 Hello there. I'm Jackson from Cointelegraph, and with me today I have the co-founder of Tezos, Arthur Breitman. How are you doing today, Arthur? I'm good, thanks for having me. So the first thing I want to ask you is, can you just say in your own words what exactly Tezos is? I always think it's interesting coming from the creator, how you formulate it. Yes. Tezos is a blockchain. It's a smart contract platform and also it powers a cryptocurrency called Tez. So in this balance you would say it's a layer one protocol. I like that. Nice and simple. So what's going on in Tezos? What are you developing right now? There's a lot going on. We've had a tremendous year of growth, especially in the NFT space, and the art NFT space has been really, really booming. Now we're seeing a lot of new growth coming in DeFi space and in the gaming space. The thing that I work on is I try to bring projects to the chain. I try to talk to entrepreneurs, developers and creators who are looking to work on Tezos. But I also talk to development teams, core development teams, because Tezos is a self-evolving protocol, which means that it has rules on the blockchain to decide what's the next version of it is going to be. So people will be familiar with Ethereum and saying, oh, we're going to get Ethereum 2.0. So we've had nine upgrades on Tezos chain. So talking to the developers who are working on those upgrades and that's many teams working on that is also part of what I do. So you named a couple sectors earlier there, DeFi, gaming. Are there any particular spaces in Tezos blockchain that you're really excited about, like sectors of the industry? Gaming, I would say that's a very exciting sector. It's something we've been passionate about for a long time. I started getting involved in some gaming projects on Tezos in 2018 before gaming and NFT was a big thing. But I would say now, largely speaking, people are starting to realize that gaming is very important. Another area I'm quite excited about that people haven't really tapped into is DeFi for real-world assets. We've seen DeFi for DeFi assets, which is interesting as a lab and as an experiment. But I would say to unlock the real power of DeFi, it will have to be used for actual financial applications, real-world assets being tokenized. So the combination of those two words, a meaning of traditional securitization and DeFi is going to be quite big, I think. When you say real-world assets, are you talking about stocks? Are you talking about cars? Yeah, absolutely. No, I am. So it could be stocks. It could be digital arts. I consider that a real asset. Stocks, digital arts, real estate, anything you can think of. So are we talking about NFTs here then? Yeah, absolutely. Financialization of NFT is going to be a big thing. Mm-hmm. You know, it's funny because whenever I hear about the stocks thing, I always think about synthetics. You know synthetics, right? Yeah, of course, of course. And I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but to me it seems like it hasn't really become too popular among the Treadfy community. Yeah, so there's a couple things. One is that right now we have a high tide. There's a lot of excitement and you're either out of the crypto space, in which case you're not going to look at it, or you're in crypto space and there's just so many opportunities, so many things going on that it doesn't feel that those applications are very, very compelling at the moment when you have a yield farm where you get like 500%. If you're a finance person and you're looking into space, this is what you're looking at, right? Now, I would say the tide is going to go out at some point because these things are not sustainable. And what will remain are real use cases. And at that point, I think we'll see more interest in this. Got it. So what's that catalyst then to get people in? The catalyst, I say, is some of the hype dying down a little bit actually. Okay. Got a little dust settle. I forgot what's good. Yeah, exactly. I think we've had tremendous hype over the year 2021, which brings a lot of money into the space. So it helps build a lot of things. But you have to, it's kind of like poking up and cutting down at some point, you have to conform that to what actually has a point. And the point of DeFi cannot just be to trade DeFi tokens. Right now, this is what it is. I'm laughing because that's what it is right now. So okay, you have Tezos, you have Ethereum, you have Cosmos, you have Polkadot, you have all of these layer ones. What is the resolution of this layer one landscape look like? I mean, consolidation definitely is going to happen. Network effects are possible because as we've seen bridges are very difficult between chains. We keep seeing bridges getting hacked. There's natural reasons for this to happen. Blockchains are not very good at porting state from one to another. Even in ecosystem like Cosmos, you make some, you have to weaken your security assumptions as soon as you have a bridge. So I would say that that is going to leave verticals for different ones. So I think network effect can be built around their verticals in no spaces, but lots of consolidation. So are we talking zero sum game, two or three blockchains? What do you think? Well, it's not a zero sum game because the universe of what can be done is still expanding. And like I said, right now it's very, very incestuous almost. The type of trading that happened on these blockchains, there's a gigantic and tapped universe that's out there. So I think everyone has a lot of room to grow at this point, but I would say after a gross phase, and there will be some consolidation, I don't know if it's two or three, like I'm going to give the safe center sensor, which is going to be a parallel. And then the exponent of the parallel is just going to keep increasing. I like the idea of having niches for blockchains, like specific use cases. What do you think about that like Solana for gaming or carving out a specific sector of the industry for that blockchain to inhabit? Yeah, I think it's possible. One thing we have to be careful about is that a lot of times people think that blockchains are going to specialize from a technical standpoint for those niches. I think like, oh, your blockchain will be designed specifically for that use case. I don't think that's going to be really the case. I think we're going to see a lot of convergence in the design of blockchains. We're kind of circling patterns of what works in terms of scaling and what doesn't. So we'll have a lot of convergence, but what make a niche sticky is simply just a network effect of the composability between the contracts and just people being there. So you think we're kind of just waiting around until someone finds the best solution and then we kind of like iterate on that? I think we're getting there. So that kind of brings us to the trial limit, right? Decentralization, scalability and security. How is Tezos like, where do you stand in all three of those? I mean, for a while we stood back because I was looking at the solution that were available, the ways that I still wanted to do sharding in 2017. I didn't see anything that was convincing. My own approach that I published in 2017 for doing scaling was using zero knowledge proof for scalability. So that's now known as DK rollups is what you see, for example, with companies like Starkware and Starknet or Aztec or Metalabs. So these have become extremely popular at scaling solutions. Interestingly, I do think that the best pass now for scaling is a combination of a similar technology called Optimistic Rollup and Availability Sampling. So that combination I think is a winning one. And it's what we're going to start seeing being deployed. I don't really buy the very, very big, very, very fat layer one, high-supert layer one approach that Solana is doing. I think having a modular approach is going to win. So I think a lot of what you just said might have gone over whoever's lodging this head. Do you think you could like dumb it down a little bit and explain what? So the first thing is I think we can solve the tree lemma, right? I don't think it's an inscapable fact. I think you can have something that scales, that's really decentralized, and that's really safe. So that's the great news about it. The way I think about it is that when you think of a validator on a blockchain, they're really doing three different jobs. One is that they're taking all the transactions and then saying in which order this transaction should happen. And that sounds very, very trivial, who cares about the order, but it's actually a subtle problem. And that's what at the heart of solving the double spend problem. It's like you want to have an ordering. That's where consensus comes from all of that. The second thing they do is they take all this transaction and they execute them. They compute the results. And the third thing that they do is that they tell everyone what transactions have happened so that I know if someone is paying me, whether or not the payment is valid. The approach to scaling and solving the tree lemma involves unbundling those reactivities. You basically take your validators and you say you're just going to order transactions. That's all you're going to do. And we're going to rely on different solutions for making those transactions available. And we're going to rely on different solutions for executing them. The way Zika rollups work is that you outsource this to another party. It could even be a single party. Someone who's going to collect all the transactions that have been posted. They're going to compute the results. They're going to post the results. And they're going to post a cryptographic proof that the result is correct. That's a magic. So they post a very small proof. It's got 100 bytes. You spend two milliseconds on it and they're like, yep, yep. You know, you've done this calculation for five hours. You've checked everything and I am convinced it's correct. That's a magic. It's very, very magical. There's a big downside which is computing this proof is really, really expensive. It takes a lot of computing power. There's a lot of overhead. The optimistic rollup is a very similar approach. But instead of posting a proof, you just post some, you just post a bond and you say, look, I believe this is a result. And if anyone disagrees, they can, they can, they can, they can prove it very, very easily. So instead of proving that you're right, you wait until someone proves that you're wrong. So that's a, it's a very slightly different security properties, but you don't have to have this giant overhead of computing these proofs. Interesting. I, thanks, thanks for giving that definition. I appreciate it. Any final words you'd like to say to the Cointelegraph viewers? Yeah. Check out Tezos because, you know, we've been around for a while and last year has been a year of tremendous growth for the, for the project. We've had a lot of really cool applications launching on a chain, checks them out and also check out a roadmap for scaling because I think we have one of the best roadmap for scaling out there and we're executing very, very quickly on it. Thank you so much. That was Arthur Breitman from Tezos and I'm Jackson. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed this interview.