in a zero knowledge proof and verify certain data about the passport as well, like that they're over, you know, 18 or uh it's not expired and things like that. It's crazy stuff. And so, you can actually build the tools for for digital democracy. And uh I was excited when I discovered this because the Islamic Republic of Iran was having their elections in like 10 days. And so me and my other Iranian activist friend were like, "Let's just do a hackathon project. Let's hang out for a week." Uh we forked their system, put it all in, uh Farsy, uh launched our own app, and then we're like uh you can now vote in a you know parallel election for the Islamic Republic except we said that you can only vote no uh vote of no confidence in this. A couple a couple hundred people when we tried to pitch this to Iranians. We were like, "Hello." They were like, "What do you mean you generate a zero knowledge proof, right? uh what are you doing with my data? I'm like your data never leaves your device that just the proof leaves your device and they're like what are you doing with the data you know uh so they didn't really believe us um but it worked as a you know intermediary goal to uh connect us with some other developers who then uh we explained how zero knowledge proofs worked and uh the potential and people got excited about it. Um, I I asked, "Oh, like I'm like, "Hey, man. Uh, like I want to do surveys uh but like I want to pay people, but that there's like sanctions laws. Can I prove that somebody's not on the sanctions list uh so I can like pay people to do surveys?" And he hit me back with like a whole paper and he's like, "Here's a 20-page paper. Can I put your name on it?" I was like, "Fantastic. This is great." And so, uh, made a system that also allows you to do that. So, there's a lot of potential in these systems. um to advance uh our cultural institutions like democracy uh and that stuff uh is pretty exciting for me. So um great to see everybody here uh you know loving the emphasis on privacy. I think uh PG said it right where privacy gives you freedom, gives you sovereignty, lets you have more power to decide what you share with the world. Uh and it's uh great to be part of this uh movement. So, thank you for uh listening to my TED talk. [Applause] [Music]