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Cointelegraph Magazine journalist Felix Ng spent a week working in virtual reality. It was mostly terrible… but does have some potential.

I just spent an entire week working in virtual reality using the new Meta Quest 3. While the experience still mostly sucked, I came away with some renewed optimism for VR in the workplace.

As I took Rons outstretched, virtual hand for a handshake, my actual hand in the real world clumsily whacked into the side of my desk.

Ron started laughing, his avatars animated facial expressions mimicking his real face thanks to his devices eye and facial tracking technology.

A project manager at Microsoft, Ron tells me its something Ill get used to. Hes been working in the metaverse for over a year.

Days later, I meet Heather, a mother whos been working in virtual reality for a couple of months. She likes to jump into the metaverse to work when her kids are at school and the house is quiet.

Then there was Miguel, a recruiter at Netflix, an OG user of the virtual reality app Immersed, whos been using it to work for the last two years.

The big question is: Why would you want to?

Only two hours in, my eyes are burning

As impressive as it all sounds, after working in the metaverse for a week myself, Im not sure how anyone could do it for longer.

I spent most of the seven days clocking in and out through the virtual coworking app Immersed, which can be found on the Meta Quest store but can be downloaded from other platforms, too.

Most days, I would be joined by as many as a dozen other VR users, depending on the time of day and which public workspace I chose. (The Cafe setting seemed to be the most popular.) 

Initially, I was going to spend the week using Metas home-grown Horizon Workrooms, but I quickly switched to Immersed after realizing Horizon Workrooms didnt support public workspaces and also lacked important quality-of-life features, such as the ability to move and adjust screen size and distance.

The setup wasnt too difficult in either case. When you first strap on the Meta Quest 3 headset, the device will scan your surroundings to understand where you are within your room (in my case, the office) and where certain obstacles are, such as bookshelves, desks and chairs. This is so it can warn you if youre getting too close to a wall or obstacle when youre immersed in VR.

To be able to interact with your computer in virtual reality, theres a companion app that needs to be installed on your PC, which will then allow the app to retrieve the necessary information from your computer and beam it into your headset via cable or WiFi in the same way most remote desktop apps work.

In Immersed, your virtual screens can be rotated, resized and moved anywhere you want. You can even choose to work in mixed reality, allowing you to superimpose virtual screens among your real-life surroundings.

But it wasnt much help. At the end of each day, I was left nursing a splitting headache and trying to rub the immense strain from my eyes. My neck always felt stiff, a side effect of being weighed down by the bulky headset.

And for what? Most days, I struggled to achieve the same level of output compared to a regular day in front of the PC.

My experience is far from unique. In 2022, researcher Dr. Jens Grubert at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany gathered 18 people to participate in a study of the effects of working in VR for a week.

Two dropped out within the first few hours due to nausea, anxiety and migraines, while the others who managed to finish the week reported increased levels of frustration and anxiety.

They also reported a significant decrease in their own perceived productivity compared to working in the real world. All suffered eye strain, though this seemed to diminish as time went on.

In April, research firm Forrester found that, while theres a lot of hype around the possibilities of working in VR, theres not a lot of it happening in reality virtual or otherwise.

Forresters research found that only 2% of respondents said they preferred to use a mixed-reality device for work. The hardware is still too cumbersome to use for a long stretch of time, according to J.P. Gownder, principal analyst of Forresters Future of Work team.

OK, some bits are impressive

But despite all the annoyances, eye strain and headaches, there were also a few times I was genuinely impressed with the experience.

Working in a virtual environment next to other like-minded people turned my regular remote, isolated working existence into something that was far less lonely.

In the week I spent in VR, I sat and worked alongside a digital marketer from Canada, a software developer from the United States and a salesman for a firm offering e-commerce solutions. We chatted about sports, what we each did for work. It felt like real networking.

The biggest benefit is the ability to interact with people all over the world very effortlessly. I work from home with no one around, explains Pat, the digital marketer.

With VR, you can choose whether you want to be chatting with others, or you can either mark yourself as Do Not Disturb or grab a private room.

Ron from Microsoft also tells me he often prefers working out of VR and takes his headset everywhere, including his home office, a clients office, or on occasions he needs to report to the tech firms headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

And he points out that virtual reality is not constrained by carry-on weight or size limits, and the headset essentially allows him to take five monitors with him anywhere he goes.

Conducting meetings can also be a game-changer in virtual reality. 

Theres something very oddly natural about being able to shake hands with someone more than 10,000 miles away, even if they lack a physical form. Its something that a Zoom meeting could never replicate.

Other times, I simply admired how focused my virtual reality co-workers were, prompting me to do the same.

There was also the freedom of being able to switch my office environment from a space station orbiting Earth to a cozy chalet on a snow-capped mountain, a fireplace quietly crackling in the corner.

Maybe Zuckerberg was right?

Metaverse skeptics raised their eyebrows when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted his lofty vision for the metaverse at the 2021 Connect event.

Well be able to feel present like were right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are, said Zuckerberg.
Many then laughed as the tech magnate sunk tens of billions into research and development for his loss-making Reality Labs division seemingly only to produce legless, blank-eyed monstrosities via Metas Horizon Worlds.

But that laughter is quietening. In September, Zuckerberg showed that the technology is far further forward than we thought.

During a face-to-face conversation with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg showed off the latest version of Codec Avatars, one of Metas longest-running research projects aimed at generating photorealistic metaverse avatars.

The tech was met with awe from onlookers, including Fridman himself.

Im already forgetting that youre not real.
However, the tech requires specialized equipment and is at least three years away from being available to everyday consumers. Zuckerberg said he hopes the scanning process could eventually be done with smartphones.

Metas latest version of VR uses a self-contained, standalone headset that displays a stereoscopic image via LCD screens through pancake lenses, offering a wider field of view than its predecessors while being lighter and thinner. Motion and hand tracking are achieved through a mix of accelerometers, gyroscopes and four outward-facing cameras, while another two cameras are used to display colored passthrough useful when engaging in mixed reality experiences.

Meanwhile, theres considerable anticipation over Apples Vision Pro, which is set to launch in the first quarter of 2024. While it comes with eye-tracking, 4K resolution and Apple EyeSight, which may also impact the future of work, it also comes with an eye-watering $3,499 price tag.

Apple says the spatial computing device will allow users to set up the perfect workspace.

So, is VR work ready for primetime?

As I reflect on my week in virtual reality, Im enjoying a coffee in a very real, definitely not virtual coffee shop in Sydneys Western suburbs.

Occasionally, I miss my VR work friends and the serenity of my cozy virtual chalet.

But until the tech gets smaller, lighter and less clunky, Ill probably stick to Slack huddles and my trusty PC on its wooden desk.

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Two years after John McAfee’s death, widow Janice tells Magazine she’s penniless and can’t move on until his autopsy records are released.

Janice McAfee, the widow of tech impresario John McAfee, is still in the midst of grief. She is doing odd jobs to feed herself, has run out of funds, and still doesnt know what really happened to her husband.

Since the death of crypto guru and antivirus pioneer husband John McAfee in a Barcelona prison more than two years ago, she has remained in Spain in an undisclosed location and has only been saved from homelessness by the kindness of friends.

She cant move on because she still doesnt know what happened to her husband in spite of a September ruling this year from a Catalan court that John McAfee died by suicide and the case was effectively closed.

In an exclusive Zoom interview with Magazine, she explained her current situation.

For more than two years, Ive not only had to deal with the tragedy of Johns death, but its so hard to move on because the authorities refuse to release the autopsy of his death. I have tried and tried, but they will not let me see it.

There is the opportunity of an independent autopsy, but that will cost 30,000 euros, and I dont have the money to pay for it. All I want is to see his body for myself and know that really happened.

Not having the money myself to make the decision to find out what really happened is hard, but Im hoping that giving this interview will give people the opportunity to know whats really going on. I still have people contacting me who still cant believe hes dead, she says.

What happened to John McAfees $100-million fortune?

Although John was worth more than $100 million after he resigned from antivirus company McAfee in 1994 and sold his stock, his official fortune had dwindled to an estimated $4 million at the time of his death, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

He claimed in 2019 that he had no money and could not pay a $25-million court order over a wrongful death lawsuit. However, he was arrested the following year on U.S. charges of tax evasion, with authorities claiming he and his team had earned $11 million promoting cryptocurrencies. From prison, he told his 1 million Twitter followers he doesnt have any hidden crypto. I have nothing. But I regret nothing.

According to Janice, her husband didnt have a will or an estate, so there is no money, and because of the judgments against him in the U.S., its highly unlikely that any financial legacy will be passed on to her. 

There are stories that there are secret caches and documents, but Janice was deliberately kept in the dark (about alleged secret treasure) by her husband, so she wouldnt be in danger. She also has a raft of unanswered questions about Johns untimely end. 

I dont think he thought things would have ended the way they did and nor did I. I dont know if he committed suicide; we talked every day after he was imprisoned near Barcelona. I dont know how he got strung up. 

I dont know if it was with a rope or a shoelace. In the prison report, it says that when they found him, he was still alive; he had a pulse and was breathing when they found him. A faint pulse, but a pulse is a pulse.

Janice cannot believe that when he was found in the cell with a ligature or shoelace around his neck, medical practitioners there appeared to have attempted CPR on him without removing it first.

I went to school to be a registered nursing assistant, and I know how to do CPR. Even in the movies, its the first thing you do: clear the airways. 

If somebody has something tight around their neck, thats the last thing you would do. The first thing would be to remove the obstruction, but you can see from the prison video that didnt happen. I dont know if it was negligence or stupidity; it just feels sinister. But now Im speculating, and I dont want to do that. 

Janice McAfee was frightened after Johns death

After her husbands death, Janice was frightened for her safety. While John had told her that the authorities were only after him, not her, she was still worried that she would be a target for others.

John always assured me that he wouldnt tell me anything that would put me in danger; that was a comfort. He was public about the 31 terabytes of information that he apparently possessed, but he never shared that with me, and I have no idea where it is or whether it actually existed.

But I feel safe at the moment. I have nothing to hide, and I dont even know how he really died, let alone what he possessed. If there was an independent autopsy, I can get some peace. There is an opportunity to do so, but its very expensive.

I first met Janice and John at a blockchain conference in Malta in 2018. Like the crypto world at the time, it was chaos but good chaos.

I interviewed him on stage, and it wasnt my finest hour, or maybe it was. There was something about being near him that affected me and made me behave on stage in a more carefree manner. Maybe thats what he could do, a Svengali of sorts.

John had been drinking whisky on the side of the stage but was sober and lucid. Janice was with him, protecting him from the thousands of people who wanted to speak to him.

She reminded me of Kim Kardashian when I interviewed her in Armenia calm, collected and almost zen-like in her presence. I immediately liked Janice and trusted her.

Later after the on-stage interview had been completed, I was approached by a husband-and-wife camera team who was doing a documentary on crypto that was almost finished, but they would love a word with John. Could I help?

I wasnt sure but texted Janice, and she said it was OK; John apparently liked me. I was invited to the penthouse suite and convinced the armed guard outside their room that I could vouch for the people with me. Again, not something I did every day.

John laughed when he saw me. You again, for f–ks sake! But he was civil to the husband-and-wife team and invited me to join him on a private yacht in Valletta Harbour that evening.

What goes on on private yachts stays there, but we became friends there and then, mainly because I was the only one not blowing smoke up my arse, according to John. Further invitations would follow notably to an island off North Carolina when he was still incognito and on the run.

We stayed in touch, and I conducted a couple of interviews with him during the pandemic when I was running a podcast. When I reached out to Janet on Twitter/X to see if she would be interested in doing her first interview, she said John considered me a friend and would be happy to do so.

Janice McAfee still wants to recover John McAfees body

So, thats the backstory to this interview, but what is more important is the journey from this point on. Janice is determined to follow Johns wishes that, if died, he wanted his body to be cremated. 

His body is still in the morgue at the prison where he died. I dont know why they decided to hold on to his body. They dont need it. Two years ago, I had the money for an independent autopsy; a year ago, I had the money, but now I dont. 

Also read: Holy shit, Ive seen that! Coldies Snoop Dogg, Vitalik and McAfee NFTs: NFT Creator

I am surviving by taking little jobs here and there to feed myself; thats not whats important. What matters is what I can do for John. Im not a victim John was the victim and I need that autopsy report, not to continue a fight against Spanish authorities, but to know what really happened to him.

I put it to Janice that the perception was that John had run out of time and had come to the end of the road. An extradition order to the U.S. had been made hours before his death, and it was surely going to be hard for him in a U.S. prison. 

American authorities do not like people who thumb their noses at them, and an example would have been made of him. In some ways, didnt his apparent suicide make complete sense to a proud man?

We never talked about that. Ever. While he did tell me he wanted to be cremated, that was because he knew there were people who wanted him killed, but thats not the point. 

I dont want to be on one side or the other. Just tell me what the body says. Im not trying to seek justice theres no such thing on this earth any more. I just want Johns wishes to be fulfilled.

Janice is an American citizen, but shes understandably in no rush to go back to the U.S. when she doesnt know what her status is.

John McAfee Netflix documentary

A Netflix documentary called Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee was released last year and portrays her and John as fugitives, which is not something that Janice thinks represents the real story. 

It was more of a tale about the journalists themselves who tried to sensationalize a public figure and werent quite up to it. They centered themselves when the focus should have been on the real story of why McAfee felt disposed to be a so-called fugitive or why Janice was staying with him.

People forget very quickly, and I understand why because the world moves very fast nowadays. I just want him to be remembered properly, and thats the least he deserves.

Janice wants closure. She wants to cremate her husband, remember him with love, and work out what to do next.

I hope she gets her wish. Everybody deserves a chance to move on, and Janice McAfee much more than many others.

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Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal won’t be happy until the project is successful enough to stand alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Read Part 1 here: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygons Sandeep Nailwal

Growing up in poverty in a Delhi ghetto with an alcoholic father and an illiterate mother, Sandeep Nailwal has always had a fire in his belly to achieve something better.

He wants to go big or go home middling success is not an option.

I am not doing something small, he tells Magazine. Okay, we build some network, and it has a token. It does well for one cycle and then fades into the dawn, and I make a few million dollars for myself and retire or whatever this was not the plan.

We were very clear that we will build this, we will grow the community, and well make it one of the biggest projects in the space.

And thats why, in his mind, Polygon formerly Matic Network is yet to truly succeed, despite nudging a $19-billion market cap at one point and joining the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (its currently No. 13 with a $6-billion market cap).

Being in the top 10, top 15 projects brings no satisfaction to me. Its very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have that kind of impact which Ethereum and Bitcoin have had. We have to go to the top three projects in the space. And thats only when I would say that OK Polygon has made it.

Part 1 of this feature told the story of Nailwals rise from grinding poverty to going all-in on Bitcoin with $15,000 hed borrowed to fund his wedding and the difficult early days of Matic Network, where the threat of running out of funds was ever-present.

By mid-2019, Matic Network had raised $5 million in a Binance initial exchange offering to keep itself afloat and had launched the alpha version of its Ethereum layer-2 sidechain. But it was slowly becoming clear that the Plasma technology it was pursuing was not the answer the market was looking for.

Ideas around scaling had begun to change, and Plasmas shortcomings (TLDR: complicated, better at transferring assets than running smart contracts) had seen it lose favor. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the research-oriented Plasma Group decided to ditch the framework altogether in favor of building an Optimstic rollup and renamed the project Optimism in early 2020.

But the Matic Network white paper had outlined a Plasma-based solution with fraud proofs and a proof-of-stake checkpoint layer, and the team was determined to follow through and build it in 2019 and 2020, despite waning interest in the tech.

Mainnet market crash and resurrection

Just as the project was gearing up to launch its mainnet in May 2020, a worldwide pandemic and the March Black Thursday market crash intervened. Around 70% was wiped off the already paltry sub-3-cent price of MATIC within the space of 10 days. With fears of a new Great Depression gripping the world, Matic Networks future again looked in doubt.

Suddenly, everything felt like it will go to zero. That shock was there for two to three months. We survived that, but what we realized is that, you know, we started with Plasma technology, and now plasma is dead. And now we are launching our mainnet. People are, like, Plasma is dead; there is no interest from the community.

Nailwal says the team came to two conclusions.

The first is theyd try and get as many developers and builders as possible. This was a success, as they launched their Ethereum layer 2 just in time for DeFi Summers ludicrous gas fees on layer 1.

The second conclusion was to never again put their eggs in one basket.

We realized that we need to be multichain; we cant be relying on one particular technology, he says.

Long-term Ethereum community insider Mihailo Bjelic was also thinking about a multichain future and joined the project to become something of a bridge to markets and communities from which the team felt excluded at the time. Nailwal says the projects roots in India meant it had a low profile in the Western world, where some considered it to be just like another internet scam. 

Also read: Beyond crypto Zero-knowledge proofs show potential from voting to finance

In early 2021, Matic Network rebranded as Polygon to highlight the change in direction. At the time, Nailwal told Cointelegraph the idea was to become Polkadot on Ethereum and to add Optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups and StarkWare-style Validiums alongside the PoS network.

But Nailwal says they quickly realized that Optimistic rollups were at best an intermediate solution that wouldnt be able to scale up to have 50 chains working in the ecosystem.

With ZK, you can imagine a world with […] 100,000 chains; each of them has 1,000 transactions per second (TPS); all of them combined together could be tens of millions of TPS in the whole network. And the architecture will still survive and keep scaling.

Infinite scalability, unified liquidity and that is the main point for why we bet on ZK because ZK is the endgame for blockchain scaling.

Polygon bull-run fever

At the dawn of 2021, MATICs market cap was just $87 million. By mid-year, it had surged to almost $14 billion, and it was nearly $19 billion by years end. Thats in no small part due to its surging user numbers and ability to scale Ethereum.

At the end of 2020, it had fewer than 1,000 daily active users, but by October that year, it had surpassed Ethereum for the first time with 566,000 users in a day and had flipped ETHs daily transactions, too, thanks to high gas fees on the L1.

Suddenly, the founders were very wealthy individuals, and the project itself had the funds to embark on a major acquisition spree.

In August, it snapped up the entire Hermez network for 250 million MATIC. The project became Polygon Hermez, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible ZK solution focused on decentralization and a proof-of-efficiency consensus.

In December, it spent another $400 million in MATIC to buy the Mir team of ZK-proof experts to build Polygon Zero (ZK recursive scaling). And the acquisitions kept coming.

We reached out to all of them. We said, You want to work with us? And I think at that point in time, whatever was like number three, number four, number five, like we acquired all of them, because number one, number two did not come with us. (But) the talent in number three, four, five teams is super, super good.

The venture capital seemed to think the new plan was a winner, with Polygon raising another $450 million in early 2022, selling MATIC tokens in a raise led by Sequoia Capital India and including Tiger Global and Softbank Vision Fund.

The advantages of having multiple teams taking different approaches became pretty clear.

We initially kept them completely autonomous so they could pursue their own research, and they collaborated with each other. Due to that collaboration, suddenly, we got a ZK EVM, which people have thought is four or five years away.

He says the ZK EVM took just 12 months to develop because of the cross-pollination of ideas between these teams.

Other ZK flavors developing under the Polygon umbrella include Miden (a StarkWare-like system with its own virtual machine) and Nightfall (Optimistic rollups meet zero-knowledge cryptography).

Bets each way on ZK, JavaScript is for midwits

The other big advantage of having multiple teams building different solutions is it doesnt force Polygon to make the same hard choices other projects have had to make.

For example, StarkWare is betting that the additional performance provided by its Cairo virtual machine will make up for the fact that its much harder to port existing Ethereum projects over to StarkEx.

Most of the other projects zkSync, Linea, Scroll, etc. are making the opposite bet that less performance but easier compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine will attract projects and see their solutions win market share.

Polygon is the only team with bets each way, with Polygon Miden following StarkWare with a ZK-optimised virtual machine. For his part, Nailwal thinks EVM will win in the short term, but other solutions will come into their own in the years ahead.

I almost feel like EVM is like JavaScript right? he says. I remember when I was in first or second year of my engineering college JavaScript was considered to be a programming language of the midwits! But today, JS is everywhere; maybe 80% of the web is powered by JavaScript. So, EVM kind of has those effects no matter how much you say, These are the problems.

Nailwal adds, however, Our plan is a 10-year-long plan. So, we have the ZK EVMs, we have Polygon Zero, but we also have Polygon Miden, which we believe is highly performant, has privacy features inbuilt […] and it will support all the programming languages.

Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare told Magazine earlier this year that the Miden VM will enable users to do things like run high-quality video games and generate ZK-proofs on their home PCs they can send into the network.

What they are doing, it gives me goosebumps, Nailwal says. But Miden will start blossoming in around one year. By that time, we, as the Polygon community, need to win the ZK EVM. He hints that a new token and airdrop are being considered to help with this.

Ethereum upgrades to turbocharge Polygon L2s

Ethereums next big upgrade, EIP-4844, which is supposed to happen sometime before the end of the year, introduces proto-danksharding to make life easier for rollups, which Nailwal says is welcome but not a game changer.

I think some estimates were saying up to 200300 TPS only for the rollups. So, not a huge advantage, but its going to reduce the (gas) cost of the transactions.

Full danksharding, which is several years away, according to the Ethereum Foundation, however, will multiply that improvement by the number of shards, currently expected at around 64.

So, you can imagine that 64 multiplied by 200. So, there will be, like, you know, 12,000 TPS, all the rollups can support.

In June this year, the project unveiled its Polygon 2.0 roadmap to become the Value layer of the internet. The vision is for a network of ZK-powered L2s that will seem like using a single chain to users thanks to a cross-chain coordination protocol. Builders can knock up their own ZK-powered L2 chain in a flash using Polygons Chain Development Kit.

The existing PoS blockchain will become a Validium, which is one approach to dealing with the data availability problem of how to affordably store stuff on Ethereum.

The roadmap will also see MATIC tokens upgraded to a new token called POL (short for Polygon) and introduce the controversial concept of restaking, which enables token stakers to earn additional rewards by helping secure other networks.

The POL token is basically the hyper-productive, third-generation token. You can validate on multiple chains, and you can validate for multiple roles: You can be an aggregator, you can be a sequencer, you can be a data availability provider, and you can be a prover. So, with the same token, you can actually stake on multiple layers.

Restaking is controversial in the Ethereum community, with critics arguing it could turn into an unstable house of cards. But Nailwal says POL will be natively integrated into the ecosystem rather than added by third parties on top, as with Ethereums EigenLayer, which will mitigate the risks.

With Polygon, risk-taking is more enshrined in the protocol; this is part of the protocol; this is how the protocol behaves, he says.

If youre a validator and you are running 100 chains, and of those 100 chains you falter or you do fraud on one chain, you get slashed from all of them, he continues, adding hes not sure EigenLayer could implement that especially when they are building on top of something.

I think there are a lot of nuances where ours is much simpler and easier to do.

Polygon 2.0 is like the internet of money

For Nailwal, the ultimate aim of Polygon 2.0 is to evolve crypto networks in the same way the internet evolved. The forerunner of the internet was ARPANET in the 1970s, then the invention of TCP/IP in 1983 allowed multiple networks to connect, forming an inter-network, which grew into the internet thanks to additional technologies like the Domain Name System and the World Wide Web.

Its interconnectivity of all the networks, he says. This is exactly what you see is happening on blockchains.

Its very hard to move your money trustlessly from one chain to another; you use these bridges, which get hacked all the time. Thats why Polygon 2.0 is not only about having infinite scalability […] But it should also make sure that that value that is being created on these hundreds of thousands of chains also is connected and seamlessly movable.

He says the interoperable layer will enable value to flow between L2 chains, as well as Ethereum and potentially other layer-1 chains as well in the future if they join in.

So, with this Polygon 2.0, we can achieve the same characteristics as the web has, he says. The Web3 network, whichever will win, should have infinite scalability and seamless transfer of value between these chains.

Thats why Polygon 2.0 architecture has got a lot of critical acclaim.

Future for Polygon and Sandeep Nailwal

Even as the founder of a multibillion-dollar blockchain and living in luxury in Dubai, Nailwal still feels unsatisfied, as if he has yet to make the impact he feels he should. He looks up to world changers like Mark Zuckerberg, Satoshi and Vitalik Buterin a truly remarkable man. So, mere wealth is not enough. He wants to make a lasting impact.

Ive never felt that Polygon has made it, he says. That part is very relentless in my mind, like there is no middle ground like this.

I think Bitcoin, Ethereum only can say that they have made it nobody else, no other protocol can say that theyve made it; they can die in a matter of six to 12 months.

So, Nailwal wont be happy until the Polygon ecosystem truly deserves to stand along Bitcoin and Ethereum as the bedrock of the entire industry

We have to go to the top three projects in the space, he says.

Read Part 1 here: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygons Sandeep Nailwal

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Growing up in poverty in a Dehli ghetto, with an alcoholic father, Sandeep Nailwal went on to found the $6B Polygon crypto empire.

From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna river in Dehli to launching the $6-billion Polygon blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal has an incredible rags-to-riches tale.

Now happily ensconced in the futuristic, air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he tells Magazine he was born in a farming village in 1987 with no electricity called Ramnagar in the foothills of the Himalayas.

His parents married as teenagers and then packed up home when Nailwal was just four to try their luck in Dehli. They wound up in the poor settlements on the east banks of the river, often dismissively referred to as Jamna-Paar.

Imagine the Bronx in New York, Nailwal says. It was like a tier-three area. Even now, when you go there is a very kind of ghetto-ish area.

He remembers lots of cows roaming the roads and illegal guns, though he says knives were the weapon of choice. When stuff needs to be done, then knife is the best tool, he says of the attitude.

Nailwal didnt attend school until he was five, in a country and period where many schools accepted children as young as two and a half, mainly because his parents didnt know any better.

My father and mother both were kind of like illiterate people; they did not even realize that the kid should be sent to a school after three years or whatever. So, somebody in my area who used to have a small school said: Why is your kid not going to school? And then I started going to school.

He waves at an ordinary-sized room behind him in Dubai, saying the school was almost the same size with 20 kids crammed in. Home life wasnt much better.

My father became an alcoholic and got into gambling. So, he would make like $80 to $90 a month, and out of that, generally many times, he would lose all of it, says Nailwal. As a result, the family was often behind on paying the schools monthly fees, so they will make you stand outside, and its basically a very traumatic experience as a kid.

Also read: ZK-rollups are the endgame for scaling blockchains: Polygon Miden founder

Experiences like that in his formative years helped Nailwal understand the kind of man he didnt want to be and forge his determination to succeed. Now the head of his own family, with a young child named Adi, he says becoming a dad made him reflect on how he hopes to do things better than his own father. But the conversation takes a surprising turn when Nailwal reveals he was actually thrust into a paternal caring role, looking after his baby brother when he was just 10.

I would say in a way, my first son is my own brother, he says, his voice becoming thick with emotion. So, basically, when he was very young, he met with an accident at that point in time. So, I would say thats where my childhood ended basically because I had to take care of him.

Young entrepreneur

Nailwal got his start in business as a teenager, selling pens from a friends shop at a decent markup in school and tutoring other students. After he graduated, he hoped to take an insanely competitive engineering exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but couldnt afford the extra tuition he needed to get an edge among 1 million students fighting for around 5,000 seats.

He ended up getting accepted into the tier-two MAIT college in Dehli and took out a loan to put himself through a computer science and engineering degree.

Supremely ambitious and possibly a tad overconfident, he saw his future going down two possible paths based on two notable role models: Either join a company and work his way up to become global CEO like PepsiCos Indra Nooyi or start up a revolutionary internet business like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook.

I was inspired by all this hype around Facebook in 2004, 2005, he says, recalling the intense media coverage of Zuckerberg in India at the time. I said to myself and it was very stupid at that time like I want to build my own Facebook. Thats why I chose computer science.

During his university degree, his talents in data analysis saw him get a gig working on electorate analysis work for the regional BJP party now Indias ruling party. After a short stint in the workforce after university, he returned to study at the National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering (now the Indian Institute of Management) to get his MBA, where he met his wife, Harshita Singh.

Although a highly regarded employee at Deloitte, and then Welspun textiles, where he was quickly promoted to head of technology for e-commerce, Nailwal never stopped working on his own projects. Hed spend all day at work, then go home and work on projects like a GPS-based system to optimize cargo vehicle deliveries or a B2B service platform for project management.

Nailwal says he felt he wasnt able to pursue a startup full-time, as he felt cultural pressure and a responsibility to get his family out of the one-bedroom rental they were in and into their own home. And nobody would give a home loan to a 27-year-old with intermittent income from a fledgling business.

But Harshita one day said, You will never be happy this way, he recalls. She said, I dont care about my own house; we can stay and rent. That was a very big burden away from me.

In his last month of work, he borrowed $15,000 so he could afford to pay for a wedding one day, and then started to work on the B2B services marketplace full time, which he ran for a year until he realized it would never scale up the way he wanted.

Bitcoin revolution

Instead, he looked to get into deep tech, first considering then abandoning AI as it was beyond his mathematical abilities. Bitcoin was starting to get some press at that time due to the upcoming halving in 2016.

Nailwal had heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 but initially wrote it off as some sort of Ponzi scheme. After discovering it had lasted the distance, he thought it worthy of further investigation. Reading the beautifully written white paper, he realized:

Oh, this is big this is the next revolution of humanity.

Converted, he was desperate to get skin in the game and, over the next three months, tipped the $15,000 wedding loan into Bitcoin at $800 a piece. Looking back, he says it was an insanely risky move given his finances at the time.

The level of FOMO I had, it would have been exactly the same if I was one year late. And I would have done the same thing at $20,000. Yeah, and I would have lost all that money, and it would have been really, really problematic for me.

But as a builder, he wanted blockchain to be about more than just payments, which led him to Ethereums full programmability. I was like this is the thing, this is the thing I want, he says.

Throwing himself into the space, Nailwal founded a blockchain services startup called Scope Weaver in 2016 and became well-known as a moderator on local Ethereum forums. Thats where he met a hardcore programmer named Jaynti JD Kanan, who kept suggesting he spend his $400,000 Bitcoin stash investing in his startup ideas.

Initially, Nailwal wasnt keen, but then Ethereum started to struggle with its own popularity during the 2017 bullrun, most notably after a 600% increase in transaction fees from CryptoKitties made the blockchain all but unusable.

Also read: Ethereum is eating the world You only need one internet

Kanan suggested they work on fixing Ethereums scaling problems by developing the layer-2 Plasma technology proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in August that year, which helped offload transactions to faster and less crowded side chains. Nailwal agreed and helped raise $30,000 in seed funding to build a product, with Anurag Arju joining as another co-founder and Matic Network officially launching in early 2018. The project was bootstrapped on the smell of an oily rag. All up, he says, the Matic Network survived for its first two years on $165,000 of total funding.

Matic Network nearly dies

Having watched endless projects raise millions with vaporware initial coin offerings, the team was determined not to launch a token sale until they had a product.

They would come to regret this decision bitterly. Launching directly into the great crypto market crash of early 2018, the ICO market was strong for a few months after but petered out by the time their runway was growing short.

We kind of ignored that opportunity, he says. Which was really, really painful later on.

We had this huge opportunity of raising $10 million. We left it; we did not do it. And now we have no money to build. I remember that one time I had to almost beg one of the other founders of one project from India to grant us $50,000 so that we can run for three more months.

Shortly before his marriage, Nailwal traveled to pitch to a Chinese fund that seemed keen to invest $500,000 in the struggling project. He recalls being delighted two days before his marriage, with a house full of guests, that everything was going to be OK.

Everybodys happy, and Im also content that we will get $500,000 now (for Matic Network), and suddenly, Bitcoin goes from $6,000 to $3,000. That fund after that simply said, No, we will not invest now because we were going to invest 100 BTC; now the value is half, so we are not investing.

Even worse, the projects treasury was still in Bitcoin and had also halved in value.

That was a very traumatic experience for me around that point because I should not have speculated on this money, which is the companys Treasury, he says, meaning that he should have cashed out or turned it into stablecoins.

So, I was really angry at myself, and this thing went away. By that time, we had like seven, eight, 10 people [in Matic]. They are also [attending] my marriage, and we are enjoying it and all that but deep down, I know that shit, we might not have this team in the next two, three months.

Binance is actually diligent

Toward the end of 2018 and early 2019, the opportunity came up to raise funds in an initial exchange offering on Binance Launchpad. While the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission thinks Binance is a bunch of cowboys who will accept any old bus pass as Know Your Customer verification, Nailwal says the exchanges due diligence was possibly too diligent.

Nobody believed that there could be a protocol coming from Indian co-founders. And there were two or three projects which turned out to be scams, and everybody was very wary, he says. Matic ended up going through eight months of evaluation before getting the nod to raise $5.6 million in $300 lots to the winners of a ballot.

Nailwal says, At that point in time, $5 million was a very good amount.

If Binance had said, You can raise $1.5 million or $1 million, we would even settle for that because we had a struggle for survival. But once we launched on Binance, things became much better.

That marked a turning point for Matic, which survived the 2020 pandemic market crash and grew from fewer than 1,000 daily users at the end of that year to surpass Ethereums user numbers with 550,000 in October 2021. It also flipped Ethereums transaction numbers that year, too. Rebranding as Polygon, it surged from a market cap of $87 million at the start of 2021 to almost $19 billion by the end of the year.

Nailwal was now one of the richest and most successful people in the cryptocurrency industry. But he wasnt satisfied, by a long shot.

Being in top 10, top 15 projects brings no satisfaction to me. Its very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have that kind of impact which Ethereum and Bitcoin have had.

Look out for part two, which tells the story of how Polygon became one of the key players in the space and Nailwals plans to make it a top-3 project. 

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“Restaking” involves reusing staked Ether to earn fees and rewards. The restaked tokens can then help secure and validate other protocols. But many fear restaking could disrupt Ethereum’s chain itself.

Ethereum restaking proposed by middleware protocol EigenLayer is a controversial innovation over the past year that has some of the brightest minds worried about the potential ramifications.

Restaking involves reusing staked or locked-up Ether tokens to earn fees and rewards. The restaked tokens can then help secure and validate other protocols. 

Proponents believe restaking can squeeze additional security and rewards from already staked ETH and grow the crypto ecosystem in a healthier way based on Ethereums existing trust mechanisms. Restaking could serve as a security primitive for exporting Ethereums trust generated by its validators to other projects.

Yet Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and a number of key devs worry that restaking is a house of cards that will inevitably tumble. Some of those Ethereum devs have even proposed a fork to head off restaking platform EigenLayer. 

Why the projects founders promote trust as a service from Ethereum without the Ethereum founder and others willingness to participate is still to play out. Will the whole concept result in an Ethereum fork to protect the network from catastrophic failure? 

Staking and restaking

Staking is a crypto-native concept. On Ethereum, it means putting up a security bond in ETH so that the validator (validators of new transactions who maintain the security of the blockchain) will behave honestly in verifying transactions rather than lose their staked tokens. Stakers are then paid rewards for locking up this ETH. 

In essence, stakers lock up their tokens to commit to producing Ethereum blocks  an on-chain way of supporting development, regardless of fluctuations in highly volatile token prices. 

So what is restaking?

In short, restaking works in that already staked Ethereum tokens can be rehypothecated (when a lender re-uses collateral posted from one loan to take out a new loan) to secure a wider variety of applications and accrue additional rewards.

But restakers also get penalized or slashed for non-performance of their staking tasks. (More on that below).

So restaking is a crypto primitive for generating economic security from Ethereums nine years of concerted developer activity and project track record. 

Its an extension protocol to extend what Ethereum can do, scaling out Ethereum stakers beyond Ethereum to other bridges and oracles that need to be secured, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan tells Magazine.

He says EigenLayer is commoditizing ETH staking to make it more general purpose, as, in crypto parlance, staking is the root of trust. 

Kannan is an academic on leave from the University of Washington, and EigenLayer began as academic research into exported trust as a consensus protocol. Basically, he sought to piggyback the trust generated by Ethereum to other ecosystems. 

Kannan essentially seeks to export the trust generated by Ethereum for other projects across the ecosystem and other chains. In crypto, mechanisms for trust mean that investors need skin in the game. The pseudonymous world needs carrots and sticks whereby validators are distributed. He calls it permissionless innovation. 

The best each chain has to offer

The big idea for EigenLayer is to bridge blockchains and create super applications, taking the best each chain has to offer. Kannan says every ecosystem is better in some dimension, but not all dimensions, and EigenLayer enhancing decentralized tech stacks will actually benefit the industry. 

Kannan said that what can be built with EigenLayer fits roughly into two categories.

Firstly, EigenLayer allows for the construction of bridges from chain to chain, say Ethereum to Avalanche. EigenLayer acts as a marketplace for decentralized trust, connecting stakers seeking yields, projects built on EigenLayer offering risk-reward structures for yields, and operators acting as bridges between stakers and projects.

Secondly, a set of smart contracts on Ethereums chain lets ETH stakers opt to run other software. EigenLayer could, for example, improve Ethereum transaction finality speeds. ETH stakers can now take the layer-1 blockchain Fantom chain (for better transaction finality times) and fork it on EigenLayer, thereby running a layer as a super fast finalization layer with an EigenLayer trust layer.

But its all still theoretical.  

The idea of restaking makes sense theoretically, helping projects build off Ethereums security layer but the problems worry many. 

In theory, its like the NATO security alliance; each country is still a sovereign country, but their mutual defense pact is secured by the sum of their military power, Sunny Aggarwal, co-founder of Osmosis Labs and creator of a similar restaking system Mesh, on Cosmos chain told Magazine. 

In practice, EigenLayer provides two ways to restake: whitelisted liquid staking derivatives can be restaked with EigenLayer or an EigenPod (a smart contract can be created to run a validator while restaking). But most restakers wont run their own validator, so new networks can build projects without their own communities of validators. 

EigenLayer isnt live yet, and its impact is still highly speculative, according to Anthony 0xSassal Sassano, a full-time Ethereuem educator, founder of YouTube channel The Daily Gwei and an early investor in EigenLayer.

To date, theres only a smart contract for staked ETH to bootstrap the EigenLayer network, and perhaps given EigenLayers hype, people are depositing their ETH into that network, expecting to farm an unconfirmed airdrop of native EigenLayer tokens. 

A force for good or evil?

To be successful, new consensus protocols need a balanced alignment of incentives. Trust is like a scale weighing competing interests. And trying to export Ethereum security layers to different blockchain ecosystems worries some. Many are still trying to understand if its a force for good or evil or both.

There are two camps: those excited by broadening the use case of ETH staking, and then there are those that worry about potential attack vectors on Ethereum and potential negative consequences for Ethereum if something goes wrong with EigenLayer. My view is in the middle; I understand the concerns and the excitement. Sassano says.

Inherently, all of this is complex; it depends which rabbit hole you want to go down. The simple answer is that Ethereum, as a network, currently has over 25 million ETH at stake thats tens of billions of dollars. So restaking is asking, what if we could harness that economic security for other purposes than just securing the Ethereum chain?

Sassano continues: Thats exactly what EigenLayer is trying to do, to generalize the security that Ethereum has with its stakers and expand that to other things like an oracle network or a data availability network. Its inherently more technical and complex than that, but thats the gist of it. 

There are two types of danger that restaking could pose: first for restakers and then for Ethereum itself. 

Restaking creates too much leverage

Restaking is controversial as it is akin to leveraged investing through borrowing. Some argue that the danger here is that the hunger for real yields or actual revenue that emerged in crypto in 2022 leads to unsavory developments, like restaking. 

Jae Sik Choi, portfolio manager at Greythorn Asset Management, told Magazine that securing networks through restaking could work, but restaking is akin to leverage:

Just like how Terras over-leveraged safe collateralization of Luna was, there would always be a risk of participants over-leveraging into this new concept, and such a risk wont be quantifiable until we see more data sets throughout the emergence of this new restaking narrative.

Dan Bar, chief investment officer at Bitfwd Capital a boutique crypto assets hedge fund agreed that restaking amounts to leverage, telling Magazine: While moderate schemes of restaking could be beneficial for capital efficiency purposes, any crypto assets manager and finance professional worth their salt knows too well how easily and quickly leverage can turn into a slew of synthetic toxic financial instruments that bring disasters into even the most healthy of ecosystems.

And maybe thats the first major problem. Investors will only see restaking as quick, easily leveraged financial products. EigenLayer building an open-source, decentralized network security may fail to convince doubters.

Risks to Ethereum itself

One fear is that slashing on EigenLayer will affect Ethereum itself.

Ethereums proof-of-stake trust system keeps everyone in check with slashing conditions essentially non-performance penalties. Programmable slashing means restakers have additional computational responsibilities and face consequences for non-execution.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin fears an overload of the chains consensus, basically, computational overloads, if the blockchains computational power is suddenly redirected elsewhere. 

Kannan admits that Vitaliks concerns are valid. We dont want to shard Ethereums trust layer, and we dont want contagion of nefarious actors leveraging Ethereums trust system.

Sassano also notes that the functionality of Ethereum proof-of-stake was designed to make sure that there wont be a sudden influx or outflux of validators, which would affect the core properties of Ethereums consensus mechanism. 

The issue is that EigenLayer will decide where to take ETH from, but they cant slash a validator on Ethereum.

In Ethereum, theres also a queue for validators to enter or exit each day. So lets say, in an extreme example, 30% of all staked ETH begins staking with EigenLayer and say that all 30% gets slashed by EigenLayer. While it depends on what the slashing condition was, lets say all this ETH was lost because they tried to do something really bad. Even if all 30% had to be exited, theres a limit on how much can exit per day. It would take literally years to exit 30% of ETH stake. So I understand peoples concerns, but at the same time, other things built on top cannot dictate what happens on Ethereum.

So, restakers should have to play by Ethereums rules. 

Yet Sassanos biggest concern is around the calculus of ETH staking, which may one day become a question of whether stakers get more from staking on EigenLayer than Ethereum itself. This could erode the Ethereum staking model in time.

He is confident, though, that Ethereums tech offsets those systemic risks: Its not a critical risk to Ethereum if you are slashed on EigenLayer. You are not slashed on Ethereum. EigenLayer cannot cause you to be slashed on Ethereum because Ethereum has its own slashing conditions built into the protocol. And EigenLayer has its own separate slashing conditions built into its protocol as well.

Anything built on top of Ethereum introduces additional complexity and risk. Juan David Mendieta Villegas, co-founder and chairman at crypto market maker Keyrock, tells Magazine:

EigenLayer is an interesting development but creates additional attack vectors without providing explicit benefits to the Ethereum ecosystem itself. If we take a step back, its important to note that ETH staking has introduced a base benchmark yield for the industry, and that is a good development. You can almost think of it as a risk-free rate. Any additional layers, such as liquid staking derivatives and re-staking mechanisms, of course, can carry more concerns such as concentration risk, security and smart contract.

But Villegas wishes EigenLayer well. Overall, were advocates of the innovations that are happening around staking and want to see multiple protocols win as this will assist in the decentralization and democratization of the network.

In other words, he wishes for competitors to EigenLayer to create similar products. 

Restaking could make or break new projects

Cosmos Aggarwal believes restaking will only benefit those blockchains with existing network effects for those with existing economic alliances or overlapping communities.

He also sees restaking protocols akin to a venture capital arm for layer 1s that might discourage solo stakers and further centralize networks. 

In the end, competing layer-1 blockchains probably wont engage in restaking across chains. For that reason, he feels that EigenLayers design could be improved. 

While EigenLayer is designed as a security system importing trust from Ethereum, builders will create their own tokens and revenue models. This has pluses and minuses. 

In some cases, dodgy new tokens may benefit from Ethereums trust layer. Choi thinks this trust layer benefit could potentially be moot due to the tokenomics that these alt layer 1s would want to try and attain (i.e., the use of their own token their own agendas) could be problematic and so any supposed trust exported from Ethereum is lost anyway.

On the other hand, experimental, well-meaning projects may now have a chance at success thanks to EigenLayer. Thats why Choi thinks the ultimate potential benefit EigenLayer is proposing is that other blockchains that do not want to spin up their own validator and staker sets have a chance at scaling to success. 

Aggarwal also notes that with appropriate checks, restaking should be set within parameters to control risk. Restaking primitives need cleverly programmed governance, such as discounted voting power to restaked tokens on another chain. For example, one restaker cant have more than 20% of the vote for another chain.  

So, is restaking a good thing for Ethereum?

The purists would say Ethereum should only be securing the Ethereum Beacon Chain and nothing else. [They] shouldnt be exporting Ethereum security to anything else. But I dont think that is necessarily a bad thing to get node operators to do other work, says Sassano. 

If it can happen on the Ethereum network, it will happen. If the network cant resist it and Ethreuems chain becomes insecure because of it, and there are adverse effects because of it, then Ethereum as a protocol was not designed correctly and needs to be improved.  

Well find out soon enough.

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An emerging cryptographic technology may provide help with two gaping 21st-century needs: Privacy and truth.

In a world increasingly anxious about privacy and exploitation of ones personal data by governments, corporations, social media platforms and banks, zero-knowledge proofs may offer some relief. 

Indeed, this emerging cryptographic protocol could partially remedy two rapidly growing global deficits: privacy and truth.

ZK-proofs have already found a home within the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector enabling scaling protocols to make Ethereum transactions faster and cheaper, for example. But this may just be the beginning. 

One day, ZK-proofs could help convince your bank that your income is above a certain threshold to qualify for a mortgage, for example without revealing your actual income. Or prove to the election authorities that you are a resident or citizen without giving them your name, drivers license or passport.

ZK-proofs open up a new world of potential applications, including anonymous voting, decentralized games, proving personal information without fully disclosing your personal information, and fighting against fake news by proving the source of the news, Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina tells Magazine.

To this point, some in the cryptographic community already view ZK-proofs as a potential weapon in the looming struggle against false information, including AI-altered documents, images and identities. 

We may have a technological battle for truth coming up where ZK can play a critical part, prize-winning cryptographer Jens Groth tells Magazine. There is this idea of proof-carrying data, i.e., data that carries within itself proofs of correctness including origin and provenance data, so nirvana would be that all data we get are verified data.

In some industry sectors like finance, ZK-proofs may profoundly alter how business is conducted. We see this revolutionizing the audit industry, Proven co-founder and CEO Rich Dewey tells Magazine in connection with ZK-enabled proof-of-solvency protocols, like the one his tech firm has developed. The only question is the timeline. 

Requiring fewer resources

Even though ZK-proofs were first presented back in the 1980s by researchers Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, only in the past decade have they had their big breakthrough, according to Baylina.

Now its possible to prove any generic statement. This statement sometimes called a circuit can be programmed with a specific language and can be anything, Baylina says. 

ZK-proofs are computationally complex, which has arguably slowed their development, but their core intuition seems simple enough. As described in a forthcoming paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: 

By using a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), a party can prove to other parties that a computation was executed correctly. There is no need to replicate the computationonly the proof needs to be verified. Ideally, verifying a ZKP needs significantly less resources than re-executing the computation.

What follows are some of the promising ZK-proof use cases on the table today beyond the strict confines of the crypto sector that may or may not involve the use of blockchains.

Verifying digital voting 

Electronic voting has been slow to catch on globally, but if and when it does, the odds are that ZK-proofs will play a prominent part. ZK-proofs are already being used in e-voting systems in trials in a number of Swiss towns and cantons, Dahlia Malkhi, distinguished scientist of Chainlink Labs, tells Magazine.

ZK-proofs can add verifiability to an online election, allowing anyone to check that the votes were counted correctly, explains Malkhi, without revealing how individuals voted a key concern with electronic voting, she says. 

Cryptographic electronic voting systems have been around for decades, Malkhi adds, but their adoption has been moderate. On the technical side, one of the challenges has been the compromise of end-user devices, which ZK-proofs dont protect against.

There are other obstacles, too, that are beyond ZK-proofs purview or ability to control which also may suggest their limitations. 

Electronic voting requires a credible digital identity system, i.e., a link to real world information that isnt always easy to secure. (Think of all those voting rolls on aged paper ledgers.) ZK by itself cannot bootstrap e-voting, Malkhi says. 

Cryptographer Groth, like Malkhi, cites the need for some sort of trust anchor to make ZK-proofs impactful in everyday life. Zero-knowledge proofs often need a hook to reality.  

Maybe one day, thanks to ZK-proofs, someone will be able to prove that they are older than 18 years of age or a United Kingdom citizen without having to pull out a drivers license or passport, Groth tells Magazine, but you cannot prove youre over 18 out of thin air. You need the trust anchor that establishes your age, he says, i.e., some authority that verifies your citizenship or birth year, adding:

In the future, organizations may issue ZK-friendly trust anchors, but right now, it is not common practice, so you have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

Privacy safeguards for CBDCs

Today, the world seems awash with central bank digital currency projects. According to the Atlantic Council, 130 countries representing 98% of global GDP are now exploring state-issued digital money. 

But CBDCs come freighted with privacy questions, and some fear they could be misused by governments to surveil their own populations, for instance.

That is why high privacy guarantees are at the core of most CBDC projects today, Jonas Gross, chairman of the Digital Euro Association, tells Magazine. 

ZK-proofs can be part of the solution, he adds, and it is for this reason that various central banks are studying [ZK-proof] applications for example, in the U.K., Japan and South Korea. 

If privacy is a top priority, ZK-proofs should be considered, Remo Nyffenegger, a co-author of the St. Louis Fed paper cited above and research assistant at the Center for Innovative Finance at the University of Basel, tells Magazine. 

Indeed, the European Central Bank published a regulatory proposal for the digital euro in late June and states therein that zero-knowledge proofs should be considered in the CBDC tech stack, he adds.

Again, there may be limits on what exactly ZK-proofs can do by themselves. I dont see using ZK-proofs [alone] as sufficient because ongoing political discussions show that not all CBDC-related data will be obfuscated if ZK-proofs are used, Gross comments. High privacy also needs to be supported by regulation and educational efforts around the actual degree of privacy of a CBDC.

Exposing an altered photo

AI apps are now so powerful that distinguishing between machine-generated images or documents and those created by human beings is already problematic. Things will only get worse, but ZK-proofs may offer at least a partial remedy.

Blockchain tech and ZK-proofs could be used as built-in safeguards in these systems to verify the origin, authenticity, and ownership of AI-generated files and manage some of the risks associated with AI-generated content, says Malkhi, while Groth adds:

There is interesting new research showing applications of ZK-proofs to demonstrate, for example, youve not altered a photo too much i.e., combating fake news.

High-end cameras that digitally sign photos along with metadata like location and timestamp are already on the market and can establish authenticity, continues Malkhi. The current problem is that these digital files are often enormous much too large to post on a news services website, for instance. 

But with ZK-proofs, their file size can be substantially reduced, making them practical to use online while preserving critical verification elements. It could prove that the recording or image has not been altered, maybe [including] even the date, without revealing identity or location or whatever, adds Baylina. 

Proof-of-solvency with ZK-proofs?

Many believe that finance will be the first major business sector to be impacted by ZK-proofs. Indeed, 41% of respondents in Mina Foundations State of Zero-knowledge Report 2022 agreed that finance was the industry most in need of ZKPs, far ahead of healthcare (12%), social media (5%) and e-commerce (3%).   

In March, Mexican cryptocurrency exchange Bitso announced a partnership with tech firm Proven to implement a proof of solvency solution that relies on ZK-proofs. This protocol will soon enable investors, regulators and others to know whether the exchange is solvent i.e., its obligations are less than its assets based on daily reports. 

One of the more ingenious aspects of Provens protocol is that it involves the exchanges customers in the process of keeping the exchange honest. Its a sort of crowd-sourcing version of auditing.

Co-founders Dewey and Agustin Lebron tell Magazine that every day, an exchange (e.g., Bitso) publishes a cryptographic proof-of-solvency attestation. And when it does, each individual client/user of the exchange is issued a receipt that reflects that individuals unique holdings. Millions of digital receipts might be issued on a daily basis. 

What if one day a customer doesnt receive a daily receipt, or its wrong? That user might take to Twitter or some other social media venue and complain or ask questions. Have others experienced something similar? A thread might grow.

This protocol relies on the law of big numbers. Bitso, for instance, has some five million users, and the presumption is that a critical mass of complainants might surface quickly, collectively waving a red flag that might prompt further investigation. 

This ZK-proofs-based protocol has another advantage, too, according to Bitso. It provides a proof-of-solvency that can be confirmed without revealing all of that information to a third party. All an auditor needs to do is run the zk-SNARK protocol to come to the conclusion that the proof is true. 

According to Groth, the use of ZK-proofs to demonstrate financial solvency gained more traction after the FTX implosion. Indeed, if such a protocol had been available last year, the Bahamas-based exchanges meltdown might have been avoided, some say or at least its wrongdoing would have come to light sooner. 

Interestingly, FTX Japan, now rebranded as Liquid Japan, has been using Provens proof-of-solvency technology since its recent re-launch in early September. With the adoption of Proof of Solvency, we can now prove it [solvency] in a cryptographic manner that is verifiable by 3rd parties, notes the company, adding:

We are starting to work on increasing the frequency of publishing the Proof of Solvency to 1x day by the end of 2023.

Immutable tracking of goods

ZK-proofs can become very relevant in the context of digital identities, whether they are issued by the government or private entities, adds Nyffenegger. They could prove that you are not included on some government sanctions list without revealing who you are, for instance.

ZK-proofs potential use in supply chains is also frequently cited. But the difficulty here, as with e-voting, is that this requires connecting to a trustworthy real-world information source, which can authenticate the date an order was shipped from the factory, for instance. 

ZK-proof-based supply chain tracking systems havent been battle-tested long enough in live environments, notes Malkhi, adding that that could soon change:

The potential of ZK-proofs here is vast helping to improve transparency and reduce the potential impact of fraud by enabling the immutable, real-time tracking of goods.

It should be added that while blockchains provide some of ZK-proof’s first exciting use cases, the technology does not require blockchain technology to work but they are surely helpful.

They are just a very suitable tool for blockchains because they provide proofs of correct computation which aligns well with the need for verifiability on blockchains while hiding as much information as possible, Johannes Sedlmeir,  a researcher at the University of Luxembourgs Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, tells Magazine.

With a blockchain platform, a verifier can check if a certain hash appears somewhere on the blockchain and hence binds me as a prover, he adds. 

Blockchains arent required for Provens proof-of-solvency protocol to work, Lebron tells Magazine, though its always useful to have validators on-chain. It appears to be more of a like to have than a need to have circumstance. 

Obstacles remain

What obstacles still need to be overcome before ZK-proofs become commonplace? Malkhi has already cited the challenges with bridging to the real world, and this would well prove the biggest hurdle to surmount before ZK technology becomes mainstream, in her view. 

However, other barriers remain that might require laws and regulations to overcome. Will ZK claims be accepted in court, for instance? 

Scaling also remains a challenge in many use cases given that there is, at present, no standardized way to program, says Malkhi, making it difficult for developers to integrate proofs into their apps.

To this last point, Provens protocol with Bitso requires some five million unique receipts to be issued monthly (though soon daily) to Bitso users, but Proven says this isnt an issue. We figured out how to scale, co-founder Lebron says.

Complexity is another potential sticking point. For small- to medium-size assertions, we already have a good ZK system, cryptographer Groth tells Magazine. For large assertions, we still need to improve efficiency. ZK-proofs like SNARKs can be cheap to verify, but the prover pays a large performance overhead compared to native computation, he adds.

Becoming magnitudes cheaper

The user experience needs to improve, too. Using a technology secured by ZK-proofs for an everyday activity like buying groceries should be so seamless that the user doesnt even know, says Baylina. 

The other thing we need is time, Baylina says. Protocols like Polygons zk-Ethereum Virtual Machine are still new but are becoming more usable all the time. As Polygon zkEVM matures, over the next year, we anticipate it will become orders of magnitudes cheaper.

Given these potential roadblocks, how long might it take before the technology becomes commonplace? 

I believe five years is too short of a time frame owing to the current TRLs [technology readiness levels] of ZK-proofs, says Sedlmeir, referencing the finance sector specifically. While ZK-proofs have matured rapidly in recent years, they are still complex to implement and prover performance is still a significant bottleneck. 

There might be a transition period as ZK-proof works in tandem with traditional protocols, as in financial auditing. Provens Dewey envisioned working hand in glove with traditional Big Four audit firms for a time. 

Vast potential

In sum, ZK-proofs still face challenges. They cant work in isolation. They still need to be attached to a truth source or oracle. Doubts about computational complexity, usability and scalability remain as well. 

But if these hurdles are surmounted, ZK-proofs could offer a 21st-century solution to not only the fake news challenge but also the privacy quandary as with CBDCs, providing just enough anonymity for users to comfortably use state-issued digital money but enough accountability so governments can be assured fraudsters or money launderers arent infiltrating their networks. 

As the technology and the underlying infrastructure improve, summarizes Malkhi, ZK-proofs have vast potential to enable an internet where the majority of contracts are underpinned by cryptographic guarantees.

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Cointelegraph goes to Cuba to see how some Cubans use Bitcoin to secure a better economic future.

In Cubas capital, Havana, a Bitcoin community has emerged from an economically antagonistic environment.

Satoshi didnt create Bitcoin for Cubans, but it really comes in handy for us, Forte, co-founder of the aptly named local Bitcoin organization Cuba Bitcoin, tells Magazine.

Cubans are turning to Bitcoin because their money is increasingly worthless. Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Lebanon often compete for media coverage about runaway inflation levels, but the Cuban peso is not far behind.

The Cuban peso has devalued so much over the last few years that carrying bags of cash is increasingly common among the rich and the poor.
In practice, even if someone bought Bitcoin at the top of the 2021 bull run at $69,000, their money is worth much less in Cuban pesos. Whereas Bitcoin dropped 80% to its bear market low, it has since recovered 100%, and the peso has devalued by 90%.

The realization that someone should swap local currency for the Bitcoin top, knowing that it will crash and theyll still retain more purchasing power, is one of the many financial wake-up calls received while working on Cointelegraphs new documentary, The Truth Behind Cubas Bitcoin Revolution. 

In 2021, I came across the article Inside Cubas Bitcoin Revolution by Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein, in which he explains how and why Cubans were utilizing Bitcoins stateless and low-fee properties to save money and escape financial oppression. 
In line with the Bitcoin mantra of Dont trust, Verify, I went to see with my own eyes what Gladstein described.

Camera in hand with my trusty travel partner Paco de la India by my side, I network my way into the Cuba Bitcoin community, which now counts thousands of enthusiasts and advocates.

La Cultura Cubana

Following one of the largest financial conferences in the world, Bitcoin Miami, in arguably the worlds most capitalist arena, the United States of America, I hop across the Caribbean to Cuba, one of the few extant socialist states. The contrast hits me harder than the Cuban tropical heat. 

From the moment I landed at Havana Jose Marti International Airport, I noticed some funny quirks: doors open manually (forget automatic sensors), check-in and immigration are done on pen and paper, and the taxis are 1950s Chevrolets. 

Its common to describe visiting Cuba as a time warp. Its not hyperbole; Cuba cannot access world markets, financial institutions or trade. The United States has subjected Cuba to a trade embargo the longest in modern history since the island nation nationalized U.S. oil refineries in 1960.

As a result, Cuban industry, economic output and commerce lag far behind the modern world.

The embargo, coupled with more than half a century of communism, has resulted in a highly educated, extraordinarily literate but desperately poor and hungry population, many of whom possess a heartbreaking desire to leave the island, or in Spanish, to find a salida an exit. 

Why stay in a country where a taxi driver earns more than an atomic engineer and the emaciated engineer struggles to feed their family? 

Adopting Bitcoin

In such an environment, its a wonder why Cubas dont flock to Bitcoin as money that exists outside of state control. However, many Cubans are learning about and slowly turning to Bitcoin. 

Catrya, one of the main characters in Cointelegraphs new documentary and one of the founders of Cuba Bitcoin, explains that there could be around 5,000 Bitcoiners in Cuba, and if you include crypto enthusiasts generally, the number is higher still. 

Cubans do not have easy on-ramps into crypto. Firstly, those with internet connections cannot sign up for Binance, Coinbase or Gemini due to their nationality. For Cuban Americans on the island, Cubas government restricts access to American websites. Cubans buy Bitcoin peer-to-peer through Telegram or WhatsApp groups and at in-person meetups. 

What amazes me is the tiny amounts of money Cubans put aside to save money or stack sats. Saving 1,000 satoshis (less than $1 a week) is meaningful to a Cuban on $40 monthly. The Cuban peso may not be here in 10 years, but Bitcoin certainly will be.
The peer-to-peer process is straightforward, but its not beginner-friendly, and these hurdles can hamper adoption although they do have a silver lining, as Catrya explains:

Since were denied [access to exchanges] by default for being Cuban, we can never do KYC [Know Your Customer], so thats a good thing for us, at least in terms of privacy.

Buying Bitcoin peer-to-peer and storing Bitcoin by taking ownership of the private keys is safer. Customers who trusted custodians such as FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and Vauld with their crypto were wiped out. Cubans dont have that option, and while it takes longer, its more secure. 

Erich Garcia Cruz, the founder of QvaPay and BitRemesas a currency remitter using Bitcoin that boasts tens of thousands of Cuban users says that the small but growing number of Bitcoin customers somewhat represents Cubas fledgling internet culture.

Connectivity and freedom of information

Cubans could get online in earnest from 2013. So, while the rest of the world was enjoying the iPhone 5C and 4G, a few lucky Cubans fortunate to access a computer could get online that year, albeit with an awful internet connection. 

Now, Cubans can access 3G and sometimes 4G connectivity on their phones. The tech-savvy and younger Cubans use VPNs to circumnavigate online restrictions.

Generally, the lag in internet infrastructure combined with the cost and difficulty of buying a smartphone on a frighteningly low salary means Cuba is way behind in IT. 

In 2021, the World Bank reported that three-quarters of Cuba has access to the internet. But while the issue is improving, internet censorship is rife, and Cubans are repeatedly told to trust the government through state-sponsored TV, newspapers and media.

Independent media publications are classified as enemy propaganda, which is something I was made aware of a few times during my investigation. I wont share those stories here, but its safe to say reciting such stories wouldve landed me in trouble had I stayed in Cuba. 

Two exiled Cuban journalists have since advised me to avoid returning to the island for some time, especially if the Cointelegraph documentary gets a lot of attention. 

A funny caveat to the state-run media is that some Cubans were orange-pilled by Bitcoin proponent Max Keiser. His appearances on the Russia Today news channel were approved for broadcast in Cuba. Some of Catryas peers watched the show where Keiser bashes fiat currencies and promotes Bitcoin. 

And yet, Bitcoin is magic internet money; it lives on the web. If Cubans arent online or watching Russia Today how can they know about it? 

Orange pill Cuba

Bitalion, one of the Cuba Bitcoin founders, works in telecommunications for the government. He explains that as a privileged public sector worker, he benefits from better internet connection speeds and lower online censorship levels. 

Bitalion stumbled across the Bitcoin white paper in 2014 and became infatuated with the idea of an independent, borderless currency. He rhetorically poses the question: For those fortunate Cubans who are able to travel abroad, what can they bring to the new country? The peso in their pocket, or Bitcoin in a mobile wallet? 

As with the other Bitcoin advocates on the island, Bitalion volunteers his time to educate people and support Bitcoin adoption. Hes also one of the handful of Cubans running a Bitcoin node. At Cubas first-ever Bitcoin-only meetup, he demonstrates to dozens of Cubans how to pay for goods and services directly to his Lightning Network node.

Cruz, Forte and countless business owners explain that Bitcoin is an easy orange pill to swallow, particularly for the digitally capable Cubans. You merely explain to them that nobody controls it; its stateless money. 

At face value, Bitcoin is a useful tool for a country that has been financially and economically handicapped for generations. But for Forte, Catrya and Bitalion, the ideology of Bitcoin resonates strongly.

Forte jokes, Satoshi didnt create Bitcoin for Cubans, but it really comes in handy for us.

In the hope of encouraging more Cubans to explore Bitcoin, the trio and the Cuba Bitcoin community host monthly educational meetups in which they explain the principles of Bitcoin and delve into its philosophy.

They recently introduced the popular Mi Primer Bitcoin (My First Bitcoin) program in the country, which is already picking up speed in El Salvador and will soon be instructed in schools nationwide. 

Por qu aceptas Bitcoin? Why do you accept Bitcoin?

QvaPays Cruz explains that Bitcoin is the financial tool that allows the small but growing number of Cuban business owners to access foreign products.

Recent U.S. presidential administrations had fluctuating policies on the Cuban embargo, relaxing and tightening different aspects based on political expediency.

Cruz orange-pills suppliers in an attempt to open up the Cuban economy to international markets where possible:

You are accepting Bitcoin because youre dealing with a private [independent] coin. The government doesnt have access to the transactions you and you have the freedom to do whatever you want.

The term freedom, or libertad, popped up frequently as I mingled and met with Cuban Bitcoiners, crypto enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. The fact that citizens can hold money in a wallet, outside of government overreach, appealed to many Cubans whom the government has consistently let down.

The ability to store wealth on a mobile phone in a Bitcoin Lightning wallet instead of in pesos at a bank is also an efficiency gain. It means no more queues at banks to cash in money that could devalue by a few pesos over a bank holiday weekend. 

Cruz and three other business owners also share that accepting Bitcoin benefits holidaymakers. Adan, a nightclub, bar and restaurant owner, explains that tourists bring a lot of cash to Cuba for vacation and thats risky. 

Having Bitcoin on a mobile phone in a wallet is a safer way to travel than flashing wads of dollar bills that end up on the black market in Cuba, inadvertently supporting the illicit and sometimes dangerous black market activity of exchanging notes in public. 

Adan accepts Bitcoin because of the international branding the Bitcoin logo brings. It opens up his bars doors to another potential market. Similar to El Salvador, where Bitcoin tourism has become a trend, bars and restaurants in Cuba could also attract holidaymakers to spend satoshis instead of pesos at the till. 

Finally, there are myriad ways in which adopting Bitcoin can lead to positive and unexpected outcomes. Mister Navis bar and restaurant, run by Mr. Navi and his son Julian, recently began accepting Bitcoin. Following a conversation with Forte, Catrya and Bitalion, the Cuba Bitcoin group now hosts educational Bitcoin meetups at the venue.

I tipped one of the service staff in Bitcoin at Mr. Navis the first day we visited. Five days later, I saw her again when we went out for dinner with Mr. Navi and Julian. She seems different I ask her if she is OK. She confesses that she was mugged a few days ago, and the attacker stole her purse, cash and phone. 

To her surprise, when she downloaded the Bitcoin Lightning app where Id tipped her, the funds magically reappeared on her new phone. On seeing her wide-eyed reaction, I tipped her again.

It’s clear that, for Cubans, Bitcoin could represent a critical instrument for securing their financial future in the face of runaway inflation and government interference, or as a way of opening up to embargoed markets and the international financial world.  

Disclaimer: The views, opinions and perspectives expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Cointelegraph.

Many see music as the next frontier of blockchain adoption, and musician Vérité reveals what a fan-first approach to Web3 looks like.

Carving out a sustainable career as an independent musician is no easy feat. The competition is fierce, support can be hard to find, and earning a living without the financial help of a major record label is an uphill battle. Yet, for those who are able to build a loyal fanbase, the freedom of complete creative control can be liberating.

Technology has long proven to be a potential friend to those musicians willing to embrace it, and nonfungible tokens are the latest innovation that many tech-savvy artists have begun incorporating into their careers. But NFTs remain both controversial and experimental, especially among the mainstream, and music NFTs are still relatively niche.

One artist who has cracked the code to maintaining a successful career as an independent musician is American singer Vrit, who has racked up hundreds of millions of streams without the support of a record label since releasing her first single, Strange Enough, in 2014. 

After finding success and touring internationally, Vrit became one of the earliest musicians to experiment with NFTs in February 2021. Since then, she has built a strong Web3 community and had several successful high-profile drops, including releasing 1/1 NFTs, selling the master rights to her music, fractionalizing song royalties on the blockchain and giving NFTs to concert attendees. She has done all this while still retaining her dedicated non-Web3 fans, many of whom have little to no interest in crypto.

How does one walk this fine line and successfully integrate Web3 into their career without alienating their existing, perhaps skeptical, fans? Magazine sits down with Vrit to find out. 

Dont over-rely on Web3

For many musicians, Web3 is an exciting frontier filled with new possibilities for fan engagement and revenue generation. However, Vrit believes it is important that artists have diversified revenue streams and marketing strategies and dont fall into the trap of assuming that the hype surrounding anything, especially NFTs, will last forever.

Building a music career in Web3 is a bit of a double-edged sword, Vrit tells Magazine. While it can help bring people together, it becomes a negative when maybe artists limit themselves to only utilizing those tools and only existing within those communities, not really having the foresight that there was a hype cycle that then broke and these paths to monetization closed.

My focus is How do I build a career that can withstand trend cycles, that can refocus on the foundation of my career while trying to push forward to build better? because we recognize that a lot of these systems are extremely broken.

Protect and respect fans

Not every fan wants to join their favorite artist on their Web3 journey, and thats fine, according to Vrit. When she first started releasing NFTs, she heavily emphasized that she was simply experimenting with the technology. I was very, very clear that I dont care if you come with me on this experiment this is an experiment for me, she states.

Vrit actually took it one step further, actively encouraging fans not to join her. A lot of my communication with them was, Dont buy this. Dont participate unless you are fully educated and willing to fully educate yourself and take on the risks. Even now, she still tells her fans that they should never feel pressured to participate in anything Web3-related.

More than monetizing, its really protecting the people who have supported my career for the last eight years, Vrit emphasizes.

Frame Web3 as a set of useful tools

Its clear that not everyone is sold on the power and potential of blockchain. The bear market certainly hasnt helped the spaces reputation either, with the collapse of crypto exchange FTX making mainstream media headlines and the prices of even blue-chip NFTs crashing 95% from their bull market peaks. 

If you go on my Discord and I do tag everyone and say, What do you think about crypto and NFTs? people are not jazzed. Most of them, honestly. Its just general disinterest, Vrit explains. But its not necessarily that her fans actively hate crypto. Im finding that people dont have a desire to do something new because they dont see a problem, right?

According to the singer, NFTs, Web3, how its been marketed out to the masses is also wholly unpalatable really to non-tech-native fans. Instead, she offers the following advice: 

I would more so recommend people to frame it as utilizing tools because its a weird market, and its hard to justify some of the scams and the negative aspects that can cause real harm to someone who isnt knowledgeable or educated on those things.

Offer an option, not a requirement

Instead of forcing fans to join her on-chain, Vrit instead focuses on building experiences with a Web3 element that is present but optional. She describes her approach as offering a door for fans to enter, one where blockchain functionalities can be unlocked to further enhance the fan experience but where fans will still enjoy the experience regardless of whether they open the door:

Do you need to jump the technological hurdle in order to have the experience, right? Or is it just a door? If its a door, you can talk about it because its not a burden.

For me, its really trying to consider, What is the experience that were offering, what are the actual viable use cases of blockchain technology that we can tack on that arent burdensome? she says.

One example is The Vrit Crewneck, a tech-enabled sweatshirt the singer dropped in late 2022 in collaboration with IYK, a company working with brands, artists and creators to develop phygital experiences. The sweatshirt has a near-field communication, or NFC, chip embedded in the sleeve, which can be scanned to access exclusive content and unlock an NFT representing a certificate of authenticity.

Vrit explains that fans who bought the sweatshirt received premier access to the next era of my records. Buyers could scan the chip with their phones and get early access to music and perks such as behind-the-scenes content. That was the main value proposition not a Web3 activation, right?

But the landing page also features an option to verify the garment, through which curious fans can receive their NFT.

Fans are at the center of it all

Between straight-up telling fans not to purchase her NFTs to offering them experiences where the Web3 option is an added bonus, Vrits fan-centric approach has undoubtedly played a significant role in her ability to push boundaries and see success in Web3 while still maintaining a loyal non-Web3 fanbase. Or, in her words, My fans come first, and I dont have fans just so that I can sell them shit all the time.

Regarding her long-term hope for the future of blockchain and music, Vrit says her vision is that we can demystify the black box of data that exists between artists and their fans, that is held by social platforms, ticketing companies, etc., and that blockchain actually does have the ability to make that information transparent so that artists can communicate directly to the people who support them and reward them in long-term scenarios.

If the hype is to be believed, this dream may one day come true. But based on Vrits experience at the forefront of it all, it seems the only way the music-Web3 revolution will be truly successful is if fans are placed at the center of it.

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