# Christopher Goes [Anoma], Pie Man [Fairblock] & Amit [Labyrinth] at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: [Christopher Goes](https://streameth.org/speakers/christopher-goes)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 26:06
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-tNRjwxgjZ9Q
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNRjwxgjZ9Q

## Description

Participants

Chrostopher Goes: https://x.com/cwgoes x anoma.net
Pie Man: https://x.com/Pememoni x www.fairblock.network
Amit: https://x.com/amitchax x www.labyrinth.technology

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, Bangkok, 11.11

Facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info
Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info
X: https://x.com/web3privacy

## Transcript

all right thanks all for coming um we are here today to investigate in 20 minutes so we won't finish but to investigate the relationship between research and applied privacy protocols to kind of motivate uh this a little bit I just want to note that you know we all stand here kind of on the shoulders of giants and for better for worse a lot of those giants were funded by actually State funding for research especially in I don't know uh 6 7s ' 80s some of the early developments and ZK snarks and other kind of Technology just came out of the academy we've done a lot of work I think to productionize them but we depend on that and my aim today is to investigate a little bit together which parts of that relationship between say the kinds of projects that all of us are working on and the research both in sort of in principle like research as such and also the actual community of researchers uh in which ways that relationship works well in which ways it doesn't and what kinds of alternative ways can we imagine it might work in the future so I want to start off just with very brief introductions in you get only two sentences and in the first sentence introduce yourself and your project in like you know five to 10 words and in the second sentence what is your favorite research paper at least favorite Recent research paper and why okay hello everyone I'm paymon from fer block and we work on encrypted transactions for applications like confid itial actions and like AI incentive layers um is that two sentences uh you're doing well and favorite research paper oh favorite research paper it's hard um I I I like Dan bonus's IB paper um because we started everything based on that but not for research reasons but yeah hi everyone this is Amit I'm a co-founder of Labyrinth protocol uh Labyrinth protocol is a privacy preserving protocol where we keep uh user own privacy at the top of it we try to balance privacy with compliance and more decentralized and more cryptographic guarantees I would say my favorite paper research paper is the zero cach paper because that's what it's all started right and one thing I like about the zero cach paper is they have these Progressive descriptions of protocols right it starts with like very simple one slightly more complex slightly more complex it's a really nice Expedition okay so now I want to dive a little bit into the relationship between research and sort of crypto technology our kinds of Applied uses of it uh by asking you know both of you I think work on projects that have are in some way kind of trying to productionize research or at least taking different components from the research literature uh and assembling them into some kind of product and I want to ask you how do you think about that relationship do you think about research is something that you do is something that you consume do you think about it is something that you fund even or is it just sort of there in The Ether and you're like pulling parts and trying to assemble it how do you think about your relationship as a project to research personally one thing that I really find interesting in crypto is that like so personally I was working on things like privacy preserving ML and like in general I'm originally from Iran so like we have a lot of we care about privacy we have like the pain in the daily basis but like everyone is a little bit demotivated about privacy it seems like something luxury that you should give up your Facebook and Cat videos and uh it's really hard and painful but in crypto it seems that at least I found it very motivating for myself because um in research you found yourself like in a lot of situations that you question the paper that you're working on you don't know like even if it works even there's no comp like if it like is not going to be published or not and like what's the point am I getting like solving a real problem or not but in like cryptography research like we've seen it's even worse like you should work on a paper for 20 years and it may not be even used right but in crypto you say like you can see that if you use like this kind of encryption I can prevent like me it's like A3 billion Market if I work on this I can work on like intense it's like a 10 billion do market so I think it just motivates you better and there's like monetary immediate value to that so maybe it's not like a good thing that you just think about money but I think it's just like a really interesting middle ground that you can bring a lot of talent from Academia make them work and accelerate the process of like research and like development even for good reasons at the end of the day right so so that your strategy is like cannibalize the academy steal all the good researchers pay the more money build real products you see that it's happening right like 5 years ago if you mentioned like blockchains to any privacy researcher in conferences they were like saying oh like that's a scam or something but right now we see that more and more people like I'm from uu so in uu there are more and more people working on blockchains in Colombia like Stanford like like honestly I think it's because of the money but it's going to good cause yeah uh my take is slightly different like um like how we and I personally have benefit benefited from the research based paradigm I think what research taught us is about the persistent and the commitment towards the problem and specifically about the privacy because um like zero cach is one of the example it started like one of the paper we have tens of thousands of papers and like hundreds of researchers focused only on very slight uh very small problems of privacy in which if you go to the uh practitioner space they sometime don't matter right they want something like slly different the user so that's what the pro of uh researchers which we really benefit of course apart from the cryptographic expertise right the the negative part or like I would say like uh which is in um somewhat uh not in line with uh the uh the crypto or the narratives or the user adoption is kind of taking step back and trying to have this thesis that uh let's build the research out of it and somebody else will productionize it but the Privacy protocol building is very tough job right it's a fat protocol it's not like a thin protocol you need uh actually the research mindset developers uh you need some of the community members who try to align uh with the research right because how will you ensure to the Community member that you are providing the Privacy it's the whole thing is Tech based whole thing is research based so I think there uh of course everybody is doing their job right all the ecosystem like if you look and deep down like they are research based but the whole Magic lies between how you convert and connect the research based thesis to the users and also to the community I think that's that's what I also want to investigate kind of what we understand as research that has implications for our work so here so far we've just talked about what I will call technical research Arch but actually the few of the a few of the talks beforehand at least referenced maybe more social sciences research or anthropological research and I'm curious when you think about how these protocols might be used by people or when you think about designing products and the kind of social structures context of use that would surround those products do you also draw on other sort of non stem research disciplines oh yeah so I'm the I'm the one of the example like in my PhD was in economy and uh I have like few political economy paper institutions like you know economic history as well uh did did that have like concrete implications for how you designed the protocol yeah yeah like um uh like being into the stem I would say not a bubble but like you know a monolithic uh domain actually makes uh you bias towards your own opinion your your opiniated but if you look in the wider as you said like anthrop anthropological re anthropology research social science research you study the implications of your protocol like what are what would be the wider implications of privacy technology on the people um who are the people who you should actually be able to convince shortterm who would are the people who you will be able to convince longterm and who are the people who actually are waiting for some incentives to on board to privacy Tech Tech so social anthropological research teach about this and one of the thing which we and I uh learned is about uh those case studies right those uh uh not quantitative not like you know trying to have cryptographic proof like bit of an informal focus groups right you chat you chat it out right what the solution is so that's I think uh multi-disciplinary is the key to the success that's that's my personal learning so last time I talk about the money part I think money is important for bringing a lot of people working on a lot of the stuff in the meantime but if you really want to go long and don't get distracted with all of the noises in the especially in crypto and then get get motivated I think most people who are making the like highest influence in our ecosystem are deeply motivated by values and um that's the reason for me that every day that I wake up I don't get like really sad about all of the randomness in the ecosystem like personally like when I like I don't know growing up in Iran I've seen like the I don't know bad side of the centralization corruption not having access to free market and like not having access to free internet so I know like at the bottom of my heart like the thing the things that we are working maybe not in one year but maybe like in 10 years have something like really like deep for our like the whole world like it it used to be just for Iran and like I don't know Russia but it seems that it's actually happening in Western countries as well so I think it's important like people like v alic he's also deeply motivated by these kind of values right so this is how you can go like really far and like personally another thing that got me into crypto in the first way like step was like I had a course in surveillance and privacy so in Sur surveillance yeah surveillance and privacy in in my gr school and it was in a sociology department and it was a really mix like interesting mix of like the professor from cryptography Department Ian Goldberg and like the sociology professor and in that course I learned about like the bad effect of like advertisement industry right and I learned like there's a all of like this kind of deeply intellectual like work about privacy but we we should also understand the capitalism and how it's working and how we can like somehow make it work and not just eliminate them so it got me into the like my first research was on working on like at ads mechanism like an auction mechanism or like just data sharing mechanism which is not deeply like extracting your private information so it it's just like this this kind of very high impact information and how like they are changing our society and making us think less and follow other people I think it's like has a very interesting like overlap okay so so far I think we've said a lot of good things about research crypto now I want to brainstorm some less good things which part about say the relationship of this industry our industry to research do you think which specific Parts aren't working well or which specific or there areas where you think we really need more research and we don't have it or we're like applying the wrong research to the wrong problem this is also an open question to the audience where could we do better one thing that I hate is that we have some like sud sudo academic papers in crypto that they're saying that like we've already solved all of these problem like it's like shiling but in like a latte format and I like specifically there are some like muv teams I don't want to mention but like if you read the paper you like it's full of misinformation like and there is like like money is on the bad side here right because there are incentivized to like publish something that is like purely not true maybe it's the same problem that we have with like Pharma industry and Academia so it's happening right you mean you mean sort of like the language of research getting co-opted ultimately to Market things even the claims even the academic claims are like I've seen it it's like completely wrong and um it's frankly it really hard there are very few people who read the paper and understand it but if you write a paper like 20 Pages paper and say that our protocol has already solved all of the problems and because of this and that with two optimization formulas like nobody is going to we kind we kind of lack some sort of ecosystem of research quality control in this sense yeah I want to to continue that of course the I would call it like you know noise too much noise in the research but um one problem which is uh becoming really big like it has become big and this web to I'm sure like you might know like you know the history of that Silicon Valley based web to research which overpowered uh some University Research outcome and the specific kind of research was put down as a very prominent uh one-sided research search and I think the same and that's that was due to incentive problems and the same kind of thing is happening in crypto as well we see uh so public private uh interactions happening in University space and uh some of the problems are getting too much biased and uh people are uh some of the academicians are looking forward uh to the far uh to the very shortterm Solutions and uh being running a protocol like you cannot start a deep mind right like institution um you need to rely on some of this public good research which either happens through uh you know the state funding as you said earlier or maybe you know institutions right we have like big protocol ethereum paa Cosmos also funding that but they canot they can do it up to the extent so I think that problem is becoming more eminent and also the trade off uh the Young young PhD students uh um uh the expectations are very different uh when they were like you know like pretty much 5 seven years earlier what what do you mean specifically what how are the expectations CH the the expectations uh in the sense of uh monetary incentives like quicker monetary incentives like um like once uh one of the reason uh the researchers uh or the research driven thesis was promis because uh the people who used to hire them always thought that money is secondary and the research part is the main thing right that's how you hire the research based person but you see the flipping happening in crypto and that's what I think you were also mentioning then when you are unsure the value of the researcher the true the true researchers goes down then there's a classical problem of like you cannot differentiate between who is right like who is the right guy right so you're right I mean if the ends of research are driven by the interest of capital then it's kind of not research anymore as a sort of first principles based inqu yeah capital is important but it it was always subtle right it was always not on the Forefront it was not the deciding factor for the research yeah I want to open this question too to the audience are there kind of specific areas in which you think the relationship between this industry and research doesn't work that you would like to see changed we have one here yeah um I think one thing that is definitely more needed is the sort of weaving the different dots together especially in cryptographic research there is so many silos so many very specific points of research that are not connected to each other especially with deal with protocol design you see it for example in the industry with things like te ZK MPC no one is thinking about deeply the relationship between the four of them and how we can integrate them into something else for example and so this type of uh more fundamental research is needed um to connect things I think anoma does that to some extent but I think more systematic ways of sort of highlighting what are all these different fields and how can we learn from them together is very important I have uh like I think you have you have nailed it right what's happening so I have one thesis like why it is happening uh I call it like you know the fragmentation of research right because um the mar so somehow the market gives premium sometimes to FH higher sometime to ZK higher and they think F ZK MPC are are now competitors right there are less so that's that's very short term right and if you walk into any academicians and he will tell like you know effectively this is a you need to combine then otherwise you will be lagged behind by I don't know like you know some random centralized database I have have a like good answer so like actually in Fair block we like I call it multimodal cryptography we are using like uh theral decryption like IB or like things like homor fre encryption and te's and for the very same reason that they're complimentary and like for security or performance reasons you need to combine them for many applications uh but the challenge here is that in crypto if you want to really make it you want to like somehow identify as a cat and um we are resisting against it but like I see the problem in a lot of like teams that they want to be like the like FH team the ZK team and like if they if if you go to the ZK team and ask about the FH team they say like they're lying if you go to the ZK team they say like they are lying like the te team this is like a tribal Behavior right because like the for the same thing that we have like between like ethereum and I don't know Cosmos people like those are bad I'm good so I think this is like a childish kind of behavior that I agree that we should like combine them and solve more real problems right so so maybe this is a good point to brainstorm on a little bit if we have a few minutes here which is let's take the meme of zero knowledge as an example so zero knowledge was you know 20 years ago a property of some obscure proof schemes and some obscure academic papers that maybe 50 people in the world knew about and in the past 5 years maybe the past 10 but especially the past you know more recently it has turned into a meme with which you can raise capital and this this conversion is not you know people can one might complain about it from a perspective of technical Precision because the word zero knowledge doesn't always mean zero knowledge anymore which is confusing but on the other hand it also succeeded in funneling some Capital to actual applied cryptography research which at least I think is helpful um but as you say this kind of the association of like we'll invest in the zero knowledge technology or the FHA technology or the MPC technology while it helps actually fund some applied research positions these things as competitors to each other and doesn't necessarily create the kind of uh let's say incentive for building a more integrated system or thinking about how to uh use these Technologies in ways that are synergistic that are actually better than like each of them independently and I'm wondering can we imagine what would be required for an alternative kind of capital ecosystem that is able to understand these more uh nuanced distinctions rather than treating different Technologies as sort of like investment categories so um so we are we are trying one solution in our protocol um it's it's like a you can say it as a naive or trivial solution uh we feel the users are the people who need to decide right but we also know that users uh doesn't want to read MPC threshold encryption ZK paper right so what we are trying is trying to abstract away from the technology itself we are trying to create a linguistic uh uh framework which shows a much more unified approach in from the user perspective rather than the underlying technology so that that's working pretty well in the short a linguistic framework you're designing a language uh no no I mean I mean like I mean I'm more power to you I'm not no no no so by by linguistically frame by linguistic framework I mean the choice of the words are abstracted away from the technology like you know we don't mention like specific I see because if you're using MPC you're using ZK you can take the academic words right and roll it up then it creates a contention framework rather than create much more user friendly words right like what they're easily explainable so that is e that is easier for a person to adopt the technology and if we are able to show that the integrated technology is adopted well then more people can follow that and more people can see uh the profit or the uh incentive to combine them together and to work together around that that's yeah that makes sense my question what what I'm trying to get at a little bit here though is can say that kind of approach where we come up with a language to describe the system that is focused on the affordances the system provides to users rather than the technological components used to implement them right can we apply that approach to the whole ecosystem like to the structure of capital form uh I don't think so don't think so so that's that's the thing right um that's this is what I'm saying like it's in the short run right that doesn't Sol that doesn't solve the structural problem because what you described is a structural problem right uh here in the structural problem what you said like we need much more nuanced uh research Community coming together trying to have this coordination trying to drive uh this towards single goal right different kind of people should meet right uh uh there has been a one of the biggest contention in physics has been Quantum versus others right and they have been able to make some uh progress the Applied Physics came in and there was some uh you know they thought like you know things can be made in much more collaborative way so we can so different ecosystem can sit together right and uh and move towards a simple goal and that way the capital always follow the most productive outcome right if you're able to show the most productive uh result will be due to combining all of this better technology together then I think it will follow right if if you believe it capital follows the most productive right so we should all cude with each other and then we can like direct the capital that's what I'm hearing roughly actually in the next uh group discussion we are going to go into the differences between the structural approach and the eventual user Centric implementation which is kind of a hint guys all right all right uh two sentences closing remarks what research would you like to see someone produce in the next 12 months what paper do you want to read that doesn't exist yet let me think so it's somehow related but I think we are living in a posttruth era and it's really hard to understand and trust any academic research these days in any in any area like medical research like news and I was kind of thinking about like incentivizing like Academia to have like more valid data points in a way that like for example you can stake and if someone can prove that it's like fra you can like get slashed so I don't know maybe it's like some kind of reaking between like universities it's a veryt stake stake on the accuracy see at least that your images weren't doctored okay uh one of the research which I would like to see is again more multidisciplinary uh what are the economics and sociological limits of all the Privacy protocols which we uh always discuss right that includes zero knowledge trusted execution right um we we most of um you know in our uh conversation maybe is a crypto C or you know informal chats always the researchers always talks like some of the economic limitations some of the coordination problem right and these are non- cryptographic problems sometimes and uh and because precisely because the things are not going multidisciplinary like this is a there is a huge gap so I think that research would have a huge impact over uh the the protocols I would say all right limits on sociological possibility you heard it here the first thanks everyone thank you