Anoma Community Updates: July 2022
Welcome to the July edition of the Anoma Community Updates! This past month has been stacked with opportunities for our team to do what we love best — connecting with people from across the space, especially when they’re just as passionate about solving some of the world’s most pressing problems as we are!
Here’s how we’ve connected with the community in the last month:
Anoma Twitter Spaces: WTF is Anoma?
On July 14th we held the first ever Anoma Twitter Spaces. Aptly titled, “WTF is Anoma?” co-founders
, Adrian Brink, and Christopher Goes shared their vision for Anoma, starting with an overview of the progression from first generation protocols(Bitcoin, with scriptable settlement) to the second generation (Ethereum — programmable settlement) to the need for a third generation.This is where Anoma comes in — addressing the trade-offs of previous generations by following the design principles of intent-centricity and homogeneous architecture, heterogeneous security, while enabling counterparty discovery, distributed solving and atomic multi-chain settlement.
Christopher, Awa, and Adrian explained how Anoma can be used for a range of crypto-native and novel applications, and answered questions on Juvix, the programming language that is being developed in-house, as well as diving deeper into the topic of intent-centricity. Check out the recording here.
A couple weeks later, we hosted our second Twitter Spaces and the second episode of the series, recapping Paris and discussing some more aspects of Anoma in detail. Take a listen to that episode here.
We will be hosting “WTF is Anoma” on Twitter every two weeks so be sure to keep an eye out for upcoming episodes!
ETHCC[5] in Paris
From July 19th to 21st, members of the team from as far afield as Colorado joined together in Paris for the annual ETHCC conference, where Anoma contributed speakers to a variety of talks across the three days. Here’s a brief recap:
ETHCC: Day One
An architecture for user-defined markets
Awa kicked off Anoma’s contribution to ETHCC with her talk, titled ‘An architecture for user-defined markets’. Awa gave a deep dive into the background behind Anoma and the problems it is trying to solve, before exploring the protocol’s architecture and how it will work in practice.
She explained that Anoma is a unified architecture for full-stack, decentralized applications, and concluded by reasoning that “many design flaws and exploitative paradigms are being carried over from Web2 into Web3, and the importance — when designing decentralized protocols — of enabling “a more equitable relationship between the user and the system. And if there is room for a few parties to extract a disproportionate amount of value, given the little value that they give back to the process, then this needs to be eliminated.”
Watch Awa’s full talk here:
Blockchain Security/Privacy: don’t keep it too simple!
Next up, co-founder Christopher Goes delivered his talk “ “Blockchain Security/Privacy: don’t keep it too simple!”
Christopher started out by explaining the need for privacy and security, and then explored the current status quo of privacy in blockchains — which is broadly broken into two choices. The first is a sovereign blockchain that issues its own assets, like Zcash, which is effective, but inflexible. The second is a privacy-preserving solution built on a smart contract chain, which is more flexible, but usually very costly.
He continued by explaining our solution for this, which is called Namada — “which aims to synthesize across the trade-offs of existing solutions.”
Watch Christopher’s full talk here:
ETHCC: Day Two
Anoma: An intent-centric, privacy-preserving protocol for automatic counterparty discovery and atomic multi-chain settlement
To kick off the second day of ETHCC, Christopher took to the main stage to deliver his talk, “Anoma: An intent-centric, privacy-preserving protocol for automatic counterparty discovery and atomic multi-chain settlement”
He began by explaining how programmable settlement isn’t sufficient, as parties need to know who they are and what they want. Counterparty discovery enables parties to discover one another, and to agree what to settle upon. In order to solve this issue, there have been many different approaches (AMMs, single operator databases, private mempools) however, all of these create a centralization point and a trusted party. Many of these approaches are also permissioned where operators need to be KYC’d or verified in some way. Christopher explained that it is possible to create a generalized approach to counterparty discovery, and that “In Anoma, we’re building a framework for both counterparty discovery and settlement… Anoma follows two key design principles — the first is intent-centricity, and the second is homogeneous architecture, heterogeneous security.”
Christopher explored the principles of “intent-centricity” and “homogeneous architecture, heterogeneous security” in depth, before explaining some of the potential applications of Anoma, as well the potential `deployment patterns’ — in which users and/or developers can choose what kind of security they want to accept — and finished by explaining the potential user cases for Anoma.
You can watch Christopher’s talk here:
ETHCC: Day Three
Vamp-IR: A universal language for arithmetic circuits
Launching Anoma’s contribution to the final day of ETHCC, Joshua Fitzgerald, Cryptographer at Anoma, gave his talk “Vamp-IR: A universal language for arithmetic circuits.”
Vamp-IR is “a language that can represent an arithmetic circuit canonically and universally, so that same circuit can just be ported to whatever library you want to use, and all you need to do is write a compiler from this language to the back-end library, and it takes care of transforming it into a form that those libraries want.”
Joshua also gave detailed explanations of how arithmetic circuits are written in Vamp-IR, how it works with other libraries, and finished with an overview of the future research that will be done and incorporated into the language.
Watch Joshua’s full talk here:
Intent-centric (intent-solver pattern) architectures for fully decentralized dApps
Adrian concluded Anoma’s ETHCC outing by taking to the main stage and delivering his talk “Intent-centric (intent-solver pattern) architectures for fully decentralized dApps” to a packed auditorium.
He explained that, in many applications, there is a need for infrastructure for counterparty discovery. Adrian commented that “Generally speaking, users don’t have fully formed state transitions, they have intents. They have the idea that they currently have Bitcoin, and they’d rather hold some ETH. So they have the intent of selling BTC for some ETH. This is not something that they can settle on-chain, they need to discover some counterparty who has the exact inverse, or a number of counterparties with whom they can settle.”
He explained what we consider to be “the third generation” — which is Anoma — a unified architecture for full-stack, decentralized applications. With Anoma, it’s not just programmable settlement, but also decentralized counterparty discovery and distributed solving.
Watch Adrian’s full talk here:
Privacy Evolution
On Wednesday, July 20th, Anoma co-hosted, along with
and ZPrize, ‘Privacy Evolution.’ The event was a five-hour deep dive into the world of zero-knowledge cryptography and privacy in web3.Through a range of talks, panel discussions, and fireside chats, the event provided context to those working at the forefront of ZK, and was a deeply educational and enlightening evening.
Here is a recap of the event:
Part I — Private from the start
Privacy as a public good
To start the evening, co-founder Awa Sun Yin, gave her talk “Privacy as a public good” in which she began with the state of privacy in Web3 — from pseudonymity to zk-SNARKS. Awa explained that we need to stop thinking of privacy as a feature, or add-on, and instead need to think of it as a public good. She then explored what we need to consider in order to build privacy in this way. She then explained how Namada (and the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP)) are an example of in-built privacy, and gave an overview of Anoma’s approach to privacy in its architecture.
ZKPs in Anoma and Aleo
The final installment in part one was a fireside chat between Howard Wu, CEO of Aleo, and Co-founder and CEO of Anoma, Adrian Brink, hosted by Olaf Carlson-Wee. This wide-ranging discussion began with why zero-knowledge proofs haven’t been more widely used in the past, and went on to discuss ZKPs more generally and their applications in blockchains. This discussion touched on some troubling areas of individual privacy, with Adrian commenting that “things that you were fine with sharing five years ago, can all of a sudden become illegal, but on a blockchain this is permanent. Even if things were legal when you did it, it may not be legal forever.”
Part II — Achieving privacy and programmability
Presenting the ZPrize competition
To kick off the second part of the evening, Alex Pruden, COO of Aleo, and Adrian gave a joint talk on ZPrize — a collaboration between companies from across the zero-knowledge space, which is dedicated to accelerating zero-knowledge cryptography. Alex explained how the goal of ZPrize is to inspire different teams to collaborate and share the low-level primitives they produce in-house. He gave an overview of the structure of the divisions of the prize, which aim to solve problems ranging from more general to more specific. Alex and Adrian then had an informal fireside chat on the value of ZPrize and why they think it is so important.
An introduction to Taiga
Next up, Yulia Khalniyazova, Cryptographer and Researcher at Anoma, gave an introduction to Taiga — a protocol for private, multi-party bartering on Anoma. She began with an explanation of the governing concepts behind multi-party bartering, its benefits, and explaining how it is implemented on Anoma as a single atomic transaction. Yulia then detailed how Taiga enables private multi-party bartering, using zero-knowledge proofs to facilitate private transactions, and explained how it interplays with other cryptographical components in the privacy-preserving space.
Vamp-IR and Juvix
The third installment of part two came from Paul Cadman and Joshua Fitzgerald from Anoma. Paul’s talk focused on Juvix — the open-source programming language developed by Anoma. He explained the need for Juvix, how it works, and why the team decided to write a new language in the first place — to create a unified platform with a more expressive type system and the ability to compile efficient WASM programs, so that they are optimized for the Anoma use case.
Joshua’s talk centered on Vamp-IR, a language for arithmetic circuits developed by the Anoma team. He explained the need for arithmetic circuits, how they are represented, and what they are used for in the context of Anoma.
Part III — Why ZKPs are fundamental to the future
How ZKPs and other advanced cryptographic schemes can be deployed to solve hard problems in decentralized systems
The final part of Privacy Evolution consisted of a panel discussion, titled “How ZKPs and other advanced cryptographic schemes can be deployed to solve hard problems in decentralized systems.”
Panelists included Anoma co-founder, Christopher Goes, Howard Wu from Aleo, Justin Drake, Researcher at The
Foundation, David Wong, Cryptography Engineer at O1 Labs and , and Brian Retford, CEO of RISCZero, and the panel was hosted by Georgios Konstantopoulos. The panel discussed subjects ranging from defining ‘hard problems’ to the limitations of ZK rollups.After the event, attendees enjoyed an afterparty, courtesy of
!Watch the full livestream:
Nebular Summit Paris
On Friday, July 22nd we were excited to join the Nebular Summit in Paris. This day of talks, panels, and keynotes celebrates the Cosmos and interchain ecosystem, and welcomed developers, researchers and entrepreneurs to discuss the challenges facing the Interchain. The team was excited to have the opportunity to speak throughout the day.
Here’s a recap of our talks:
Typhon, Chimera Chains, and Multi-Chain Atomic Transactions
Isaac Sheff, Senior Research Scientist at Heliax, gave a talk on Typhon — which is an integral part of Anoma’s stack and aims to evolve from Tendermint, which will improve throughput and latency, and will enable a new kind of side chain, called ‘Chimera chains.’
Isaac commented that “In a sense, a Chimera chain is a bit like a trusted bridge, you can run transactions on it and you’ll get this atomicity under certain trust assumptions. And these trust assumptions arise naturally from the quorums of validators on each chain. The more validators they have in common, the stronger the atomicity guarantee.”
Watch Isaac’s full talk here:
A New Generation of L1 Architectures for Fully Decentralized dApps
Adrian gave his talk “A New Generation of L1 Architectures for Fully Decentralized dApps” which explained, in detail, Anoma’s design principles.
Adrian explained that “intents are really binding programmatic commitments to state preferences. A simple example is, you currently have 1 BTC, and you’re willing to have 0 BTC if you have 100 ETH. You express exactly what state you want to end up with, rather than expressing how to compute your resulting state.”
His talk continued through the architecture of Anoma, before explaining the deployment patterns of Anoma, and how dApps will work on Anoma.
Watch Adrian’s full talk:
Building Usable Privacy Preserving Systems
To conclude Anoma’s contribution to the Nebular Summit, Christopher joined a panel discussion entitled “Building Usable Privacy Preserving Systems.” He was joined by Nicolas Bacca, co-founder and VP of the Innovation Lab at Ledger, Henry de Valence, founder of Penumbra Labs, and Sajida Zouarhi, an independent blockchain architect. The panel was moderated by Richard Ceatano, CEO of Akord.
This discussion covered a broad range of topics, beginning with the general direction of travel in the development of privacy-preserving technology, moving through the subject of privacy in the Cosmos ecosystem, before arriving at some of the specific challenges in building privacy into technology in Web3.
Christopher commented that “I think people are, right now, maybe much more willing to pay some slight monetary cost for privacy than they are to pay a ‘really bad UX’ cost for privacy. Especially if the cryptography and the UX are misaligned, and you just can’t figure out how to use a private system, then that’s pretty difficult to accept as a user. You will go and use something else.”
Watch the full discussion:
See you in Seoul
Members of the team are going to be in Seoul for BUIDL Asia, ETH Seoul, and ZK Night in early August. Watch out for our booth at BUIDL, as we will have some great new merch to share, and we’d love to connect with you in person at all three events.
Let’s keep in touch!
Whether you’re an experienced developer or you’re new to the space, we always want to hear from our community — and anyone interested in our vision and technology. If you have questions, or just want to get the latest news, please make sure to follow us on Discord and Twitter. See you soon!
