Zero-knowledge Proofs & Scalable Infrastructure with Nana Murugesan of Matter Labs
Jeremy Allaire joined Matter Labs President Nana Murugesan to discuss the importance of zero-knowledge proofs, building scalable and secure infrastructure, and the future of programmable money. Their conversation touched on:
- [3:00] – Nana’s journey into crypto
- [15:06] – Making serious technology fun
- [23:59] – Identity and KYC
- [27:10] – Permissioned and permissionless systems
Nana - 00:00:00:
A lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions, and that's because they made it fun, but many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to.
Jeremy - 00:00:29:
Hello and welcome to this new episode of The Money Movement. I'm really pleased today to be joined by the president of Matter Labs Nana Murugesan And it's a great pleasure to see you again in this context and in your new role as well. Excited for the conversation.
Nana - 00:00:47:
Great to see you, Jeremy. And congrats on all the progress. And it was also so great to see your New York office. I'm here in New York and just near the World Trade Center. So, so cool to see you.
Jeremy - 00:00:58:
Okay. All right. You'll have to come to the opening celebration for sure. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Well, you are now in the thick of it in terms of fundamental infrastructure for crypto, for blockchain networks. I'm talking all the time. People are always asking me, what's it going to take to get to mainstream scale and acceptance? And there's a lot of different things that I talk about. But one of those is the sort of innovations that are coming with ZK and with new approaches to scaling and security and other things. And so I know the work that you do and the work that Circle is also doing with USDC on the platform is important. And we'll come back to that in a little bit. But maybe before diving in, I'm always interested to talk about people's journey. So maybe we can just start just your professional journey into crypto, into this space, and kind of ultimately kind of what's landed you where you are today.
Nana - 00:02:09:
Yeah, no, thanks, Jeremy. You know, my professional journey actually started with some of my personal experiences, too. So maybe I'll touch on that a little bit. You know, I grew up in Southeast Asia and in India, like four countries. And then I moved to the U.S. For grad school. And throughout this. I experienced a lot of the challenges of the financial system, particularly around cross-border transactions. So just grew up with a lot of pain and it kind of created a bunch of itch around why does this need to be so hard? And then I worked in both enterprise and consumer early on in my career. I worked in a startup. I was in Cisco and Samsung earlier, but I really got into crypto about six years back. When I was at Snapchat. That's not one you usually hear, is that people got into crypto and they're at Snapchat. But that's right. Well, I'll tell you more then. I have a former Snapchatter who's someone I think you know, Patrick Elias, who is now, he got into crypto, I think also went to Coinbase. But yes, no, Patrick was in my, I actually hired him at Snapchat. And then he came to Coinbase with me. And after that... You guys took him. Hope he's doing well.
Jeremy - 00:03:28:
He's doing great. He'll be happy to hear that on the podcast.
Nana - 00:03:33:
No, no, at Snapchat, I really got to understand Gen Z. And I also have two daughters. One is a Gen Z and one is a Gen Alpha. And, you know, for me, I was also entering, let's say, the next stage of my career. And I told myself I need to be working on things that matter for the next generation, which is Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And Snapchat got me into that. My daughters got me into that. And I can just tell you that this generation is more naturally aligned to the shared values of crypto. And, like, the way they think about... Centralized entities, the way they think about empowerment, the way they think about the creator economy, the way they think about assets, it's quite different from even how I may have thought about it. And it just aligns so well at the fundamental shared values of crypto. So that's actually how Snapchat, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, my daughters played a big role into me getting into crypto. I started getting more and more into it, started investing myself. And that's why naturally after Snapchat, I joined Coinbase, which was just such an amazing place to learn more and dig more into crypto, particularly for someone coming in from the web2 and social side of things. Spent a couple of years there at Coinbase, the Circle partnership we did with you and your team was a massive highlight. And another one was a huge expansion of the international footprint that we did, particularly during the bear market. So that was another highlight. After Coinbase... I jumped even deeper into blockchain and crypto earlier this year. That's when I got into the infrastructure side of things, as you mentioned earlier. And so maybe I'll share a little bit more about Matter Labs and why I'm so excited about it. Matter Labs better known as a creator of ZK Sync, which is the most mature and most production-ready, zero-knowledge ZK roll-up stack in Ethereum. And... I'm also really fascinated by ZK, just zero knowledge. This was actually conceived in 1985, if you can imagine. And it was just a mathematical way to provide a simple proof for the question without any additional information. So that was the logic. Kind of like saying I'm over 21 as a ZK proof without actually showing your data board or any other information. So pretty cool.
Jeremy - 00:05:54:
Identity credentials are one of the most commonly given examples of the power of this in a very basic human way, yeah.
Nana - 00:06:03:
And I was like fascinated by ZK and that's one of the reasons why I joined Matalabs because it's really a pure play ZK. And so after four decades, since 1985, I think we're really on the verge of having a ZK moment. Thanks to all the crypto funding and the builders, including Matter Lab as one of the earliest pure places I mentioned, because I really think ZK allows blockchains to scale efficiently, inheriting the security of Ethereum, not really compromising on the core properties that make blockchain so powerful. And like I mentioned earlier with that, I'm over 21 example, it really brings a whole new dimension to privacy, KYC and so on and so forth. So anyways, so with that, excited. I'm excited to be tackling problems like tokenization and TradFi or the creative economy on consumer and so many more use cases on emerging markets. But really, even after I say all that, it really feels like it's day zero. And that's why I'm so excited to continue to be in crypto and can't fight for all the things that are gonna come at us, right?
Jeremy - 00:07:06:
Yeah, I mean, it's a special moment. I've reflected on this online and in some other conversations, which is... We've been at this kind of collectively here for a while. I've been at this for 11 years. Obviously, you've been at it for a while. And you sort of have these really significant infrastructure improvements. And I think it's notable that sort of like during the bear market of the dot-com bust in the most recent kind of bear market in crypto, that so much progress was made on infrastructure and technologies like ZK and roll-ups and the ability to sort of take cryptography and its application to the next level to actually enable scalability, enable better user experiences, enable better privacy, identity models, all this stuff. Like these were just not ready. And we had to go through. We had proof-of-stake migration. And then obviously, you know. I have a huge amount of admiration for the ZK-SYNC implementation, and I've always felt like it's one of the most impressive Layer 2 models out there. Because of its effective implementation of ZK roll-ups. So it's really, really strong on that. But we're now at a place where with these kinds of layers, people can deploy meaningful applications. And I'm interested, I kind of compare this period of time a little bit to... You know, in 2003, 2004, like there was like broadband started to become available. Wi-Fi started to become available. People were connecting devices. It wasn't yet iPhone, but it was mobile devices were coming. And digital media was coming online, all these things. And so you kind of like the pipes got there, right? And the infra got there. And then it really took off. And so I think we're in a very similar place. And so I'd be interested. You know, as you look at... You know, the Matter Labs you know, kind of R&D agenda and technical agenda, you know, I keep saying like 2025 is gonna be the breakthrough year when we can actually deliver delightful user experiences that work for end users. And I'd be interested just, are you seeing like that kind of progress and what are some of the most significant kind of infrastructure things that you can talk about that you guys are moving towards, you know, in the coming 12 months?
Nana - 00:09:55:
Yeah, and thanks for saying that, Jeremy, right? One of the things that I really admired about the work that you, Circle, have done, and I've heard you talk about this is also like hype is great, but what is long lasting is the legacy of what remains after the hype. And so it's really important for us to be building future-proof stuff, things that we believe and have conviction is going to happen in the future. So with that, to your question, the what of what we are doing is like really we talk about Web3, Internet of Value. We've heard these things a lot of times. But what it really means is we need to have a borderless, transparent, and secure backbone of the Internet. That`ll power the world's financial system. Consumer apps, identity, and everything in between using zero knowledge as the core. We truly believe that zero knowledge is the one that's going to actually deliver a lot of the properties. And I can talk about a few things that zero knowledge can enable, which will get to your question. First is... I mean, really the chain you build on matters, even though there's so many chains, but really the chain you build on matters and why zero knowledge at the core matters is, one is it's not a one size fits all world, right? Like this internet of value is not gonna be on a single blockchain, just like nothing is gonna be on a single thing. And hence we have this vision called elastic chain. Which is about an interoperable chain of chains. So you could have a chain, others could have a chain, based on whatever you prefer. You could prefer public, you could prefer private, permissioned, permissionless. It's your choice, but at the end of the day, we want to create an infrastructure which creates and supports this not a one-size-fits-all and creates that interoperability. So that's one element. The other element is throughput.
Jeremy - 00:11:54:
Sorry, is that like kind of like a ZK-Sync era stack, like a way for people to kind of build these instances of this kind of compute memory data space that they can do for their application and at the end of the day, right, it inherits the security and interoperability that's sort of underlying both ZK-Sync and Ethereum.
Nana - 00:12:19:
That's right. Just to tell a little bit about the evolution, to get into that, right? So in 2021, we announced a thing called ZK-Sync era light, which was a payments L2. And then in 2023, we had our very first ZK EVM. In 2023 with ERA. And then in 2024, just a few months back, we launched Elastic Chain, which is this interoperability. There's ZK Stack, which enables the things that you mentioned. And then you have different chains. ERA is one of the ZK chains. Now we have Kronos and we're going to have almost a dozen chains by the end of the year on mainnet. So that's the whole interoperability piece. And we can get more into that, but there's a lot there. Second thing which I wanted to highlight is throughput. You know this really well, right? In the current traditional system, credit card payments, they can handle like tens of thousands of transactions per second. And blockchains are like nowhere near that kind of throughput right now. But Zero knowledge through the succinctness of the zero knowledge proofs, the way it's done, is the only way we believe blockchains are going to get to that type of throughput that the current traditional financial system needs, right? How can we... Create the current financial system if blockchains can get that level of throughput. So ZK is that future-proof technology. So that's the second thing which we're really focused on is throughput. And finally, and certainly last but not the least, is security. We're seeing a lot of demand, natural demand when it comes to tokenization of assets. I mean, the thing that you've done with programmable money and stable coins and what's done to the US dollar. Similarly, there's an entire opening out there with real-world assets and the need to increase accessibility and making it more efficient. So again, as more regulatory frameworks come through and as these assets go fully on-chain, we don't take these things seriously right now, but this is where ZK Sync's security features, when we are talking about full on-chain, are going to really help support the tokenization at scale. So those are a few things that we just want to highlight.
Jeremy - 00:14:33:
I want to come back to one of those in a couple of minutes, but I think just as an observation. I think you have an interesting background, obviously, like the Snapchat world, which is sort of sexy and consumer and digital media. I spent 10 years in digital media, but also I've worked on infrastructure, like app servers and programming languages and developer tools. And Circle has had a few different kind of... Product arcs, but yeah, I think. Coming back to this kind of where are we in the evolution and what does it take to get to mainstream scale and other things like. Building infrastructure is both difficult, but it's also fun, right? And I'm just interested in particular, given where you came from and where you are today, you eat infrastructure for breakfast, basically, right? And so I'm just curious, how do you feel about that from an entrepreneurial perspective? I certainly can relate to that, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts just as a builder, as a leader in the space. Because there's a lot of people saying, hey, we got too much infra. We now need to, it's all about consumer, it's all about apps, but there's still like a lot of unsolved infrastructure problems too.
Nana - 00:16:06:
No, that's a great question, Jeremy. I'm a big believer and I personally want to work on serious things, but I want to make it fun. I just know that, and that's one of the things that I feel like institutions and enterprises can learn too, because a lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions. And that's because they made it fun, but many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to, right? So I'm always thinking about that. And my Snapchat experience has really taught me how to make things fun. But then some of the other experiences and also Matter Labs is like really serious technology, really serious infrastructure stuff. So I'm always thinking, how do I make, how do I do things that are both serious and fun? And so some of the things I'll highlight, right? One is... ZK is really hard to understand, even for those who are in crypto. I mean, and hence, it's like really not accessible. So one of the things we did was we wrote a book just almost written for a kindergartner called, I don't know if you have, I would love to send it to you. It's really fun.
Jeremy - 00:17:19:
Sure, yeah. For real. Yeah. I do the, I use GPT to like make cartoons about topics for my daughters all the time. And it's like, how do you explain, you know, what a reserve currency is to a nine-year-old, you know, in a cartoon?
Nana - 00:17:36:
Yeah. Yeah, we created these characters called Mathemals, you know, math cartoon characters. And then we kind of talk about circuits and all these things in a way that a kindergartner can understand. And we've seen such great reception for this. We were in Argentina recently. The former president of Argentina came by our booth. He carried along that book and he was like, this is great. So I think one of the things which we need to do, that's a great example of making really serious, hard concepts fun and easy to understand because that's how people are going to embrace it. But there's a lot of other things that we are doing too. For example, one of my favorite apps, I, being at Snapchat and in general, the people who know me, you can ask Patrick too, I love taking pictures. And I feel like... Pictures tell, you know, speak a thousand words. And so we have, we're working with Nodal. They have a click app where you can use your phone's metadata and store a hash of it on chain. And you can verify what device location and time a photo was taken. ZK proofs are going to be coming. And this is a great way where even for applications like Muse and other things where we are fighting things like, is the picture? You know, authentic, authentic, the right one. These are like natural applications where ZK can help improve, you know, whether it's fake news or whatever it is, or just prove the legitimacy of the picture that you've taken. Right. So things like that are really cool. And it kind of gets the point across on the application of ZK at scale. So anyways, those are ways in which you can make infrastructure fun.
Jeremy - 00:19:14:
Totally. Are there, I'm actually, this is a sort of random question, but like are given the ZK architecture, are you finding like Web3 games as a category just in terms of literal fun? Like, because it obviously the architecture is one which kind of lends itself to executing on game kind of. Models on chain.
Nana - 00:19:35:
That's perfect. I actually want to talk about it later. You asked me already. That's amazing. I think gaming is one vertical. The two verticals that we are really excited about right now on TradFi with tokenization, tons of progress. And on the consumer side, gaming, we've had tons of progress. We had TreasureDAO, who just switched over from Arbitrum to ZK Sync for particularly the reasons that you mentioned. It's just such a natural fit for them. And they just switched over recently. And then we have some very interesting announcements coming up soon. We're working with Budgie Penguins on their chain. And we have a few more announcements. All of that is going to be around creators and gaming. And we're seeing a natural fit over there.
Jeremy - 00:20:24:
That's awesome. Yeah, maybe kind of connecting some dots here. Like, the, the... Coming back to this serious crypto, there's serious applications. I think one that like we write about extensively, actually. Recently, we launched a Circle Global Impact Report, which really talks about the growing use of USDC in humanitarian aid, in disaster relief, in supporting households in markets and countries that really want to depend on a digital dollar as a store of value. It's serious because we're talking about people's livelihoods. We're talking about people who are liking in places like Argentina, who are where hopefully things are getting more under control, but where it's still really challenging. And so we really think about, and I know you do too, so I want to hear what you're seeing and learning is, a lot of times these more efficient technologies that kind of deal with access and cost and other things in fundamental ways, their adoption scales up faster in emerging and developing markets than it does in developed markets. And it really feels like the adoption of crypto infrastructure, the adoption of stable coins, there's sort of this leapfrogging, which is what happened with WhatsApp in its adoption cycle. And so I'm curious, do you see that happening? And how are you seeing Latin America, Africa, other emerging markets in terms of people who are building with ZK or ZK Sync and the opportunity space there? And then obviously, We launched USDC and CCTP and bringing those there to kind of ensure that there's the best possible digital dollar in the world with great underlying liquidity and so on. What are you seeing in terms of that demand and that sort of use case?
Nana - 00:22:46:
Yeah, that's a great question, Jeremy, right? Like in the Western world, we often talk about things like tokenization, gaming, you know, a lot of those use cases when it comes to crypto. I spent two weeks in Argentina and we can talk a little bit about what we are seeing over there. There are like basic. Day-to-day use cases and utilitarian things that are happening there that are so inspiring. And folks in high schools and colleges, and we spoke to a lot of them who are just so much talent in that region too. And they're just building on crypto blockchain, right? USDC has done wonders over there, right? To solve like one of the most basic problems. And there's so many other things too. One of the things that we are working on is Quark ID. So Quark ID is the ID, the KYC and ID that the government is creating. And so they're actually building, they're gonna be a ZK chain. They're gonna be building on them. Which is really incredible because some of the basic challenges that people are having with respect to driver's license, which is going to be rolled out next, you know, birth certificates, marriage certificates and things and so on and so forth. It's creating so much inefficiency, leading to a lot of, you know, underbanked, unbanked, a lot of those problems. And so the ability to partner with the government on Quark ID, not just in Argentina, because Quark ID is expanding across LATAM as well, to kind of figure things out at that identity level and then to partner with innovative companies like Lemon Cash and also companies like Clave, you know, at the UX level with Wallet. These are all things that we are doing to just solve day to day use cases in Argentina. And it's really inspiring. And we are actually going to be starting in Argentina, doubling down from there. It's a little bit of a different approach that I think we took both at Coinbase and also I think at Circle, you might be taking with more Brazil because there's a bit more of an established central bank. But for us, Argentina is a much more of a natural fit, but really excited about the entire region.
Jeremy - 00:24:58:
Totally agree. We, you know, we've been making a big push in Latin America. We recently launched. Direct USDC liquidity and banking and infrastructure at a wholesale and institutional level in Brazil and Mexico. In 24-7 with 24-7 rails. I think we sort of think about the broader region is just an enormous opportunity space. That's really exciting. I'd be interested in that implementation. Is that essentially a permissioned implementation that then there's their own apps built around it? But is it designed so that those credentials essentially can come out to the public internet and to public blockchains?
Nana - 00:25:53:
That's exactly right. Because we have to bring harmony between permissionless and permissioned through this interoperability that I talked about. Just like we saw on Web 2, those who opened up the technology to anyone were able to scale to billions. And so permissionless blockchains are appealing from that standpoint. It's open to anyone. However, for a lot of these things, like very private confidential things like identity and privacy, permissioned is much more . It makes much more sense. And so one of the things that we are really focusing on is customizable, compliant, and collaborative. And so ZK chains are customizable. And which means it completely can support private and permissioned and also allows it to be interoperable with public and permissionless. And so this is a great way we think there's going to be that collaboration and harmony between both worlds instead of making it an either-or, but we can really think about it in terms of an end between both and we can really open things up when it's needed.
Jeremy - 00:26:58:
I mean, I think that that kind of architecture is definitely going to be a big part of sort of how all this scales up, right? People use a lot of different phrases, permission, permissionless, app change, layer threes, all this sort of stuff. And I like to use the metaphor of virtual private clouds. So I think people are more familiar with sort of the Internet. They're like, well, you can run your own private data center. And like, that's how it used to be done. And then there's like the public cloud, which was like, wow, you could like scale up on by using Amazon's resources. And then there's sort of the virtual private cloud, which is I don't want to just like be sharing the same computers and same space as others. Or maybe like startups might be willing to do that. But like I want I want control. I want control over my own security. I want control over protecting my own data. But I want to know that I'm still like. Leveraging the scale of the public internet and leveraging the economies of scale of this infrastructure and still can make access really seamless for people. And in some ways, like these architectures are kind of enabling, like whether it's enterprise or tokenization or government identity or whatever it is. But I think the important thing is sometimes there's like an ideological posture people take on this. It's like, if it's not completely on the public blockchain, like why bother? Like we can just use databases, right? But I think that's a simplistic view. And we really do need kind of these layers and we really do need, you know, you want people building on the primitives of cryptographic infrastructure and proving and blockchains. And they're not made for everything, but definitely when it comes to sort of trusted data, kind of compute integrity, all these things, that you get out of kind of crypto as an infrastructure and then kind of make that work with the public permissionless. And one of the things that we've tried to straddle with USDC is, you know, we're now kind of crossing over into a world where people are launching, whether it's on a stack like yours or other stacks, they're launching and they're using kind of a bridge USDC standard to make USDC available, even in a permissioned environment. But it's still ultimately interoperable. That digital money needs to exist in all those places, basically. Yeah.
Nana - 00:29:29:
Yeah, no, totally agree. And one more thing, in addition to the point you made about control is, as an industry, I think we kind of need to work hard on making these things invisible to the end user, because one of the biggest, biggest, biggest challenges in crypto is the UX. It's so clunky, seed phrases, this, that, so hard. It's so confusing. Which chain? Like, what do I do? And it's, it doesn't matter what kind of technology we are building. We're going to go, it's going to be hard to make progress. And so that's something where another thing which we are working on, I'm sure you're working on it, but I feel like there's a lot of work we should do.
Jeremy - 00:30:08:
Everybody's working on chain abstraction, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Nana - 00:30:11:
Yeah. But also curious to hear your thoughts on chains and all that too. I think particularly I've always been thinking about programmable money is solving one aspect of it. Now, how do we truly, achieve scale, you know, with programmable money and some of the work that we are doing? Love to hear your thoughts as well.
Jeremy - 00:30:31:
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think like at a high level, right, completely agree with what you just said, which is like the UX, like we have to kind of like make this leap where a person who's interacting with an application, a Web3 application, whether it's contained in a Web2 app and then it's Web3 embedded or it's like standalone Web3, you know, in a browser or on a mobile device, but whatever the case where that Web3 experience that the user doesn't know that they're using blockchains. They don't know that they're using crypto, but they will certainly be aware of like, that they have a digital asset, they have a digital object, they have a digital identity, they have these like things that they possess and control and are secure and we can kind of, people can convey that and understand that. But then when they interact, right, they're using more familiar paradigms like internet-based names or... QR codes, other things as well. So we really want to see that evolve. And so from a Circle perspective, we're investing a lot in making sure that, first of all, USDC can be made available safely on all of these different infrastructures that are launching, and that we can bring cross-chain transfer protocol to all of these so that effectively, moving value, people shouldn't have to worry about what chain they're on, what chain another user's on. The apps should be able to figure out, oh, this person's on ZK, this person's on Base, this person's on Solana, whatever it is, and just make it work, right? And then I think similarly, gas abstraction is probably one of the most important things. And so we're seeing proliferation in account abstraction infrastructure and effectively paymasters or gas fee payment delegation. And all of that is really important. which gets us to a world where I'm not thinking about gas, I'm not thinking about what these tokens are, I'm not thinking about what chain I'm on, and I'm just... Having a good time, whatever application I'm using. I think Everything that's happening in the industry, you know, is moving towards that. And I think we're finally starting to see some great user experiences where you can onboard with an OAuth or with a passkey and you don't have to remember seed phrases where you can, you know, you can on-ramp kind of instantly into USDC and then you can, you know, interact and transact and even use apps where, you know, any fees are de minimis because they're on these scalable infrastructures and developers can pay the fees on your behalf using USDC. And so it just sort of makes everything smoother. So we're getting there. I really feel like. Like when I look at all the entrepreneurs that are building right now and that both at the infrastructure level and the end user level, like we're really seeing really great progress. And, you know, I think this. Big push on chain abstraction is gonna yield fruit. And I really believe that that's gonna lead to 2025, like I said earlier, being this incredible breakthrough year in terms of... Scalability, usability, legal certainty, global liquidity and availability. All these things are kind of happening and building to that moment. And I think a phrase you probably remember, we will officially cross the chasm and be on the slope of enlightenment and bringing hundreds of millions and more people into the infrastructure and into these platforms.
Nana - 00:34:24:
No, totally agree. And this is something we're also waiting on is just regulatory clarity, too. I think that's going to help a lot. That's one of the biggest headwinds right now. So that'll help. But yeah, it all comes down to like you mentioned, right? Like it has to be serious and fun. People just, everything should work better. I think Chris Dixon probably mentioned this in the last show. I think I heard him say, you know, you've got to make old things better and then you also need to do new things. So you have to somehow make, do both. Otherwise it's not a web.
Jeremy - 00:34:52:
Yes. This is the 10X phenomenon, right? Yeah. It's got to be 10X better. It's going to be 10X less expensive, and it's got to enable new things that you just couldn't do before. Yeah, well, and part of your other question to me was sort of the programmability of money and the kind of, the way I like to talk about this is. Circle, we've been on this mission for 11 years, effectively to get to a point where storing and moving value seamlessly, globally, interoperably just becomes a commodity-free service on the internet. And so we're basically arriving there. And that's really cool. That should cause an explosion in the amount of transaction activity that happens over the internet because it sort of reduces all these frictions. But the really interesting thing is programmability. And we've never had composable, programmable money on open public infrastructure that anyone can build with. And people, a lot of times, are like, well, what does that mean? Well, I'm like, well, look at what's been built in the past five years in DeFi, just in the past several years. DeFi is programmable money. We're taking every fundamental building block. of finance and building it as a Lego brick, as a protocol that people can compose and integrate and build on. And it's extraordinary to see. And speaking of the earlier example, if you go to Argentina, like Lemon Cash, great example, right? Here's a product that basically abstracts away all this underneath and it becomes a very straightforward way for someone to save, spend, and earn and pay. And these verbs that are really straightforward to the user, it's like, oh, yeah, this is what I want. And it's 100% built on this on-chain composable infrastructure. And things like that were just inconceivable years ago. So programmable money is already here, but we're still... Like we haven't yet hit the iPhone moment, right? We haven't yet had, there is not yet a UX container that has that kind of appeal and seamlessness. And that then like all these like programmable money utilities can like ride on top of and scale and use, both enterprise and consumer, right, across both. But, And so I'm excited.
Nana - 00:37:23:
Yeah, no, same here. I really hope with the programmable money plus some of the things that can be enabled in infrastructures with ZK technology truly creates that, creating that,
Jeremy - 00:37:32:
yeah. Identity, security, privacy. Yeah. No, I mean, these are, you know, it's again, counterintuitive. People often ask about like, what are the biggest barriers to... To say enterprises that are using this. And my first response is, you know, is actually like privacy. Like no business in their right mind is going to build on chain unless they have total privacy and totally secure confidential transactions. And so a lot of people thought about confidential transactions as like, oh, this is a individuals that want to have private peer-to-peer transactions, which is also valid and important. But like if you want society to adopt this broadly, right, we have to preserve privacy and corporations actually. That's incredibly important. So anyway, I know you guys are doing a lot of good work in all these areas. And yeah, it's fun to chat through all this, Nana, and excited to see your continued progress.
Nana - 00:38:39:
Thank you so much, Jeremy. And congrats again and hope to see you soon, either Boston or New York somewhere.
Jeremy - 00:38:45:
Yes, yes. I think it's probably likely I'll see you in New York.
Nana - 00:38:48:
All right. Thank you so much.
Jeremy - 00:38:50:
Have a great day. You too.
Nana - 00:38:51:
Take care.
A lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions, and that's because they made it fun, but many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to.
Jeremy - 00:00:29:
Hello and welcome to this new episode of The Money Movement. I'm really pleased today to be joined by the president of Matter Labs Nana Murugesan And it's a great pleasure to see you again in this context and in your new role as well. Excited for the conversation.
Nana - 00:00:47:
Great to see you, Jeremy. And congrats on all the progress. And it was also so great to see your New York office. I'm here in New York and just near the World Trade Center. So, so cool to see you.
Jeremy - 00:00:58:
Okay. All right. You'll have to come to the opening celebration for sure. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Well, you are now in the thick of it in terms of fundamental infrastructure for crypto, for blockchain networks. I'm talking all the time. People are always asking me, what's it going to take to get to mainstream scale and acceptance? And there's a lot of different things that I talk about. But one of those is the sort of innovations that are coming with ZK and with new approaches to scaling and security and other things. And so I know the work that you do and the work that Circle is also doing with USDC on the platform is important. And we'll come back to that in a little bit. But maybe before diving in, I'm always interested to talk about people's journey. So maybe we can just start just your professional journey into crypto, into this space, and kind of ultimately kind of what's landed you where you are today.
Nana - 00:02:09:
Yeah, no, thanks, Jeremy. You know, my professional journey actually started with some of my personal experiences, too. So maybe I'll touch on that a little bit. You know, I grew up in Southeast Asia and in India, like four countries. And then I moved to the U.S. For grad school. And throughout this. I experienced a lot of the challenges of the financial system, particularly around cross-border transactions. So just grew up with a lot of pain and it kind of created a bunch of itch around why does this need to be so hard? And then I worked in both enterprise and consumer early on in my career. I worked in a startup. I was in Cisco and Samsung earlier, but I really got into crypto about six years back. When I was at Snapchat. That's not one you usually hear, is that people got into crypto and they're at Snapchat. But that's right. Well, I'll tell you more then. I have a former Snapchatter who's someone I think you know, Patrick Elias, who is now, he got into crypto, I think also went to Coinbase. But yes, no, Patrick was in my, I actually hired him at Snapchat. And then he came to Coinbase with me. And after that... You guys took him. Hope he's doing well.
Jeremy - 00:03:28:
He's doing great. He'll be happy to hear that on the podcast.
Nana - 00:03:33:
No, no, at Snapchat, I really got to understand Gen Z. And I also have two daughters. One is a Gen Z and one is a Gen Alpha. And, you know, for me, I was also entering, let's say, the next stage of my career. And I told myself I need to be working on things that matter for the next generation, which is Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And Snapchat got me into that. My daughters got me into that. And I can just tell you that this generation is more naturally aligned to the shared values of crypto. And, like, the way they think about... Centralized entities, the way they think about empowerment, the way they think about the creator economy, the way they think about assets, it's quite different from even how I may have thought about it. And it just aligns so well at the fundamental shared values of crypto. So that's actually how Snapchat, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, my daughters played a big role into me getting into crypto. I started getting more and more into it, started investing myself. And that's why naturally after Snapchat, I joined Coinbase, which was just such an amazing place to learn more and dig more into crypto, particularly for someone coming in from the web2 and social side of things. Spent a couple of years there at Coinbase, the Circle partnership we did with you and your team was a massive highlight. And another one was a huge expansion of the international footprint that we did, particularly during the bear market. So that was another highlight. After Coinbase... I jumped even deeper into blockchain and crypto earlier this year. That's when I got into the infrastructure side of things, as you mentioned earlier. And so maybe I'll share a little bit more about Matter Labs and why I'm so excited about it. Matter Labs better known as a creator of ZK Sync, which is the most mature and most production-ready, zero-knowledge ZK roll-up stack in Ethereum. And... I'm also really fascinated by ZK, just zero knowledge. This was actually conceived in 1985, if you can imagine. And it was just a mathematical way to provide a simple proof for the question without any additional information. So that was the logic. Kind of like saying I'm over 21 as a ZK proof without actually showing your data board or any other information. So pretty cool.
Jeremy - 00:05:54:
Identity credentials are one of the most commonly given examples of the power of this in a very basic human way, yeah.
Nana - 00:06:03:
And I was like fascinated by ZK and that's one of the reasons why I joined Matalabs because it's really a pure play ZK. And so after four decades, since 1985, I think we're really on the verge of having a ZK moment. Thanks to all the crypto funding and the builders, including Matter Lab as one of the earliest pure places I mentioned, because I really think ZK allows blockchains to scale efficiently, inheriting the security of Ethereum, not really compromising on the core properties that make blockchain so powerful. And like I mentioned earlier with that, I'm over 21 example, it really brings a whole new dimension to privacy, KYC and so on and so forth. So anyways, so with that, excited. I'm excited to be tackling problems like tokenization and TradFi or the creative economy on consumer and so many more use cases on emerging markets. But really, even after I say all that, it really feels like it's day zero. And that's why I'm so excited to continue to be in crypto and can't fight for all the things that are gonna come at us, right?
Jeremy - 00:07:06:
Yeah, I mean, it's a special moment. I've reflected on this online and in some other conversations, which is... We've been at this kind of collectively here for a while. I've been at this for 11 years. Obviously, you've been at it for a while. And you sort of have these really significant infrastructure improvements. And I think it's notable that sort of like during the bear market of the dot-com bust in the most recent kind of bear market in crypto, that so much progress was made on infrastructure and technologies like ZK and roll-ups and the ability to sort of take cryptography and its application to the next level to actually enable scalability, enable better user experiences, enable better privacy, identity models, all this stuff. Like these were just not ready. And we had to go through. We had proof-of-stake migration. And then obviously, you know. I have a huge amount of admiration for the ZK-SYNC implementation, and I've always felt like it's one of the most impressive Layer 2 models out there. Because of its effective implementation of ZK roll-ups. So it's really, really strong on that. But we're now at a place where with these kinds of layers, people can deploy meaningful applications. And I'm interested, I kind of compare this period of time a little bit to... You know, in 2003, 2004, like there was like broadband started to become available. Wi-Fi started to become available. People were connecting devices. It wasn't yet iPhone, but it was mobile devices were coming. And digital media was coming online, all these things. And so you kind of like the pipes got there, right? And the infra got there. And then it really took off. And so I think we're in a very similar place. And so I'd be interested. You know, as you look at... You know, the Matter Labs you know, kind of R&D agenda and technical agenda, you know, I keep saying like 2025 is gonna be the breakthrough year when we can actually deliver delightful user experiences that work for end users. And I'd be interested just, are you seeing like that kind of progress and what are some of the most significant kind of infrastructure things that you can talk about that you guys are moving towards, you know, in the coming 12 months?
Nana - 00:09:55:
Yeah, and thanks for saying that, Jeremy, right? One of the things that I really admired about the work that you, Circle, have done, and I've heard you talk about this is also like hype is great, but what is long lasting is the legacy of what remains after the hype. And so it's really important for us to be building future-proof stuff, things that we believe and have conviction is going to happen in the future. So with that, to your question, the what of what we are doing is like really we talk about Web3, Internet of Value. We've heard these things a lot of times. But what it really means is we need to have a borderless, transparent, and secure backbone of the Internet. That`ll power the world's financial system. Consumer apps, identity, and everything in between using zero knowledge as the core. We truly believe that zero knowledge is the one that's going to actually deliver a lot of the properties. And I can talk about a few things that zero knowledge can enable, which will get to your question. First is... I mean, really the chain you build on matters, even though there's so many chains, but really the chain you build on matters and why zero knowledge at the core matters is, one is it's not a one size fits all world, right? Like this internet of value is not gonna be on a single blockchain, just like nothing is gonna be on a single thing. And hence we have this vision called elastic chain. Which is about an interoperable chain of chains. So you could have a chain, others could have a chain, based on whatever you prefer. You could prefer public, you could prefer private, permissioned, permissionless. It's your choice, but at the end of the day, we want to create an infrastructure which creates and supports this not a one-size-fits-all and creates that interoperability. So that's one element. The other element is throughput.
Jeremy - 00:11:54:
Sorry, is that like kind of like a ZK-Sync era stack, like a way for people to kind of build these instances of this kind of compute memory data space that they can do for their application and at the end of the day, right, it inherits the security and interoperability that's sort of underlying both ZK-Sync and Ethereum.
Nana - 00:12:19:
That's right. Just to tell a little bit about the evolution, to get into that, right? So in 2021, we announced a thing called ZK-Sync era light, which was a payments L2. And then in 2023, we had our very first ZK EVM. In 2023 with ERA. And then in 2024, just a few months back, we launched Elastic Chain, which is this interoperability. There's ZK Stack, which enables the things that you mentioned. And then you have different chains. ERA is one of the ZK chains. Now we have Kronos and we're going to have almost a dozen chains by the end of the year on mainnet. So that's the whole interoperability piece. And we can get more into that, but there's a lot there. Second thing which I wanted to highlight is throughput. You know this really well, right? In the current traditional system, credit card payments, they can handle like tens of thousands of transactions per second. And blockchains are like nowhere near that kind of throughput right now. But Zero knowledge through the succinctness of the zero knowledge proofs, the way it's done, is the only way we believe blockchains are going to get to that type of throughput that the current traditional financial system needs, right? How can we... Create the current financial system if blockchains can get that level of throughput. So ZK is that future-proof technology. So that's the second thing which we're really focused on is throughput. And finally, and certainly last but not the least, is security. We're seeing a lot of demand, natural demand when it comes to tokenization of assets. I mean, the thing that you've done with programmable money and stable coins and what's done to the US dollar. Similarly, there's an entire opening out there with real-world assets and the need to increase accessibility and making it more efficient. So again, as more regulatory frameworks come through and as these assets go fully on-chain, we don't take these things seriously right now, but this is where ZK Sync's security features, when we are talking about full on-chain, are going to really help support the tokenization at scale. So those are a few things that we just want to highlight.
Jeremy - 00:14:33:
I want to come back to one of those in a couple of minutes, but I think just as an observation. I think you have an interesting background, obviously, like the Snapchat world, which is sort of sexy and consumer and digital media. I spent 10 years in digital media, but also I've worked on infrastructure, like app servers and programming languages and developer tools. And Circle has had a few different kind of... Product arcs, but yeah, I think. Coming back to this kind of where are we in the evolution and what does it take to get to mainstream scale and other things like. Building infrastructure is both difficult, but it's also fun, right? And I'm just interested in particular, given where you came from and where you are today, you eat infrastructure for breakfast, basically, right? And so I'm just curious, how do you feel about that from an entrepreneurial perspective? I certainly can relate to that, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts just as a builder, as a leader in the space. Because there's a lot of people saying, hey, we got too much infra. We now need to, it's all about consumer, it's all about apps, but there's still like a lot of unsolved infrastructure problems too.
Nana - 00:16:06:
No, that's a great question, Jeremy. I'm a big believer and I personally want to work on serious things, but I want to make it fun. I just know that, and that's one of the things that I feel like institutions and enterprises can learn too, because a lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions. And that's because they made it fun, but many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to, right? So I'm always thinking about that. And my Snapchat experience has really taught me how to make things fun. But then some of the other experiences and also Matter Labs is like really serious technology, really serious infrastructure stuff. So I'm always thinking, how do I make, how do I do things that are both serious and fun? And so some of the things I'll highlight, right? One is... ZK is really hard to understand, even for those who are in crypto. I mean, and hence, it's like really not accessible. So one of the things we did was we wrote a book just almost written for a kindergartner called, I don't know if you have, I would love to send it to you. It's really fun.
Jeremy - 00:17:19:
Sure, yeah. For real. Yeah. I do the, I use GPT to like make cartoons about topics for my daughters all the time. And it's like, how do you explain, you know, what a reserve currency is to a nine-year-old, you know, in a cartoon?
Nana - 00:17:36:
Yeah. Yeah, we created these characters called Mathemals, you know, math cartoon characters. And then we kind of talk about circuits and all these things in a way that a kindergartner can understand. And we've seen such great reception for this. We were in Argentina recently. The former president of Argentina came by our booth. He carried along that book and he was like, this is great. So I think one of the things which we need to do, that's a great example of making really serious, hard concepts fun and easy to understand because that's how people are going to embrace it. But there's a lot of other things that we are doing too. For example, one of my favorite apps, I, being at Snapchat and in general, the people who know me, you can ask Patrick too, I love taking pictures. And I feel like... Pictures tell, you know, speak a thousand words. And so we have, we're working with Nodal. They have a click app where you can use your phone's metadata and store a hash of it on chain. And you can verify what device location and time a photo was taken. ZK proofs are going to be coming. And this is a great way where even for applications like Muse and other things where we are fighting things like, is the picture? You know, authentic, authentic, the right one. These are like natural applications where ZK can help improve, you know, whether it's fake news or whatever it is, or just prove the legitimacy of the picture that you've taken. Right. So things like that are really cool. And it kind of gets the point across on the application of ZK at scale. So anyways, those are ways in which you can make infrastructure fun.
Jeremy - 00:19:14:
Totally. Are there, I'm actually, this is a sort of random question, but like are given the ZK architecture, are you finding like Web3 games as a category just in terms of literal fun? Like, because it obviously the architecture is one which kind of lends itself to executing on game kind of. Models on chain.
Nana - 00:19:35:
That's perfect. I actually want to talk about it later. You asked me already. That's amazing. I think gaming is one vertical. The two verticals that we are really excited about right now on TradFi with tokenization, tons of progress. And on the consumer side, gaming, we've had tons of progress. We had TreasureDAO, who just switched over from Arbitrum to ZK Sync for particularly the reasons that you mentioned. It's just such a natural fit for them. And they just switched over recently. And then we have some very interesting announcements coming up soon. We're working with Budgie Penguins on their chain. And we have a few more announcements. All of that is going to be around creators and gaming. And we're seeing a natural fit over there.
Jeremy - 00:20:24:
That's awesome. Yeah, maybe kind of connecting some dots here. Like, the, the... Coming back to this serious crypto, there's serious applications. I think one that like we write about extensively, actually. Recently, we launched a Circle Global Impact Report, which really talks about the growing use of USDC in humanitarian aid, in disaster relief, in supporting households in markets and countries that really want to depend on a digital dollar as a store of value. It's serious because we're talking about people's livelihoods. We're talking about people who are liking in places like Argentina, who are where hopefully things are getting more under control, but where it's still really challenging. And so we really think about, and I know you do too, so I want to hear what you're seeing and learning is, a lot of times these more efficient technologies that kind of deal with access and cost and other things in fundamental ways, their adoption scales up faster in emerging and developing markets than it does in developed markets. And it really feels like the adoption of crypto infrastructure, the adoption of stable coins, there's sort of this leapfrogging, which is what happened with WhatsApp in its adoption cycle. And so I'm curious, do you see that happening? And how are you seeing Latin America, Africa, other emerging markets in terms of people who are building with ZK or ZK Sync and the opportunity space there? And then obviously, We launched USDC and CCTP and bringing those there to kind of ensure that there's the best possible digital dollar in the world with great underlying liquidity and so on. What are you seeing in terms of that demand and that sort of use case?
Nana - 00:22:46:
Yeah, that's a great question, Jeremy, right? Like in the Western world, we often talk about things like tokenization, gaming, you know, a lot of those use cases when it comes to crypto. I spent two weeks in Argentina and we can talk a little bit about what we are seeing over there. There are like basic. Day-to-day use cases and utilitarian things that are happening there that are so inspiring. And folks in high schools and colleges, and we spoke to a lot of them who are just so much talent in that region too. And they're just building on crypto blockchain, right? USDC has done wonders over there, right? To solve like one of the most basic problems. And there's so many other things too. One of the things that we are working on is Quark ID. So Quark ID is the ID, the KYC and ID that the government is creating. And so they're actually building, they're gonna be a ZK chain. They're gonna be building on them. Which is really incredible because some of the basic challenges that people are having with respect to driver's license, which is going to be rolled out next, you know, birth certificates, marriage certificates and things and so on and so forth. It's creating so much inefficiency, leading to a lot of, you know, underbanked, unbanked, a lot of those problems. And so the ability to partner with the government on Quark ID, not just in Argentina, because Quark ID is expanding across LATAM as well, to kind of figure things out at that identity level and then to partner with innovative companies like Lemon Cash and also companies like Clave, you know, at the UX level with Wallet. These are all things that we are doing to just solve day to day use cases in Argentina. And it's really inspiring. And we are actually going to be starting in Argentina, doubling down from there. It's a little bit of a different approach that I think we took both at Coinbase and also I think at Circle, you might be taking with more Brazil because there's a bit more of an established central bank. But for us, Argentina is a much more of a natural fit, but really excited about the entire region.
Jeremy - 00:24:58:
Totally agree. We, you know, we've been making a big push in Latin America. We recently launched. Direct USDC liquidity and banking and infrastructure at a wholesale and institutional level in Brazil and Mexico. In 24-7 with 24-7 rails. I think we sort of think about the broader region is just an enormous opportunity space. That's really exciting. I'd be interested in that implementation. Is that essentially a permissioned implementation that then there's their own apps built around it? But is it designed so that those credentials essentially can come out to the public internet and to public blockchains?
Nana - 00:25:53:
That's exactly right. Because we have to bring harmony between permissionless and permissioned through this interoperability that I talked about. Just like we saw on Web 2, those who opened up the technology to anyone were able to scale to billions. And so permissionless blockchains are appealing from that standpoint. It's open to anyone. However, for a lot of these things, like very private confidential things like identity and privacy, permissioned is much more . It makes much more sense. And so one of the things that we are really focusing on is customizable, compliant, and collaborative. And so ZK chains are customizable. And which means it completely can support private and permissioned and also allows it to be interoperable with public and permissionless. And so this is a great way we think there's going to be that collaboration and harmony between both worlds instead of making it an either-or, but we can really think about it in terms of an end between both and we can really open things up when it's needed.
Jeremy - 00:26:58:
I mean, I think that that kind of architecture is definitely going to be a big part of sort of how all this scales up, right? People use a lot of different phrases, permission, permissionless, app change, layer threes, all this sort of stuff. And I like to use the metaphor of virtual private clouds. So I think people are more familiar with sort of the Internet. They're like, well, you can run your own private data center. And like, that's how it used to be done. And then there's like the public cloud, which was like, wow, you could like scale up on by using Amazon's resources. And then there's sort of the virtual private cloud, which is I don't want to just like be sharing the same computers and same space as others. Or maybe like startups might be willing to do that. But like I want I want control. I want control over my own security. I want control over protecting my own data. But I want to know that I'm still like. Leveraging the scale of the public internet and leveraging the economies of scale of this infrastructure and still can make access really seamless for people. And in some ways, like these architectures are kind of enabling, like whether it's enterprise or tokenization or government identity or whatever it is. But I think the important thing is sometimes there's like an ideological posture people take on this. It's like, if it's not completely on the public blockchain, like why bother? Like we can just use databases, right? But I think that's a simplistic view. And we really do need kind of these layers and we really do need, you know, you want people building on the primitives of cryptographic infrastructure and proving and blockchains. And they're not made for everything, but definitely when it comes to sort of trusted data, kind of compute integrity, all these things, that you get out of kind of crypto as an infrastructure and then kind of make that work with the public permissionless. And one of the things that we've tried to straddle with USDC is, you know, we're now kind of crossing over into a world where people are launching, whether it's on a stack like yours or other stacks, they're launching and they're using kind of a bridge USDC standard to make USDC available, even in a permissioned environment. But it's still ultimately interoperable. That digital money needs to exist in all those places, basically. Yeah.
Nana - 00:29:29:
Yeah, no, totally agree. And one more thing, in addition to the point you made about control is, as an industry, I think we kind of need to work hard on making these things invisible to the end user, because one of the biggest, biggest, biggest challenges in crypto is the UX. It's so clunky, seed phrases, this, that, so hard. It's so confusing. Which chain? Like, what do I do? And it's, it doesn't matter what kind of technology we are building. We're going to go, it's going to be hard to make progress. And so that's something where another thing which we are working on, I'm sure you're working on it, but I feel like there's a lot of work we should do.
Jeremy - 00:30:08:
Everybody's working on chain abstraction, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Nana - 00:30:11:
Yeah. But also curious to hear your thoughts on chains and all that too. I think particularly I've always been thinking about programmable money is solving one aspect of it. Now, how do we truly, achieve scale, you know, with programmable money and some of the work that we are doing? Love to hear your thoughts as well.
Jeremy - 00:30:31:
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think like at a high level, right, completely agree with what you just said, which is like the UX, like we have to kind of like make this leap where a person who's interacting with an application, a Web3 application, whether it's contained in a Web2 app and then it's Web3 embedded or it's like standalone Web3, you know, in a browser or on a mobile device, but whatever the case where that Web3 experience that the user doesn't know that they're using blockchains. They don't know that they're using crypto, but they will certainly be aware of like, that they have a digital asset, they have a digital object, they have a digital identity, they have these like things that they possess and control and are secure and we can kind of, people can convey that and understand that. But then when they interact, right, they're using more familiar paradigms like internet-based names or... QR codes, other things as well. So we really want to see that evolve. And so from a Circle perspective, we're investing a lot in making sure that, first of all, USDC can be made available safely on all of these different infrastructures that are launching, and that we can bring cross-chain transfer protocol to all of these so that effectively, moving value, people shouldn't have to worry about what chain they're on, what chain another user's on. The apps should be able to figure out, oh, this person's on ZK, this person's on Base, this person's on Solana, whatever it is, and just make it work, right? And then I think similarly, gas abstraction is probably one of the most important things. And so we're seeing proliferation in account abstraction infrastructure and effectively paymasters or gas fee payment delegation. And all of that is really important. which gets us to a world where I'm not thinking about gas, I'm not thinking about what these tokens are, I'm not thinking about what chain I'm on, and I'm just... Having a good time, whatever application I'm using. I think Everything that's happening in the industry, you know, is moving towards that. And I think we're finally starting to see some great user experiences where you can onboard with an OAuth or with a passkey and you don't have to remember seed phrases where you can, you know, you can on-ramp kind of instantly into USDC and then you can, you know, interact and transact and even use apps where, you know, any fees are de minimis because they're on these scalable infrastructures and developers can pay the fees on your behalf using USDC. And so it just sort of makes everything smoother. So we're getting there. I really feel like. Like when I look at all the entrepreneurs that are building right now and that both at the infrastructure level and the end user level, like we're really seeing really great progress. And, you know, I think this. Big push on chain abstraction is gonna yield fruit. And I really believe that that's gonna lead to 2025, like I said earlier, being this incredible breakthrough year in terms of... Scalability, usability, legal certainty, global liquidity and availability. All these things are kind of happening and building to that moment. And I think a phrase you probably remember, we will officially cross the chasm and be on the slope of enlightenment and bringing hundreds of millions and more people into the infrastructure and into these platforms.
Nana - 00:34:24:
No, totally agree. And this is something we're also waiting on is just regulatory clarity, too. I think that's going to help a lot. That's one of the biggest headwinds right now. So that'll help. But yeah, it all comes down to like you mentioned, right? Like it has to be serious and fun. People just, everything should work better. I think Chris Dixon probably mentioned this in the last show. I think I heard him say, you know, you've got to make old things better and then you also need to do new things. So you have to somehow make, do both. Otherwise it's not a web.
Jeremy - 00:34:52:
Yes. This is the 10X phenomenon, right? Yeah. It's got to be 10X better. It's going to be 10X less expensive, and it's got to enable new things that you just couldn't do before. Yeah, well, and part of your other question to me was sort of the programmability of money and the kind of, the way I like to talk about this is. Circle, we've been on this mission for 11 years, effectively to get to a point where storing and moving value seamlessly, globally, interoperably just becomes a commodity-free service on the internet. And so we're basically arriving there. And that's really cool. That should cause an explosion in the amount of transaction activity that happens over the internet because it sort of reduces all these frictions. But the really interesting thing is programmability. And we've never had composable, programmable money on open public infrastructure that anyone can build with. And people, a lot of times, are like, well, what does that mean? Well, I'm like, well, look at what's been built in the past five years in DeFi, just in the past several years. DeFi is programmable money. We're taking every fundamental building block. of finance and building it as a Lego brick, as a protocol that people can compose and integrate and build on. And it's extraordinary to see. And speaking of the earlier example, if you go to Argentina, like Lemon Cash, great example, right? Here's a product that basically abstracts away all this underneath and it becomes a very straightforward way for someone to save, spend, and earn and pay. And these verbs that are really straightforward to the user, it's like, oh, yeah, this is what I want. And it's 100% built on this on-chain composable infrastructure. And things like that were just inconceivable years ago. So programmable money is already here, but we're still... Like we haven't yet hit the iPhone moment, right? We haven't yet had, there is not yet a UX container that has that kind of appeal and seamlessness. And that then like all these like programmable money utilities can like ride on top of and scale and use, both enterprise and consumer, right, across both. But, And so I'm excited.
Nana - 00:37:23:
Yeah, no, same here. I really hope with the programmable money plus some of the things that can be enabled in infrastructures with ZK technology truly creates that, creating that,
Jeremy - 00:37:32:
yeah. Identity, security, privacy. Yeah. No, I mean, these are, you know, it's again, counterintuitive. People often ask about like, what are the biggest barriers to... To say enterprises that are using this. And my first response is, you know, is actually like privacy. Like no business in their right mind is going to build on chain unless they have total privacy and totally secure confidential transactions. And so a lot of people thought about confidential transactions as like, oh, this is a individuals that want to have private peer-to-peer transactions, which is also valid and important. But like if you want society to adopt this broadly, right, we have to preserve privacy and corporations actually. That's incredibly important. So anyway, I know you guys are doing a lot of good work in all these areas. And yeah, it's fun to chat through all this, Nana, and excited to see your continued progress.
Nana - 00:38:39:
Thank you so much, Jeremy. And congrats again and hope to see you soon, either Boston or New York somewhere.
Jeremy - 00:38:45:
Yes, yes. I think it's probably likely I'll see you in New York.
Nana - 00:38:48:
All right. Thank you so much.
Jeremy - 00:38:50:
Have a great day. You too.
Nana - 00:38:51:
Take care.
Jeremy Allaire
Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman at Circle
Nana Murugesan
President, Matter Labs