Dr. Corey Petty: Privacy Can't Be Bolted On

Hodl Up: Hello, Corey. How's it going?

Corey: Going well, happy to be here. Good to meet you all. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I've been looking you guys up, doing some background on you, and I think this is going to turn out to be a fun conversation.

Hodl Up: Definitely. Considering you joined crypto in 2013, if I'm not mistaken, based on our research, it's going to be a long one as well. Before we get into everything else, I ask everyone this question and I want to ask you too: what got you into crypto? What was the idea behind joining? It's a whole world out there, and we've seen, especially in the last few years, that crypto can be extremely brutal. So why not choose another industry to build in?

Corey: Oh, I might take the whole time with this one. I originally did a PhD in computational physics. I've always been fascinated with computation, and my PhD was in high-performance computing, so solving really hard computational problems was something I was interested in. I've also always been a deconstructionist, I guess: I want to take things apart and put them back together with as few pieces as possible. By happenstance, I saw a TED talk about Bitcoin while I was doing my graduate studies, and I was fascinated by it. I really liked the computational problem it was solving, the Byzantine Generals' Problem, and how it solved it was elegant to me. So I researched it. I wanted to understand how it works, the ins and outs, and how it could break down. Then I started playing with it, and I learned about money and the weirdness that is money. I thought it was interesting that we had built what I'd consider sovereign internet money. We'd never had that before. It was a fundamentally new thing for me, and I just got lost in it. Then I mined, because the best way to learn is by doing, and I wanted to mine and understand it and play with it. As I got more competent, I became more fascinated. Eventually I started a podcast, The Bitcoin Podcast, for some shameless self-plugging, met a bunch of people and had great conversations, and I really enjoyed it. Then I left academia, because while the problems I was solving were interesting, no one cared about them. And this was a huge industry, an exponential technology that I thought was going to take off, doing it in a way I cared about, giving power back to the people. I really like cryptography, information and decentralized systems. So I got a job doing data science and blockchain education, then security, and then I got a job at Status after their ICO, where I was the lead security engineer and CSO. I just kept doing it because the space exploded, and it's always about building things the way I like, in adversarial settings: building things that are resilient to people taking them over. That's a core part of my being: how do we build systems that aren't asymmetric in power?

Hodl Up: I resonate with that, because when we first joined crypto, we also liked the whole philosophy behind it. Given that you've seen the most important cycles of this space and watched crypto evolve into what it is today, I have a question for you. Do you like it? Did you predict it would turn out like this? Because it doesn't feel the same. I get nostalgic about everything, but most of all about when we first joined crypto. It's not the same. We can talk all day about ideologies and institutions, but it just doesn't feel the same. I want your take, because if I'm not mistaken, you've been quite critical of the institutionalization of crypto.

Corey: No, I don't like it. But I'm also not surprised by it. And it's not like the ideology is gone. When we started The Bitcoin Podcast, our mantra was "adoption is the only thing that matters." We thought, we're going to take over, replace the banks, give people power and ownership of their own financial data and so on. But that's not the adoption we got, because that's really hard to do. It's really hard to use and cumbersome. Using a wallet, taking responsibility for your own private keys, understanding what you're signing, what chain your tokens are on, the weird dynamics in DeFi: all of it is hard, and people don't like hard, because they have to learn something new and change their behavior. So the adoption we got was driven by scale and convenience. A lot of what we built, in terms of adoption, seems to be the same thing we already had, just on the internet. It's traditional finance on the internet. That isn't what I signed up for, but it's obviously how things went, because that's what people wanted. We haven't yet convinced them of the thing I got in here for, and why they need it. I think we're getting there. I think people are starting to wise up: "Oh, this isn't anything different, and I'm still not getting what I want, which is something better than what I already have." I'm still hopeful we can deliver that.

Hodl Up: In my opinion, the institutionalization of crypto was inevitable, as you said, but I also think we asked for it in a way. Maybe not you specifically, but the majority of the industry. I remember in 2020 and 2021, whenever there was news of a new institution doing something crypto-related, everyone got fired up and hyped. I think the whole industry has an identity crisis, and that's what I want to touch on with privacy as well. I think anonymity and privacy are musts in crypto. But how realistic is that? Random people don't care about it, do they? If you asked my parents whether they care that their data is being sold from their social media accounts to different algorithms, for people to basically enslave them digitally, they wouldn't care. Personally, I try to care and stand behind the movement, but at the end of the day it's really hard to be idealistic in today's world. So how would you convince someone to fight this war? I see it as a war, maybe not a direct one, but how would you convince someone to stand by those values?

Corey: That's a hard one. For one, it mirrors what I experienced doing security: people only really care about security when their security is breached, when it personally impacts them, and unfortunately by then it's usually too late. So as builders, we have to be the ideological ones and build things that don't give people the option to go without these features. It's built into the substrate, the infrastructure, of the things built on top of it. That way they're already protected, and they have to opt out if they want to, which is their decision. They're doing it with consent, rather than without consent because that's how it was given to them. Privacy is exactly the same. The transparency of everything we use today leads to a surveillance ecosystem and market, where the easiest way to profit is to aggregate data and take advantage of it, and the user becomes the product. People aren't building for users and what users need; they're building to take advantage of users. That's because of the substrate we have. So I'm less convinced we need to sell people on privacy and anonymity. We need to build a substrate that doesn't give them the option, and instead makes others get their consent for what they're selling, and in some cases lets users profit from it, rather than someone else aggregating it because it's the cheapest way to exploit them. That's a lot of what we're trying to do. And unfortunately, you can't just bolt it on afterwards. You can't add privacy to a system that isn't private very well, and if you can, it's much more difficult, because the life cycle of a transaction has many steps. If you only think about the blockchain itself, that's settlement, the end of the life cycle, and almost all the surveillance and profiteering happens before you get there. So who cares that you have a privacy solution on the blockchain? You've already sold everything, or they can go after the people using the privacy solution. In our opinion, you have to secure the entire transaction life cycle and make it private, so the user has the option to disclose when appropriate, rather than being sold down the river before they even had a choice.

Hodl Up: That's the thing. And about what Atis said: people did ask for mass adoption. They asked for all this institutional money to come in. It's like asking for rain and getting thunderstorms.

Hodl Up: Thunderstorms, yes, with a lot of narratives and political wars and so on. But we don't want to go down that rabbit hole just yet. Now I want to ask about Logos and the philosophy behind it. You mentioned you pivoted from academia, and I believe you had to unlearn a lot from academia to achieve what you have and start building Logos and all its products.

Corey: I don't know that I unlearned much from academia. I just don't use it the way I learned it. And I've come full circle to the opinion that institutions are what really matter, but you need to build good ones, because institutions are what withstand generations and the decisions of generations. They maintain the core ideas and complex thoughts, and they train people to keep doing that over time. So you need to actually rebuild institutions. They're what hold the whole thing together. But you need infrastructure that allows for that, so they're not capturable. What we see now is a bunch of captured institutions, and the idea is to rebuild them in a way that makes them uncapturable. If you look at what we've been trying to do with blockchains, it's building technology that's resilient or resistant to capture, a bit more resilient to asymmetric power dynamics where a few people can control the whole thing. We've learned a lot of lessons over the decade and a half we've been doing this about how to do that well with technology, and maybe now we're getting to the point where we can build something that impacts society and rebuilds institutions. I don't know if that answered your question.

Hodl Up: It did. So how exactly do you want to do this? As we said, institutions are coming in, but they're built in a way that's easy to capture. I don't want to be the pessimist in this conversation, but I think every institution and everything in the world can be bought with today's mindset. The majority of people are losing their ideals. I don't want to do doom talk, but that's how it feels. Everyone you want to build something interesting and good with, something better than what exists, asks, "What's in it for me? How much money will I make?" Or they present you with an offer that's all about monetary value. I totally get it, it's a business, but we're trying to build something with a different kind of value, not just financial. How do you want to change that?

Corey: A lot of our philosophy is: don't try to fix it. Build something in parallel that gives people options to build for themselves, purpose-built for what they need, instead of leveraging what already exists that doesn't work for them, doesn't care about them or takes advantage of them. And you need to build those things so they're not capturable, not easy to break and take control of. You need resilient, resistant technology that gives people the tools to build communities and parallel institutions that work in their niche areas, and then you foster those and let them grow. Hopefully what you get is emergent, resistant institutions that work for actual people and their needs, unlike the ones we have that are so detached from people that they don't serve them. It starts with building technology that's provably resistant in real-world scenarios, then going out, learning the problems people have, helping them build things that serve them the way they want, and fostering that community growth. I don't think you'll ever get societal change unless you do both simultaneously: build technology that can't be captured and serves people, understand people's problems and go help them, and repeat that iterative process. Let things grow, because big problems come from big communities. You have to battle-test these things iteratively, let them grow and prove them out, with the key focus on actually helping people with their problems and serving them.

Hodl Up: As an economist myself, I blame economists for a lot of this, because they tend to put a statistical value on almost everything, but they haven't really put one on privacy. You see all these projects and new features with surveillance tracking in the back end that people aren't even aware of. But if you asked people how much they'd pay to have their data protected and be anonymous on the internet, I don't want to bet, but I can guarantee most would pay something. So you can also monetize that side of privacy. Which brings me to my next point: the proliferation of AI. It has scaled a lot of good things in the world, but also a lot of bad things, in this case surveillance. Claude and ChatGPT know basically everything about me, because I'm the type of person who asks ChatGPT about the most minor inconveniences. I still vouch for total privacy, but I'm also caught slipping on this side of surveillance. I want your take on AI. I know you've written pieces praising how AI increases efficiency, but are there hidden narratives around AI that people aren't aware of, and that they're part of, not just in surveillance and privacy but in other issues as well?

Corey: That's a big one. I'm fascinated by AI for a multitude of reasons: how it works, the emergent property of it actually being able to reason, how these models scale, the environmental and social implications of hyperscalers, how people use them and either stop thinking or, if used correctly, think better and become more efficient, and the massive amount of control these hyperscalers actually have. From that control comes the potential to manipulate society in a way that's not obvious, through the answers they give you, because you're using it as a search engine. You're asking about everything, how things work, why things are, and it just gives you an answer, and you don't know where that answer comes from. It comes from how the model is trained, post-trained and served, and the rules the provider sets. For the first time in history, we have companies that control the entire information pipeline, from aggregation to training to serving, all proprietary, and you know nothing about how they do it. That's very scary. Previously, multiple institutions, gatekeepers and audiences controlled different parts of that pipeline, so there were some checks and balances. We don't have that anymore. And these are transnational companies, massive and huge, so they aren't subject to any single jurisdiction either. That's a very scary, unproven situation we find ourselves in. AI has tremendous potential to make society better, but only if it's built in a way that keeps those checks and balances, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. I don't think hyperscalers are the way. But we also haven't figured out how to make these models competent enough to do the work we want without "number go up" on how big they need to be and the resources required to train them. So we don't know yet. There's potential for a lot of scariness, but also a lot of greatness, and I'm trapped in the middle. From a computational point of view it's fascinating and I love it. It helps me be better at what I do and helps me learn about anything the way I like to learn. But it also makes people dumb and stop thinking if they don't use it that way. We'll see.

Hodl Up: I saw a tweet, or maybe a LinkedIn post, saying, "Don't outsource your thinking to AI." And I think I've been doing that.

Corey: Because in life, the thinking is the point. The hard part, struggling with an idea and its complexity, is the point of the exercise, and when you offload it, you lose the faculty to think.

Hodl Up: I think you stop being human, really. After a decade, say, no one is thinking; they're outsourcing it to AI, and you forget how to think, the one thing that makes us human. But I don't want to go down that rabbit hole yet, as Dren said. You mentioned you're fascinated by AI. How do you think we can stay decentralized and stop these giants from taking over the world and doing what they're doing right now? Would local compute be the answer, giving us sovereignty over AI, or are we too far from that?

Corey: I think we'll find ways to decentralize the training process, the inference process, and the ownership and aggregation of the data used to train the models, and to shrink the models so that the level of reasoning needed fits on devices a consumer can afford, without requiring massive data centers just to run inference. Then it doesn't become a global scarcity problem of who gets to own the machines that run these things. It becomes something you can run on your laptop or phone, because we get better at understanding how to do this meaningfully. When that's possible, you're no longer subject to the hyperscalers because they're the only way to do it. If they're the only way, you have no exit. I've talked about this with crypto too. I don't mind Coinbase, because it's built on a decentralized platform. If I don't like what Coinbase is doing with my Bitcoin, I take my Bitcoin out of Coinbase and put it on-chain, or whatever the token is, because I have that option to exit. If you don't have the option to exit, the company can do whatever it wants, because you can't do anything about it. So with any of this, AI included, you need a place to exit, where you can still do what you want to do without being subject to the company. When you have that dynamic, the company has to care about its users, because they can just leave. Offering people the option to exit, and minimizing the barrier to it, so they're there because they want to be and not because they have to be, is very important.

Hodl Up: I totally agree with everything you said. But from your perspective, what role does blockchain play in a future where we all run our own local AIs while keeping everything private? I think there have been a few blockchain solutions that preserve data much more efficiently than Bitcoin's blockchain does, if you know what I mean, while keeping all of Bitcoin's benefits. I think one was the Mina blockchain back in 2021. I'm not sure it even exists anymore, but I read about it about five years ago, so I know the concept exists. I don't know if it's being practiced yet. Can blockchain, or any distributed ledger technology, do that while remaining private? You're the tech guy on this call, so I want to hear it from you.

Corey: Oh, for sure, and that's what Logos is trying to do. Blockchain plays a very important role in building decentralized, resilient applications, namely by providing meaningful digital scarcity: I can give you something on the internet, and you know I don't have it anymore. It does that through global total ordering: everyone can agree on what happened. In an era of AI, where we can manufacture anything, verifiability is really important. I know this happened. I know I own this thing. And what backs up that knowledge is cryptography, not somebody telling me it's the case. Systems that operate in incredibly adversarial scenarios, giving me confidence that something is mine, that something actually happened and that I can prove it. Add zero knowledge, and I can prove it happened the way it was supposed to without anyone else knowing the actual details. That's amazing. I get global ordering, verifiability and permission control on a decentralized system that can't be taken over, plus privacy. That's very important when you want to work with people you don't trust, or build communities that can't be captured because others don't have the information to do so. That's the role blockchains serve. You don't put real data on blockchains. The data on a blockchain only serves to prove that something happened, for as long as you need to know it happened. Once it's there, you can offload it elsewhere through checkpointing and archiving, because it's all cryptographically secure. You can prove through the linking of the chain that nothing ever changed; it's immutable. And we have other solutions, like storage, where big data stays long term and can still remain private. What blockchains have lacked with respect to privacy: we have zero knowledge to hide things in the ledger itself, but the way you reach agreement, through consensus and mining, has always leaked information, which has led to people being co-opted and coerced, money being stolen and so on. So in our opinion you need to add privacy at the lowest possible level of the stack, where people run nodes. I don't want to know your IP address. I don't want to know how much stake you have or what influence you have in the mining process, but I'd like to know the mining process is fair, verifiable and not co-opted. You can do all that with ZK and what we call the Blend Network, which hides not only who proposed a given block, but also the network forensics when you submit the block to the network. On the testnet we can now show that you can't see who proposed a block, but that they did it correctly and fairly, and when you look at how that block propagated through the network, you can't see anything there either. That makes it really difficult to co-opt the agreement process, which is what people do now. With the systems that exist today that have privacy on the blockchain, people say, "Oh, we can't see what the blockchain says? Cool, we'll go after whoever is processing the transactions and get them to stop." If you want these things to exist in the real world and be resilient, you need privacy at the lowest level. We've done that, or we think we have. We need to battle-test it, try it and scale it with Logos.

Hodl Up: But how do we keep bad actors away? The whole pretext for the surveillance state is that privacy enables bad things, because authorities can't track criminals, and that's where the misconception about privacy comes from. Is it realistic to think we could have a world with privacy that's also safe from bad actors, without trading off the very things that made privacy possible in the first place?

Corey: No, you're going to have bad actors. We have bad actors today, and there will always be bad actors. The argument to make is whether the good you create by providing this technology outweighs what those bad actors do. And as ethical people, and I've always made this argument, you want the good guys, the ethical people, building this technology. I've given talks at different conferences, and my throughline is mostly that jerks are everywhere. When a community reaches a certain size, you meet the jerks, because they exist everywhere. They'll try to take advantage of systems and do bad things. So you try to build things that minimize their effect and grow networks that keep them from doing what they'd like to do or asserting asymmetric control, because they'll always be there. And you want ethical people building this stuff, so that when bad actors show up, the good people aren't playing catch-up with their methods. That's what we're doing. You won't get away from it, but when you know the ways bad things can be done, you can always help the people trying to stop bad actors. We're building technology that minimizes their ability to do things. To do a lot of what they want, they need information. If you don't provide it, it's impossible to get, or much more difficult, if it means taking advantage of someone else, especially through surveillance. So no, you don't get rid of them, but you build systems that are very resilient to them, and you help the communities using this technology root out the bad actors in the ways that still exist, because at the end of the day it's all for humans. There are humans on either side of this technology, and humans make mistakes, and you catch people doing bad things not by manipulating the system itself but by looking at the humans.

Hodl Up: Now I want to talk about the concept of parallel societies. What do you think is the most concrete evidence that parallel societies are real and not just a metaphor?

Corey: That would be a question for Jarrad. It's his whole shtick, everything he believes in. But I can give you a couple of ideas. We already have special economic zones, which are financially incentivized working examples of a parallel society outside regular jurisdictions. We have weird nations out in the ocean that do weird things, because, like traditional piracy, it's about how you build jurisdictions and jurisdictionless places. We've seen parallel institutions throughout history stand up to regimes and win, not through violence. It's hard for me to push my ideas on this, because I've always focused on the technology. I like the idea of people having the right to exit and spending their time in systems that benefit them rather than take advantage of them. Jarrad's book, Farewell to Westphalia, is a really good account of all the parallel institutions we've seen in history working out, being economically viable and in some cases producing big markets worth pursuing. It isn't just an idealistic social movement; it's also ripe with business opportunity that serves people. But I don't spend my time on that these days. I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges when we build technology that gives people the right to build it themselves.

Hodl Up: Now I want to look toward the future of Logos. You have three products: Logos Messaging, Storage and Blockchain. What's missing from your stack at the moment? I think the unification of the names and brand happened in 2025. So what's next? What should everyone listening be excited about with Logos?

Corey: We have testnets. We have the majority of the four pieces working. We have execution environments with DEXs. We have private atomic swaps. All the main pieces are working; we just need to harden them, test them, grow them and get users building on top of them. The best thing you can do is download Basecamp, run a node, and submit a bug report, try to break it or build something on top of it. We have Lambda Prizes and RFPs for people who want to build, so they're part of building this with us, and it isn't just us building it and throwing it at people. It's a community effort, and in my opinion the best metric for success is someone building something people use that we didn't plan for. You can start doing that today: download Basecamp, look at the website and find all the building opportunities, some of which we'll pay you for, because there are things that need to be on the blockchain that we want people to use, and we don't have the time and resources to build them all. So we have requests for proposals on the things we'd like built. We want people to help build this. We want to grow a community of people who care about it and help us battle-test and grow it. And running a node is stupidly simple: you download Basecamp, click "run node," and you can run it on a Raspberry Pi. We have a number of things in the pipeline to make it even easier, so you don't have to run it on your own machine: you can deploy it to a Raspberry Pi at home and use it safely and securely, or use someone else's node safely, because we have really good light client protocols that let you verify that the data they give you is correct. There's a lot in the pipeline to make it grow and scale the way it should, while making it very simple to use on your phone or home device.

Hodl Up: So you're telling me that through the Lambda Prizes, I can go and build Logos Markets, a prediction market, which we've just branded right now, and you'll fund me if the proposal lands?

Corey: Yes, we'll fund you.

Hodl Up: You'll have to help me somehow, I'm telling you.

Corey: Run a proposal. The proposals have very good requirements on what needs to be met. I helped build the framework for evaluating requirements, so that when people build something, they know what they're building against and can say it does everything we asked for. They're robust. So you can submit proposals and understand how to build things, and we want that. We want people to do that, and we have money allocated for it, because you can't do this alone. You need people building on this stuff, with a stake in the network, caring about growing it with you. This is one way we do that.

Hodl Up: Let's zoom out a bit. Say 10 years from now, without thinking about PR metrics, TVL and all the other metrics that have oversaturated my LinkedIn feed: what would make you say, "Okay, we did the right thing with Logos"? And what would make you say, "Maybe we didn't"? What's that metric for you?

Corey: The metric for me is large-scale communities using the Logos tech stack for some institution they need to maintain themselves as a community, whether it's a land registry, a local market or a voting mechanism, something large and meaningful in their community. That's what I want to see: real impact. I don't want to see another DeFi protocol that obscurely moves money around and makes money for someone without doing anything else. I want to see real impact on societies. That's what would make me say, okay, cool, this worked. And I want people to be curious and build new things that enable new types of communities. When I say community, I mean it in the most general sense: parallel societies. A parallel society, in my opinion, is just a community of like-minded people who've opted into it because of shared ideals. As those communities grow, you need bureaucracy to hold them together, and the technology can serve that bureaucracy through institutions that provide services: registries of who owns what, fair markets, voting mechanisms and so on. That's what I want to see, and that would mean we've done something. Communities being able to do this themselves, in the way they want, rather than shoving their needs into some rigid structure that doesn't serve them well. I want to see a proliferation, a Cambrian explosion, of new ways to do this that work for different communities. That's the dream. And failure is being exactly where we are today: regulated stablecoins that don't serve people.

Hodl Up: Now I want to talk about Blend, since you mentioned the nodes and how easy it is to set everything up. I know Blend is relatively new in Logos. What's your plan for growing the number of people running Blend nodes? It's not easy. I know I sound really pessimistic, and you've been here way longer than me, but I think it's getting even more brutal now, as an industry. So how do you plan to do that?

Corey: I'm really glad you asked, because it's something I've always been concerned about. Privacy lives in the size of the anonymity set, and there's a bootstrapping problem: how do you get that set, and how do you maintain it? Here's a short, high-level overview of the original version of Blend. When someone wins the lottery to submit the next block to the blockchain in Cryptarchia, our consensus mechanism, they have to send it to the network, and as I said, that gives off information. If you're watching the network and doing forensics over time, you can de-anonymize who has what stake from how often they submit blocks, because it's a stake-weighted proposal mechanism: the more stake you have, the more often you propose. So over time you can de-anonymize who has what, and you can see their IP, so you can go to their house. We don't want that. Blend lets people submit through a network inspired by mixnets, but not quite a mixnet. The block goes through a series of random delays, and each stage doesn't know who the previous hop was. So it has a number of privacy-preserving mechanisms, and if you're watching the network, you don't know who's submitting what. Okay, cool. But if all the messages you send are block proposals, you need cover traffic. You need every message to look identical, and not every message is a block proposal, so you can't distinguish a block proposal from a random message. But cover traffic doesn't really do anything; it's just extra bandwidth. So, and I'm comfortable talking about this, though we haven't talked about it publicly yet, there's something on the roadmap called Empowering, and it's a really neat way to solve a lot of problems. I won't go too far into it, and the economics and how we scale it haven't been hammered out yet, but I'm writing a blog post now that will go into the options. Effectively, a new node can now do proof of work: you run proof of work until you hit a certain threshold, and then you can draw from funds that let you use the Blend network. You gain entry to the Blend network by running proof of work on your device, and you get funds for your first transaction. That incentivizes people to submit transactions from new accounts they don't have to fund from anywhere else. They just run proof of work, and that keeps the anonymity set alive. And you can tune it automatically, much like Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment, making sure Blend's anonymity set is exactly where it needs to be to counteract actual traffic. So you're providing cover traffic through real transactions from new entrants who are just running proof of work. It's an interesting way of adding proof of work that gives you the anonymity set you want, with privacy at the base layer, without overpowering how consensus is funded or how new coins enter through inflation. It's a really cool way of giving us the privacy we need while solving some problems that haven't been solved yet, like how you bootstrap a node, and how you start participating in proof of stake in Cryptarchia without funding it from some other source, which effectively doxes you, or signing up through an exchange, which doxes you to surveillance. You want people to be able to enter the network the way you could with Bitcoin, by doing proof of work, and to enter and exit as they want without having to fund anything. This is a new way to do that while adding to the network's privacy. It's really exciting. If you look at version three of the testnet, you'll probably see the first version of this implemented, but the documentation isn't out yet. I'm writing a technical article on some of the economics. I haven't seen anything like it done before.

Hodl Up: So from what I understood, it's basically a modular way of entering the Blend network.

Corey: Yes. You automatically tune the security and efficiency of the network's anonymity set, and you give people an on-ramp that doesn't require them to find a way to fund their node before sending any transaction. You can just mine your first transaction.

Hodl Up: I'm looking forward to the blog, so I'll be waiting for that. But how do we get the average Pump.fun trader into Logos? Privacy as a narrative is technically having its best year ever, in a way. We had ZEC, more talk about Monero, and other private-by-default chains coming out. So privacy is making a comeback, but how do we make it stick and bring in the next set of users? We also had Session on the podcast, which is basically a decentralized version of Telegram, but they're relying on donations at the moment, because it's hard for a project with real utility to scale without, at some point, having the average trader with "degeneracy" written on his forehead be part of your network. That's how the market needs things to move to be sustainable.

Corey: People need to use it.

Hodl Up: Exactly. So how do we bring them in?

Corey: I don't have the solution to that, but I have ideas. One is to make something usable and efficient enough that you can build applications like that, and to provide things others can't, such as a fully private transaction life cycle, where you don't have to use Telegram to negotiate your multisig transaction. You have actual private atomic swaps. You have a developer experience that's second to none and unified across the entire ecosystem: how you interact with your storage node is similar to how you interact with messaging, which is similar to how you interact with the blockchain. Because we've merged these things, we can provide a seamless developer experience for building the entire application stack within the same ecosystem. People can build applications fully integrated with everything they need, whether chatting, long-term storage, any kind of agreement or consensus, or token swaps, all within the same wallet. So the developer experience, and eventually the application experience, should be so much better that this is where you want to build. My hope is that we're not only providing really solid infrastructure that makes the entire transaction life cycle private, but that the developer experience of building on top of it is also stupidly simple. Because it's all together, you don't need weird glue code, figuring out how to combine Arweave with the Ethereum stack while using Solana for swaps because you want to use some tool over there. That weird complexity developers deal with in stitching things together to serve their users is hopefully gone. I think that's how you get them: provide good infrastructure and real guarantees, give people options on when to disclose information appropriately, and then make it easy.

Hodl Up: Okay, so say you lead the way in this adoption of privacy, and we build a whole ecosystem around it, similar to what we already have on non-private blockchains. Then the EU says, "You know what? We're going to block everything related to privacy. If you ever deposit money that can be tied to a private platform, you'll go to jail for 10 years as a user," and other countries, like the Balkans, follow. What can we realistically do? I don't want to go too deep into regulation, but I know Monero was attacked recently, and I think it's been delisted by basically every major exchange. Is enough being done in terms of talking to policymakers and people in power and convincing them that the way some countries are approaching regulation, and privacy specifically, is wrong?

Corey: I don't know how to handle politics, but it's very important, because those decisions impact so many people. Even if the technology works, it's effectively useless if it's so hard to use because of the consequences of using it. You don't get adoption, because no one uses it, because they're scared. That's not a problem we can fix by building technology. We fix it by talking to people, talking to your local politicians. Hopefully, when things aren't done correctly in one jurisdiction, other jurisdictions call them out and shame them, because the only thing we've seen work to get people to stop doing things is calling them out, shaming them and ostracizing them in some way, shape or form. But that requires global coordination, people caring, and those of us building this stuff showing that it's good for people, so people ask for it and go to their own local jurisdictions and tell them what their preferences are and why they care. Without a grassroots movement of people complaining and demanding better, you don't get top-level political change. So everyone needs to go out and talk to people. But to do that, you need to tell them why they want this and what it means for them, and then show them solutions that make meaningful changes in their lives, so they go and demand better. I don't see that change happening unless you actually impact people's lives.

Hodl Up: Very often on the show we've had marketers who are PR-trained and talk about what they know, in a way, and very rarely do we have people who really know what they're talking about. So, Dr. Corey Petty, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a very eye-opening episode, and I really wish we could have gone longer, because there's a lot more we could talk about. There are so many rabbit holes we could go down.

Corey: They're everywhere, and they're so fascinating.

Hodl Up: Exactly. It's the most interesting industry in the world. It's very chaotic sometimes, and sometimes I wish I hadn't joined, but as you said, we're here to build jerk-resistant technology. So cheers to that.

Corey: Thank you for having me. Really great.