Zero Knowledge & Quantum w/ Eli Ben-Sasson

14:20Alex Thorn:Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. And I remember when I was at Fidelity, even as late as like 2018, ZK was thought to maybe be impossible or be impossible for anything truly complex that you maybe could prove that 2 plus 2 equaled 4 without sharing the inputs, but you couldn't put like a financial system behind a zero-knowledge proof. Right, right. We've made significant strides since then. Yeah, and I'm very proud that Starkware did a lot in this way of proving that you could even have post-quantum secure ZKStarks proving huge amounts of computation very efficiently on common hardware.

14:57Alex Thorn:So Starkware innovates on zero-knowledge technology. Yes. Give us an overview of what Starkware is doing as a business because it is a business, not a think tank. Right, so Starkware, you could think of it as, you know, the best description would be maybe it's the labs behind some of the, you know, best systems out there that are being used, first of all, by purpose exchanges. So DYDX v3 was running on our technology, you know, settling daily over$10 billion of volume. This was in the days before Hyperliquid. Today, three of the top eight purpose exchanges and the only ones running on truly decentralized infrastructure are running on our technology.

15:38Those are Paradex, Extended, and EdgeX. We have serviced the likes of ImmutableX, Sorare, a lot of unicorns that need real high-scale decentralized infrastructure. That's where StarCore comes in. And most lately, we are behind the labs behind StarkNet, which is a Bitcoin financialization layer that services also Ethereum. As of recently, Solana, Zcash also integrated into it. So the programmable hard money layer is being built on StarkNet.

16:21Alex Thorn:So how do we think of that in the context of layer ones, layer twos, I don't know, side chains, whatever role is it? Is it a ZK roll up? Like what is StarkNet in this way? So StarkNet is a little bit different. And, you know, most of the, let's say, layer twos are of the kind where you have like a single, you know, computer running and you have to trust the operator. And like then you sort of it's a very centralized architecture. So we're the only layer that interacts with, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum and these other chains in a way that is very decentralized, having, you know, several different sequencer and sequencers.

16:59And we're taking this decentralization approach much further. So you could characterize it as any one of those things. You could call it a, you know, layer two or something like that. I would like to view it as a connecting tissue. An interoperability layer. Yes, something like that or, you know, the integrity web, like this thing that sort of is integrated into many different systems of hard money and gives them more expressibility, better UX, lower fees and high scale.

17:28Alex Thorn:So we can go on StarkNet and do DeFi with these assets? Yes, you can do the best DeFi. You have perps exchanges. You have actually very successful games. You know, people forgot about those, but like you have on-chain games. You have consumer apps like, you know, wellness applications and stuff like that. And, of course, a lot of DeFi. Yeah, that makes sense. DeFi still. I feel like we haven't, you mentioned games, you know, as an example. And I think that there's some truth to this. Like people wanted, especially in like 17, 18, maybe a little bit in 21, people wanted blockchains to be used for all this giant variety of things, right?

18:03Alex Thorn:And I mean a truly wide and wide breadth of design space. Still, it feels like to me as a longtime observer that it's mostly financial use cases have only really found product market fit. Would you agree with that characterization? I would even go further and say that blockchain as a whole does not yet quite have product market fit, even on the financial layer. And then I would say that you have these sort of sprints and sprouts that, you know, from time to time, There's a lot of focus on one area. I will say this. First of all, a prediction for 2026. I think games are going to get a lot of attention, at least temporarily, once again in 2026.

18:45And in this context, I think you've got to check. If you enjoy gaming and you want to see what blockchain gaming looks like today, you've got to check out Loot Survivor, which is a very, very time-consuming and fun game to play, which is on Starknet. Very good. So Loot Survivor, you can try it out. A very fun game to play.

19:07Alex Thorn:I've always wanted, I love gaming. I came up in the eras of Counter-Strike. Well, I mean, I'm old enough to have played, you know, Super Nintendo and the original Nintendo. But sort of in my formative gaming years. I had an Atari. Oh, wow. Like the first Atari. 1K cassettes you would play. I love that. Well, I joke about how, you know, with the cartridge-based consoles, you had to blow on them. Sometimes you get the dust out. Literally nobody that I work with knows what I'm talking about when I say that. In fact, there are people here, just as a quick aside, that now I work with, this makes me feel old, that haven't even seen the original Star Wars movies.

19:38Alex Thorn:That's actually quite common, I'm told. But I always have wanted to see, at least in the case of games that have digital assets in them, whether it's inventory or skins and stuff. You know, Counter-Strike is famous for a black market in skins or gold in some of the RPG games, right? Like, be tokenized in some way. Or, you know, it always seemed like a great fit for blockchains. You've got to check out Loot Survivor. If we have time after this, I'll open it up and I'll get you hooked on it. All right. So, I think that is an interesting prediction, too, because that's pretty counter consensus. Yes.

20:14Alex Thorn:People have maybe forgotten that people are still working on games. Yes, yes. You know, what about NFTs? NFTs, do you have a view on whether those might? Not that I'm, I don't want to go too down for this rabbit hole. I think everything that had its time on blockchain will have some resurgence in some other form. So I think NFTs as well will have sort of a comeback in some other form. Yeah, definitely. Okay, and while I'm on this list of things, tokenized real world assets, right? You have stable coins that are big. Perhaps near term on the road to being huge if this Genius Act, the bullish view of what the Genius Act might do.

20:51Alex Thorn:What about tokenized equities, though? Do you think is this something that Starkware is interested in? Well, we're interested because everyone is, but actually you're a bigger expert on this. I'm not going to predict on that. I don't know. It could go either way. Interesting. I don't know if RWAs are going to be big or not. So StarkNet is built on zero-knowledge technologies, CKStarks. Yes. What does the ZK now bring to this? Why is it, I don't know, is it more efficient? Is it more private? Talk to me about how ZKs work in the context of an application platform. Yeah, so what, okay, look, what blockchain has done, starting with Bitcoin, is it's this infrastructure for things that require common knowledge or broad consensus about things like money or things of immense value.

21:42And it delivers integrity, meaning that you know that the right thing is being done with your Bitcoin, even when you're not watching. And this integrity is delivered in a beautiful new way that involves everyone running the software and checking and, you know, handing out Bitcoin to operators who service the network and increase its security. OK, so it's a beautiful new way for offering integrity that doesn't rely on, you know, some person in a suit speaking, you know, or signing something. Right. Okay. So it's a different way for offering integrity, but it involves a lot of people running the same software in a very slow way.

22:20Right. Okay. So what does ZK give you? ZK gives you integrity through math. It allows you to know that the right thing is being done, even when you're not watching. And the way it works with a blockchain beautifully is that as long as you have a layer of trust, which is the blockchain, you can now have that layer of trust enforce integrity on things that that layer doesn't even see. Right. So the ZK allows basically anyone to run things like a sequencer, a validator, you know, process transactions, operate a system. And you don't have to trust anything. That person does not have to have a suit or tell you who he is.

23:00and you can still trust that he's operating with integrity because of the integrity of math, of ZK. So it gives you both scale and it gives you privacy because you don't need to see what's happening. You know that the right thing is being done and that party can operate at immense scale and you only need to sort of check one proof that can cover a million transactions and know that they were all legit.

23:20Alex Thorn:Interesting, yes. So the scale part of it, is that because we're collapsing a lot of information into one proof? Yes. So it's like off-chain computation can occur that it wouldn't otherwise be visible to the blockchain participants, but the outputs you can trust. Yeah, a good way to give an analogy for it is the notion of sampling and polling, right? What you have is the blockchain, which you really trust, is sort of taking some random sample of, you know, all that's going on off-chain. But because of the math of it, even the small sample can enforce and ensure that everything was done okay. So it's like this magic, which is actually math, where you can take all of the information of a million transactions, mix it all together in a way that makes it very easy to sample and make sure that everything is okay.

24:10Alex Thorn:So is privacy a byproduct of the scaling or would you say scaling is a byproduct of the privacy? Two superpowers. ZK gave you two superpowers. You could use one. So, okay, I co-founded Zcash. There we went on the privacy angle. The proofs do not compress much. What they do is they offer you privacy that you don't know who's paying, who's receiving, and how much is being paid. It's not about scale. It's about privacy. In everything that Starkware did, we initially went after the scalability. So it's not about shielding stuff, but it's about packing a million transactions into one transaction. Yeah, interesting.

24:51Alex Thorn:But let's talk about privacy and blockchains to start. You know, were you in the ceremony? You know that there's a great NPR episode. Right, it's amazing. I was not, I did not participate in the ceremony. This is the initial key generation event. Right, the ZK Snarks, the Zcash. So I was not a participant in the ceremony. I knew of it. And yeah, everyone should listen to that. Wasn't it the case, I think, that it's now been disclosed that Edward Snowden was involved? Yeah, a long time ago. Yeah, a long time ago. It was disclosed a long time ago, but at the time, he was an anonymous participant in the signing ceremony.

25:30Edward Snowden was one of those who participated in the ceremony.

25:33Alex Thorn:So why – I want to get back to StarkNet a bit, too, and the scalability and what that brings. But let's go into the Zcash first example. Yeah. How important are private payments? And are they not just for criminals? No. Okay. You know, I run a company with about 200 employees. We offer employees to receive part of their salary on StarkNet, and it's very convenient. You know, I do this as well. So my CFO comes to me and says, look, it's a bit of a problem, right? Because like anyone, our competitors, you know, people working in the company with a browser know what's going on, and we pay our suppliers on StarkNet and stuff like that.

26:12So, and it makes total sense, right? Anyone running a company understands that you're not going to put all of your supplier information and payments and employee payments on a blockchain today. So you see, legitimate businesses need privacy. We all need privacy. Yeah. So it's not just for criminals.

26:32Alex Thorn:I think that makes sense. This is, of course, a little bit of a rhetorical question. Yeah. I think is, well, let's just go right at it. Zcash is up a lot in price. Yeah. ZEC, the token for Zcash. Yeah. Just in the last five months, I mean, it's one of the older cryptocurrencies. After many years of being around, sometimes performing well as an investment, but also not for a long time. Right. Is that some kind of fundamental resurgence in the market's pricing of privacy? So I also wonder about it. You know, I co-founded it, but I'm not involved in it today. I have a lot of admiration for it. I'm very friendly with, you know, folks on the team and so on.

27:13But I'm not, you know, part of the project today. So I don't know. I did ask someone who I highly respect. I'm not going to mention who it is. But, you know, what does he think, the reason for this resurgence? So he said four reasons. Okay. One is like a really good product, which is the combination of the Zashi wallet together with Near Intense. The second is Scarcity, which went after the second halving. Just there's less issue of it. Classic. i think the third then was the environmental uh i mean the regulatory environment that is now much better for privacy and the fourth is then you know kols and like market reception and yeah

27:55Alex Thorn:clearly there was an uptick in market interest yes from kols right from from influencers even from i think one of the most famous or most um diligent in promoting it has been mert from helios labs Obviously a big Solana guy. Right. Do you think we're going to get more privacy penetration applications built, say, on Solana, on Ethereum, on Bitcoin, like as a result of this resurgence? Yes. Yes. Here, I can. So for many years, I told my team, we always wanted to do privacy using, you know, ZKStarks. But we said there's not enough market demand. And based on this resurgence in interest, now one of our main efforts, which I'm not going to share details about right now, but very soon, is going to be an amazing set of new privacy-based products.

28:44And it's all because of this resurgence of interest in privacy. So on StarkNet, a lot of amazing novel things related to privacy are soon going to come.

28:53Alex Thorn:Very cool. So it makes sense, though, because for a long time in crypto and in blockchains, there was a lot of demand, though, for scalability. And you've tried, the market has tried to figure this out. There's a, you know, Ethereum has sort of embarked on this hub and spoke model with a very decentralized L1. And then, like you pointed out, I mean, I think the number one is base L2, which is an optimistic roll up. And I've joked that the base is short for computer and Coinbase's basement. more centralized L2 sort of orbiting around the decentralized layer one. And that brings some scalability, but at some cost to decentralization.

29:32Alex Thorn:Is StarkNet trying on the scalability side to try to balance that, deliver the scalability without such a centralizing trade-off? That's exactly where StarkNet stands out. We are, I think, the only L2 out there that is truly committed, not just in tweets, but in putting a lot of resources and making progress on decentralizing its layer of, you know, sequencers, validators. We already have staking both for the Starknet token, STRK, and also for Bitcoin live. So people can now generate about just short of 3 % of yield on staked Bitcoin to operate the network and about like 9 % on staking STRK token.

30:19and operating the network. More importantly, here's something that I'm really excited about that we're going to unleash and be the first to do so. And I think it's going to have a huge impact. It will be the next thing for blockchain. And I call it ZK threads or multi-threading. Right now, all of the blockchains are basically single-threaded, right? They have like one, you know, The validators all have to go through all of the transactions one by one. And if I want to affect the state, let's say, of Ethereum or Bitcoin or Solana, I have to submit something to this mempool that everyone operates.

30:59Okay. But, you know, so it's a little bit like in the old days, like these single-threaded machines. You know, you had to, you wanted to do text editing and then play a game. And be linear, right? Yeah, you mentioned the, you know, early gaming consoles. You had to take one cartridge out, put something else. Same thing with the early day PCs. But today it's very multi-threaded. Like you and I can edit at the same time a Google Doc. And, you know, at the same time, each one of our laptops will be running hundreds of other threads. Right. Then they all involve and impact the same state. Now, the same thing, if you think about the economy, right, the economy is multi-threaded.

31:39There are multiple different markets that are operating and from time to time settle. and the state of the economy is sort of settled at some frequency. But you don't have it being like everyone, first there's a transaction on NASDAQ, now something in the Chicago exchange, and they all go one by one. Okay, but blockchain is like that. So on StarkNet, we're going to very soon have the ability of anyone from their basement, right, running a sequencer and then coming back to StarkNet and saying, hey, here's a ZK Stark proof. that I ran StarkNet. Please update now the state of StarkNet from A to B, and I'm not going to even show you the transactions.

32:20So we'll have this ability for you and I to run multiple threads. This helps with privacy immensely. It helps with scale, and it helps with completely new things that just cannot be done today.

32:32Alex Thorn:Is that a solution to decentralized sequencing, basically? It's a new phase in decentralization. It goes beyond decentralized sequencing because in decentralized sequencing, you know, think about Bitcoin mining. We're all competing, but nevertheless, everyone needs to see, you know, these blocks. Here, it's something where you will never see what caused this change because I ran it on my thread and you will run some other thread, but nevertheless, the state of StarkNet will reflect all of these different changes. Oh, interesting. Yes. Only not every participant, well, they won't even know, but they also wouldn't have to know.

33:07Alex Thorn:So I can update just one piece of the state because of a proof I deliver. And you'll accept that as the current state. Starknet will accept that. Starknet will. But other validators and other people submitting these will also accept it because it's proven, but they don't know what it is and they don't care. They don't need to care. Here's another way to think about it and why I'm really excited. You see, the huge steps that blockchain takes is usually by democratizing something that has been pretty centralized or had high barriers of entry. So think about sequencing or creating a new block. If you want to create a new block in Bitcoin today, you got to go, you know, buy a lot of electricity, put a lot of hardware.

33:49If you want to sequence a new block in Solana or in Ethereum, you have to put up a lot of stake and be like rich in that token. Okay, you can submit a transaction, but that isn't costly. That's whatever, five cents or something. But if you want to sequence a block, that's serious money. Okay. What if anyone for the cost of submitting a transaction for these five cents could now say, here's a whole block and you don't even see that block. That is what multi-threading gives you. It gives you democratization of this very profitable, very important thing that is, you know, sequencing.

34:24Alex Thorn:That's very interesting. Yeah. So you democratize block building in this way. Yes. That is very interesting. That's been a struggle for a lot of blockchains, right? I mean, this is a big question too about, it's also led to the destruction of mempools as well, the inability to democratize block building. That's very interesting. So it gives you scale. It gives you privacy. It gives you democratization of this very profitable economic activity, which is sequencing, and it gives you much more control. Because you could have like a prediction market, like think about polymarket. You know, suppose NVIDIA would like to have its quarterly earnings prediction market for that.

35:00Well, what if it could take the code of Polymarket but run a thread where it controls, you know, and sees and has control over that particular prediction market, but it's all of the logic of Polymarket? What if you could have, you know, Aave lending a pool that you are running, but it has all of the logic of Aave, but you're running it on the side?

35:23Alex Thorn:very interesting that i can see how that is a big innovation um lots you mentioned before uh like post-quantum zk start uh let's can i ask you about quantum yeah so you are a a cryptographer who knows probably a lot more about it than i do of course i'm interested specifically in uh quantum cryptographically relevant quantum computing there's been a lot of discussion i think rightly about whether quantum threatens crypto. It obviously threatens, theoretically, if there is cryptographically relevant quantum computing, cryptography and all facets of the economy and markets. But we work on blockchain, so people always, I don't buy this, like, whataboutism argument, like, well, we don't have to worry about it on Bitcoin because, like, the nuclear launch codes are at risk.

36:11Alex Thorn:And I'm like, well, they've got people working on that, though. We're the people that work in blockchain that have to work on it for us. How would you view the state of quantum-resistant blockchain research? I'm very worried. I'll tell you one thing I'm not worried about. I don't know whether a quantum computer will break cryptography. I do know this. It will not break ZKStarks. So ZKStarks are post-quantum secure, which means StarkNet is post-quantum secure, and we have the tools to make Bitcoin post-quantum secure if Bitcoin is willing to upgrade. Exactly. So the reason I'm worried is exactly because this, you know, I heard Michael Saylor saying, no, it's not a big deal.

36:54You know, Y2K is not a big, it wasn't a big deal. Eventually they figured it out.

36:57Alex Thorn:Right. But exactly. But who's they? Like, Michael, it's you. Like you should, you should be advocating for us fixing the, the reason, you know, Y2K wasn't a problem for Microsoft was because Bill Gates said, guys, you know, let's fix it. and they put a lot of resources. It was billions of dollars of developers working on it for many years and that's why it wasn't a problem. So Michael Saylor, I expect you to say, it's not going to be a problem, here's why. I am supporting and putting people to work on it if it's ever needed and I would like to hear that from more people. So I am very worried that Michael Saylor and others are not saying that other part.

37:34Alex Thorn:Yeah, that there's a complacency. Yes. Because I did ask him that question and my takeaway from him was sort of, he's not worried about it because surely it will get fixed. And you're saying... You need to fix it. Sorry, Michael, you do not need to fix it yourself by writing the code. But you need to be saying, you know, putting resources on it, supporting these things. And, you know, I'm a big supporter of OPCAT, of soft forks for CSV, CSFH. I'm really worried. Like, guys, if we cannot have the nine lines of code that's OPCAT, that Satoshi was supportive of, and everything will be ossifying, like how do you want you assume this will be a much bigger of course yeah I know it will be much bigger and you know we have a lot of people on my team working on it you know on BIP 360 and so on we're doing a lot to prepare for quantum and we want to offer this to bitcoin but like I'm really worried about bitcoin's readiness I did go to a it's more of a question of urgency and are you so you said though you didn't know if quantum will threaten cryptography, but you do know ZK Starks and Starks are the solution.

38:46Alex Thorn:Is it like, therefore, a tail risk? The way you think about it, like surely if there's even a remote likelihood that they could break, say, a Bitcoin ECDSA or, you know, elliptic curve cryptography, therefore we should be preparing for it? Is that how you think of it? It's not inevitable that it does. I just read yesterday that I forgot, like some big financial advisor said, I'm now removing my Bitcoin allocation. Yeah, Jeffries. Okay, good. So like this, I predicted this will happen. It will happen more. Like because of the complacency and people like Saylor irresponsibly saying, it's not a problem, not going to be a problem.

39:20We'll just go away. But not doing the other part of saying it's not going to be a problem because I will put resources. I will support Softworks. I'm for this. You know, you will see more of these people out there saying, you know, I'm worried about Bitcoin. I'll move it elsewhere. And that is not good.

39:35Alex Thorn:Are you seeing other networks be more proactive in this way than Bitcoin? Starknet is very proactive. Right, but like Ethereum or Solana as well? Because I feel like I haven't seen that much either. I think there is. I want to see more. Yeah. Look, the thing I know most about is Starknet. We will be ready. We're taking these. We took cryptography very seriously. We are always on the cutting edge of this stuff. Starknet will be ready for, not just, sorry. Because we're already a layer connected to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and we have scale that is way higher than all of them combined, we will be ready.

40:15StarCent will be ready for this stuff. Because this is in my control, under my control. I am worried about this. We will get this shit done. I would love to offer such support to Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to Solana, to Zcash. But I can't control that. We need someone on the other side to say, oh, this is the future. We want this.

40:36Alex Thorn:Yeah. I mean, my unintelligent view, though, I went to a meeting at Presidio Bitcoin, which is at the Presidio in San Francisco in July, I think, that was all about quantum. It was well attended by prominent Bitcoin developers. It seemed that people are working on it and thinking about it. Some progress has been made, I guess is my point, in taking it seriously, no? People have been talking about OpCat for 10 years. We have not had a soft fork for four years and none of them are in sight. It's very depressing. I'm very worried. Yeah, sure. Someone is working on BIP 360. I mean, again, I have team members that are working on BIP 360.

41:19That's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about the consensus. And I'm worried about people like leaders of this area, like Michael Saylor and others, not coming out and saying, we should be worried. We should be practicing. We should be strengthening our muscles around soft works in order to be ready for this stuff. That's what gets me worried. Technologically, it's very easy to implement the changes.

41:41Alex Thorn:Yeah, it's not that solutions won't be created and proposed. It's the consensus protocol. It's the community. To me, it's like completely broken. It's very depressing. I'm very worried. And the only way to fix it is to say that, you know, to have some sort of an alarmist. The reason why 2K wasn't a problem was because everyone was freaked out by it in a positive way and did a lot of stuff in order to prepare. This is what I'm saying to Starknet. So Starknet, we are worried about it. We are fixing things. We're preparing, not just for us, but also for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for Zcash, in order to be prepared for this.

42:13And that's why I'm not worried about Starknet, but I am worried about these other networks.

42:17Alex Thorn:You don't see sufficient urgency. I need to see very high urgency. and people like saying, again, Saylor saying a different thing. Saying, I have people working on it. That's what he needs. And he needs to allocate resources. Again, also on if it's a problem, how soon do you think it is a problem? Just with, you're a smart guy. You mentioned the Jeffries guy. It's now a problem because if the Jeffries highly revered investors said this two days ago, that's a problem. It's a problem for the market, but when if we're going to get a cryptographically relevant quantum computing that is a threat to...

42:53Alex Thorn:Is it a five-year problem? Is it a 20-year problem? No one... I mean, I don't know. I'm not a quantum researcher, so I don't know. Okay, we now have our... As part of our preparation, we now have on our scientific board, Professor Scott Aronson, who's one of the most quoted and revered theoretical computer scientists experts on quantum. And, you know, he talks a lot about like so he's now saying i think the quote was and he said this a few months ago and this raised the level of alarm on my side which is why i hired him as an advisor for us for this thing to work with us on it um he said that i would not rule out that before the next election there'll be a some announcement of a cryptographically relevant uh quantum computing device and he's a bigger expert than me so that's the he's talking about the presidential election So like 2028.

43:48Yeah.

43:48Alex Thorn:That's two years from now. Yeah. Wow. So now... It could be that urgent. It could be that urgent, but it is already this urgent because if a very important investor from Jeffries is saying this, others will say the same thing and you will see this effect. Unfortunately, you will see this affecting the price of Bitcoin. And this is something that is very important. And yeah. Well, I'm happy you shared your views on this because I think the temperature is raising. you argue it needs to be raised higher. Yes, and it needs to push consensus in the community of this decentralized thing called Bitcoin towards being more proactive and adopting changes to the consensus layer.

44:32Alex Thorn:Before we wrap. I think it is a good point looking at the intransigence of Bitcoin upgrading as a red flag for... And I agree. I think there are a lot of Bitcoiners who say, you know we're skeptical it's that big of an issue but surely if it is an issue it will get solved um and you're putting your money where your mouth is i'm trying to solve it yes which i respect a lot um before i don't want to end on this doom and gloom of uh you know what gets you really excited for starknet or for blockchains in general like i mean we've already talked about multi-threading which i think is very interesting yeah um and privacy uh as well is there something else that you're following that gets you excited or that you want to talk about well first of all I'm very excited about what's going on on StarkNet, which is that we have one of the highest, you know, on all metrics, almost all metrics.

45:25One metric that is not reflecting this yet is the price of the STRK token. But I'm not going to comment. I never comment on token prices. But if you look at, you know, TVL, you know, value locked, in DeFi, in generally, the amount of Bitcoin, the amount of activity, the number, you know, the size of the ecosystem, the novelty of the applications, it is going places, okay? That gets me extremely excited. So I'm excited very much about the potential this year of Mindshare flipping around Starknet in particular. And as I said, I'm extremely excited about this democratization of block production that we're working on.

46:10And those are the two things that get me extremely excited about.

46:13Alex Thorn:Very cool. Well, Eli Ben Sasson, co-founder, CEO of Starkware, co-founder of Zikesh. Thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains. Thank you, Alex. That's it for this week's episode of Galaxy Brains. Thank you to our guest, Eli Ben Sasson, co-founder, CEO of Starkware, and our friend, Bimnet Abibi from Galaxy Trading. Everyone have a safe and happy weekend, and we will see you next week.

46:38Alex Thorn:Thank you for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. I'm Alex Thorne, head of firm-wide research at Galaxy. Follow me on X at Intangible Coins. Follow Galaxy Research on X at GLXY Research. Read our written reports at galaxy.com slash research. And don't forget, if you like Galaxy Brains, to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more. We'll see you next time. Thank you.