Kostas Chalkias - Sui: Built for AI, Robotics, and Quantum Computing - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hi everybody. Um, I'm one of the bins actually of the company pretty much from 2009 in the blockchain space. I will explain why we're here and why even Facebook tried to create a blockchain back in 2017 and uh you will hear from me a lot of things about why big companies are now getting into AI and robotics and try to connect them uh with the crypto world and at the same time as you can see the whole team here used to work for Meta, Apple, you know uh Oracle and uh many other things around the blockchain space in the past. Um and the whole reason I personally enter the space I was very very lucky to get my degree in 2009 and 10 and I met my wife in a crypto conference literally in 2009 that's why we named our son cryptos as well uh I'm technically a white hat hacker and I'm hacking many things around given the the exchanges how they provide solveny we don't want to have the same thing as empty in the past so I'm an official auditor of binance by bit and many other things so about AI Hey, one of the major problems we faced in the past is crypto was only Bitcoin. If you ask the average government, if you go to a different institution, they would say that okay, the word blockchain is only identical to Bitcoin.

But you know, Bitcoin doesn't have the smart contracts and eventually AI came in the last two three years with Gemini and OpenAI and all this stuff. And we have so many applications that we have to convert them from web two into web 3 mainly for three particular reasons. One is from all of these applications you should think that AI is helping the blockchain. There are some applications where the blockchain is helping AI and there are a few situations where someone with AI they can profit from the blockchain literally building trading tools and at the moment you know the market is not so mature as the stock market. So technically there are so many opportunities out there for you to make money from trading.

Now AI can also help on private sharing of data. As you can understand, one of the main issues we have as society is Chad GPT and all of these they do have access to everything in the world and the only system at the moment that can protect against like verifiable data and how they are trained is blockchain. There is no other public database especially with all of the wars we have Palestine, Israel, you know, Russia, Ukraine and all these things. There is there is no stability necessarily everywhere, right? So the blockchain in your mind has to be as a public database where everybody can use and nobody can affect.

So Bitcoin started with the payments. Yes, we have the gold, we have the asset. At the same time, smart contracts came to our life. And what do we need for all of these things to work? You need some privacy.

Of course, you need speed. AI needs speed. Especially if you're talking to agents. And all of these can actually be potential startups. And this is not the only place.

Apart from hacking and marketplace and all of their stuff, there is also audits, auto audits in the hearts of a hacker. For example, AI at the moment is probably the best tool ever in our history where we can audit smart contracts. We can audit the L1s. We can audit everything that we're doing in our wallets. At the same time, we're going to see copyright infringement.

We're going to have a huge problem down the road with AI created images. And people don't know is this open AI? Is it a human uh creation? Is it a mixed creation? And at the moment the only place where there are cryptographers who are working on you know u digital signature hashing obuscation and all this stuff it's a blockchain.

There is nothing else. Um the whole situation about this is shu because it's also coming from Facebook. We decided to go very deep into agenting payments. And you know, we had the this agreement with uh with Google uh last week about having us testing for their new uh agent payment system. And the reason is look, how bad can it be a company that was created originally from Facebook and they were the original creators of SUI, the contributors of SUI.

Obviously, these people know how to maintain two billion users. And at the same time, what is the main problem we face in crypto? Everybody's firing. Okay, get some users from Ethereum, get us users from Salama and then you're good. But imagine how tiny is this number compared to the JavaScript user or to the Instagram and Tik Tok users.

So we have to figure out how to do a zapping payments at the same time with the people behind who can actually maintain these systems, right? Otherwise, we will always stay with a few hundred thousand just like lurking around and figuring out how to make money. And um it's not only this. It's true because we have the access to Silicon Valley. We had some of the best brains in the world and you will see in my last slide.

What I mean with this, you cannot compete with open AI uh like continuous success and all of the other companies if you don't have access to the places where AI is happening. And at the moment Silicon Valley probably some uh places in Asia, Europe unfortunately is staying behind Singapore and and and all of these uh uh things where money is flowing on AI and at the same time we need verifiability and that's why you see all of the humanoids and robots coming as well. They also need to find a place to share their data and at the moment again there is no other global database. It's again the blockchain. Now why?

One of the things that you have to do is batching transactions. AI agents need to do trading in multiple forms. You have to buy 1% of BH Khalifa in Dubai, then convert it into gold, then from gold you go to USD, then from USD, USDC you go into SU and so on. If you cannot do combination and having like a statistical arbitrage or a real arbitrage like either everything succeeds or everything fails, then we have a problem, right? So you need a blockchain that supports big blocks and for example in some situations the previous blockchains haven't been designed in a way to be compatible with the new agenting world.

You meet all of these things like speed and no congestion. You cannot wait for example 10 minutes from some AI shar to take a decision on the blockchain and we will see coordination. If you see what's happening in the stock market today more than 75% I would say even 90% in some situations is bots. a 100% raiding in crypto will be bots. There is no way we can avoid this.

So all of you have to invest in these things now to make it actually happening in a more automated way. Humans cannot now actually uh front the the AI there by far faster. Google and Facebook are building MCP protocols. We have to act uh really fast here and have the blockchain supporting this stuff. And uh something that we will see we need key management, proper key management.

You cannot just leave the AI there and no human can actually stop it. Many mistakes have happened in the past but people are not yet uh quite educated about how to do property management. So we focused a lot into making multi-IG pretty much a standard. So it's like one out of two, two out of three and so on. Otherwise the the AI will act alone without anything to stop it.

Now uh some people believe that AI doesn't read randomness but it needs randomness. So SU is by far like the top protocol in the world with a native randomness beacon which makes sense not only for gabling because the average person will say randomness is only for gabling. No go and ask chad GPT today 100 times the same prompt probably you're going to receive 100 similar but different answers. And this means that even if OpenAI is putting a signature that yes, this is coming from AI, someone can pick out of the 100 times what is the one that I like the most to put it on the blockchain. Imagine if you want to put your money on an AI agent that is using AI, open AI and then this agent is trying to ask it 100 times.

It gives you a signature. Oh, it's AI. I'm not I'm not touching it at the same time. No, no, no. I picked out of the 100 the one that works for me.

So you need some random ID and this random ID should be unpredictable to the people who are running your funds like investing in an AI bot to bet your money or trade your money into the blockchain. So you need randomness actually to do AI to randomize the prompt. The other thing that you need is you need a way to do confidential computations before you go into the blockchain. One of the issues we face making a blockchain super fast like for example subsecond sub half a second even 100 milliseconds uh in the in the nearest like uh evolution of chains you need a way to do computations on AI that it's impossible by the speed of light in the CPU to be happening on chain so that's why you need some services that are running in a secret mode situation we have nautilus in sui where you can run for example for some private execution of the LLM and then you get the output and you put it on chain. At the moment unfortunately there is no like proper L1 that can do proper AI.

So you have to find other ways to to to motivate people to do of chain computations with a signature that it's verifiable. No human hand is intervened to the results and you go on sale and you commit the transaction. So technically you will see startups that do the following. I receive prompts. I run whatever you want the logic of whatever cryptokitties or any game or any trading functionality offchain in a system that is as secure as the L1.

You get the output signed output from there and you go on the blockchain and the blockchain now believes you that you did the correct thing. And this is how you can run large large projects but still do not affect the timing on the blockchain. The other thing that you will see is because of all of this technology of private computations, health is coming into the blockchain. Believe it or not, our CEO uh very recently had a a a very uh unfortunate situation about the health thing. And however, he realized that some of the rules have changed.

Now you can go to the hospital and you can actually download especially in the US all of your blood tests and everything your medical numbers your medical results which means that for the first time and imagine myself coming from Facebook and I know how Facebook is using your data to monetize for itself but you're not making any money by posting or liking on Facebook which is quite miserable and like something of the past and we have to change that if you have your data and your blood test and everything and being uh downloaded or upload it to a clinic or a hospital, you need to know how they're using it. Otherwise, your DNA and everything goes everywhere and eventually we're going to have a problem. What's the only place that there is visibility? Blockchain again. So, that's why we also have a deal with the UN uh United Nations to to ensure that some of the shipping at least of the track um uh like transferring from different places, you need to have a global database to ensure transparency.

So these problems are coming also in the blockchain. The other thing that we will realize is robots. I was last week in Korea, one of the biggest academic conferences in robotics. Google, Nvidia, all of the big companies, big names were there. There is no way robots will not going to come into the blockchain.

That's because again robotics companies do not know necessarily how to monetize apart from selling their hardware. They need to sell the data. Imagine you have a robot and they have telemetry and they also have the camera footage and you need to share this data. You need to encrypt it somewhere and you need all of the robots to work together in a common marketplace otherwise you're going to have silos. A different thing for Huawei, a different thing for Apple robots, different thing for Tesla robots and then eventually they don't communicate between each other.

So you need a place actually to to for people to transcept data plus control the robots. You want to have crypto robot racing, right? And then people can build a prediction markets on top of this. And you know now we do soccer and basketball. But what's happening in the new generations they like to see fights between robots.

And this is amazing right? And that's why Sue invested a lot in this. We already have SDKs that are compatible with majority of devices including your air conditioning, your car, your uh your actual robot. And we're building an SDK and the small CPU you can buy. You attach it to your TV and now this TV or this robot is connected to the to the blockchain.

And I can you can watch um a video for example here about how robotics work. [Music]

So what's happening here? It is probably the first dog robot that is working from the blockchain. And how we're using this tech zk tunnels how I can remote control in the streets of Korea. This was literally last week. A full robot where I can rent it for 5 minutes and in this 5 minutes I can actually control it for free.

I paid and then in 5 minutes it stops and then someone else can rent it. And imagine you can do the same for Mario Kart racing. We can even have an arena where people are renting devices remotely completely and then they run it with zero latency and this is what tunnels are doing. You know the very basic style of um uh tunnels is similar to the lightning network on bitcoin but here it's programmable for the first time you have programmable communication that is as secure as a blockchain but zero latency because robots cannot operate with just going to the validators waiting for the mining or the proof of stake to happen and then you control the robot. the robot will will move very slow, right?

So, one transaction you pay, you rent the robot, then you control the robot completely independently, right? Literally offchain communication, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, whatever you can imagine. And then when you finish, the channel is closing. The robot is hearing from the blockchain, hey, hey, did my time finish? Like, this guy is controlling me.

He's not a good driver and so on. And after 5 minutes, the robot stops and then someone else can rent it. And the same thing can happen with anything that we want to create games or any agents with robots on the blockchain. So you need these things, right? Imagine if you paid for every move.

Every time that I'm touching the joystick, I have to pay gas. There is a popup. This is not going to work. So as Facebook realized, we had to work a lot on the UX. This is the biggest problem we're facing at the moment in web 3.

The average person can only do login with Facebook and Google and they don't expect every like and everything that they do to have a popup and also pay pay for your like right so eventually we have to start thinking differently in web3 yes we need obviously the validators to make some money because there is an incentive behind them to mine or to to vote at the same time we cannot cure the user experience of web two web two managed to make all the transactions almost instant we have to bring the same thing here otherwise forget it that we're going to win against web. It has to be the same experience. And this is one of the technologies that supports this. And as you can imagine, pers cannot only be used for AI agents, right? You can do pay as you go.

You you literally lock $1,000 to one of your supermarkets. There is an earthquake. Something is happening. At the same time, there is no internet. And I'll explain what's happening when there is no internet.

You can still pay with a lightning channel because you already opened the channel with you in the supermarket. So you can do all these transactions for one month until the internet or until someone goes back to chain to make the mapping to to finish the transaction. Um other things that you can do now with tunnels is you can have a zoom on the blockchain. Why not? I just pay I have a session with you for 30 minutes.

We talk and then the show right now it works. situations with AI in the blockchain. You see what's happening here? AI is ringing your screen and for the first time you're going to see and who wants to be a millionaire in the blockchain protected against bots because humans cannot compete with the bots on geopart games and who wants to be a millionaire. This is also game over.

AI is by far faster than us. So there are ways to create capta mechanisms so that AI cannot front the users. And here is one thing that we have to decentralize as society. We're unfortunately in the mercy of the telecom operators. Whatever we do with Bitcoin, Ethereum and SUI, there is no way one day someone can just sound the internet and you cannot do anything.

So we managed to even communicate with different people and have transactions without internet. This is by sending SMS. This is by sending you know wavelengths. You can even do by smoke, right? I mean you can do anything that is a communication mechanism and we have to ensure that all of this work and we managed to create this actually working.

We have a first example with this is this is literally a transaction where you're sending something by SMS. So if you don't have internet what you do is you fall back to SMS try to see if you can at least communicate with something and as you can see there is no internet. If you see at the top if it's visible to you there is no Wi-Fi there is no 5G there is nothing. So you can put some coins, you can put whatever you want and then eventually you submit and what's happening? It tries first with the internet.

There is no internet. Let's try SMS. Let's try whatever is possible. And then by the time you're finishing with this, then you have all of the transactions that you need. So in this situation, you're going to see all of the messages going back and forth pretty much paint the SMS and get the response back.

Yes, your transaction succeeded. So technically we have to like decentralized everything including the audits. Li for audits is one of the best things we ever had and I told you as a hacker this is super important. And here we build the first model that actually can find vulnerabilities in smart contract. And you want to see some of the things that it found here it is millions of email leaks denial of service attacks.

And as you can see, there was even a situation where we managed to we managed to find wallet library failures. And this is super important. It will be a disaster if this happens and AI is in the hands of the hacker before it's on us. I even managed to break the proof of solveny on one of the biggest exchanges in the world just with AI. Now for the problem that we all need, quantum is coming.

It will take in my opinion more than the two three years that salary people are mentioning. But the most important stuff is check on the first bullet point. the Nelson Institute of Federal and Technology in the US and most agencies it dependently on if there is a quantum computer if you want to transact with the government you want to do all of this institutional payments stock markets on sale and everything you need to be quantum safe and that's why we have a two-year journey and SUI as you can see in the picture was the first one to find a backwards compatible uh solution for this literally the old addresses imagine Satoshi if the quantum computer comes it will steal everything right so you have to have some of the best cryptographers in the world to do it. And you need to have some of the best AI u uh employees to work for you. And this is what we did.

Literally, we hired one of the best brains in the world. And this guy, imagine he's the head of AI of Mark Zuckerberg Foundation. He's going to join uh in a few like weeks from now. And you see what is his profile, right? There is no way smaller web three companies can compete with all of these things that are happening in Silicon Valley.

That's the reality. And that's who we were. Thank you so much.