Oct. 4, 2024
XEN Token & Beyond: Founder Jack Levin’s Blueprint for the Future of Crypto and Blockchain
What does it take to build a million-strong community with just a four-person team? In this special episode of The Index, featuring the recent live stream interview on Everything SVM, host Alex Kehaya joins Jack Levin, CEO of XEN, to explore the story behind XEN Crypto—a community-driven project designed to educate others about the power of economic freedom and the potential of the XEN token. Rooted in the first principles laid out by Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper, XEN aims to redefine self-custody, transparency, and decentralization.
Jack shares how X1 is revolutionizing blockchain technology by integrating a hybrid Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) model. We break down how this unique approach combines the best of both systems, offering unparalleled decentralization, security, and scalability, setting it apart from platforms like Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. Learn about XEN’s mission to empower individuals to mint their tokens, contribute to a collaborative ecosystem, and participate in shaping a future where open-source innovation drives the blockchain industry forward.
Tune in for an inspiring conversation on building value from the ground up and the impact of community-led development on the crypto space.
Check out XEN: https://www.xencrypto.io/
Show Links
The Index
X Channel
YouTube
Host - Alex Kehaya
Producer - Shawn Nova
Chapters
00:00 - Blockchain Platform Mantis Simplifies Interactions
11:23 - Community-Driven Crypto Innovation and Ecosystem
25:07 - Alt SVM Chain Building Open Source
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hey everyone, it's Alex Cahaya from the Index Podcast.
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I want to tell you about Mantis, a groundbreaking platform that's simplifying the way we interact across blockchains.
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If you're a developer or just into DeFi, you'll want to pay attention.
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Mantis enables trust-minimized transactions across different chains, letting you trade or execute actions seamlessly while getting the best possible outcome, all without the usual complexities.
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Imagine being able to move assets and settle transactions across blockchains easily, with maximum value extraction, all while staying secure and decentralized.
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That is what Mantis is bringing to the table.
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Mantis is an official sponsor of the Index podcast, and their founder, omar, and I regularly host a new live stream series on x called everything svm.
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We have these live streams weekly and if you want to keep up with what's happening in the salon ecosystem, especially as it relates to the new innovative deployments of the salon, a virtual machine, you should tune into this live stream.
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Check them out at mantisapp and follow them on X at Mantis M-A-N-T-I-S At the Index.
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We believe that people are worth knowing and we thank Mantis for enabling us to tell the stories of the people who are building the future of the internet.
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We'll see you on the other side.
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Welcome to the SVM.
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I'm here with Mr Jack Levin from Zen.
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We'll get into talking more about what they're building in a second from Zen We'll get into talking more about what they're building in a second.
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But before I do that, I just want to thank our sponsor, mantis.
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They're now an official sponsor of the index podcast and the everything SVM live stream.
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If you're a developer just into DeFi, you want to pay attention to Mantis.
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They enable trustimized transactions across different chains, letting you trade or execute actions seamlessly while getting the best possible outcome, all without the usual complexity.
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Like I said, they're an official sponsor.
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You can find them at mantisapp and follow them at Mantis on X.
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Jack, thanks so much for being here.
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We got the chance to catch up a couple of weeks back and your story is pretty incredible.
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Do you want to maybe just tell people a little bit about who you are and why you're here building in this space, and then we'll kind of get into what Zen is.
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Sure, so definitely got into the space I would say mostly by accident, and when I say the space, into the crypto world itself.
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So I learned about Bitcoin in 2011 from my former Google buddies.
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We actually had lunch and somebody was making jokes that you can use Bitcoin to buy bazookas and do other crazy things.
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Back in 2011, I was running this company called ImageShack and I still run it.
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It's still live and functioning, but I had a number of data centers that I figured I could use the excess power of to launch mining operation, and so I started to mine Bitcoin with GPUs from 2011 for about two and a half years maybe three years, I actually forget and I joined the bitcointalkorg and I'm still like a member there, like junior member or something like that.
00:03:43.093 --> 00:03:52.408
I don't post a lot, but it was a cool experience to get into proof-of-work mining and moving forward in like.
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Basically, a couple of years ago we launched the project on Ethereum and actually within the Ethereum ecosystem, we call the project Zen.
00:04:00.912 --> 00:04:23.983
The project Zen and Zen X-E-N is basically modeled after proof of work with Bitcoin, but except it's using a smart contract where you get to choose how long you should be waiting until you get your tokens, and also, based on how much gas you pay, you can actually get more tokens on the initial investment.
00:04:23.983 --> 00:04:37.142
So if you look at it from a traditional finance, it almost represents a model of tokenizing the block space plus how much you have paid for the block space.
00:04:37.142 --> 00:04:45.910
So, like specifically, when the gas is low, you can get a start on your minting and mining operation for Zen relatively cheap.
00:04:45.910 --> 00:04:53.831
And then if you're willing to wait, let's say 400 days, then you can end up with a lot more tokens that are fairly minted.
00:04:53.831 --> 00:04:59.271
And when I say fairly minted, the contract dropped 2022, october 8th.
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There was no pre-mine, pre-mint, no admin keys.
00:05:01.968 --> 00:05:03.286
The contract is fully immutable.
00:05:03.286 --> 00:05:03.954
It follows first principles of crypto.
00:05:03.954 --> 00:05:03.709
There was no pre-mine, pre-mint, no admin keys.
00:05:03.709 --> 00:05:03.658
The contract is fully immutable.
00:05:03.658 --> 00:05:17.093
It follows first principles of crypto and if you get in into it, you basically compete with the rest of the people out there for the allocation that the contract basically prints for you or mints for you, which is very similar to Bitcoin.
00:05:17.093 --> 00:05:23.634
So with Bitcoin you have difficulty of the network, plus you also have the expense of electricity.
00:05:23.634 --> 00:05:26.901
So that's the bitcoin's configuration approval work.
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With zen.
00:05:27.783 --> 00:05:40.601
On ethereum, you have your gas costs, which is basically electricity, or the difficulty of getting in into the system by paying either medium amount of dollars or you obviously pay with eth.
00:05:40.601 --> 00:05:43.387
The, if you pay for gas, obviously gets burned.
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So it's actually very, very healthy for Ethereum because it burns a lot of ETH.
00:05:46.713 --> 00:06:14.954
And you get this Zen derivative at the end of your minting period and you also specify the minting time, like how long your minter is basically functioning, and you can go as short as a single day or as long as like 500 days, and so you compete with other people to get in into the system at the lowest possible gas, where Gui is the lowest, and if you're lucky, like last weekend, I think the Gui was 0.5.
00:06:14.954 --> 00:06:17.766
And now it's 2.5.
00:06:17.766 --> 00:06:20.115
But during the bull cycle it goes up to 100.
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I would say on average it's about 50.
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So you can imagine you can basically get into the production of Xen at very, very low cost, like 100 times less or 10 times less, based on the time of the day.
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After we launched Xen on Ethereum, we actually saw that it got quite popular.
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It pushed the gas cost for pretty much everybody on Ethereum and it exposed Ethereum's weakness.
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It pushed the gas cost for pretty much everybody on Ethereum and it exposed Ethereum's weakness, obviously, because Ethereum has this thing.
00:06:49.550 --> 00:07:13.129
It's based on Nakamoto consensus, where every block is sequential and the execution of your transaction flow is run by a single thread, and so you have this global block competition to be included in the block and if there's a lot of Zenmints coming in, basically people are trying to compete for the cheapest gas, but they push the gas above the nominal condition.
00:07:13.129 --> 00:07:23.165
And so what happens on Ethereum is that if you're doing swaps for some meme coins or you're participating in DeFi, all of a sudden the gas is very, very high for you, no matter what you do.
00:07:23.980 --> 00:07:34.326
And so after we saw that, after a couple of months, we just decided to launch on Polygon, and Polygon was a lot less expensive because it runs somewhat different consensus.
00:07:34.326 --> 00:07:35.911
It only has like 100 nodes.
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I believe it's not as decentralized, obviously, as Ethereum.
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And so what we saw?
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We saw a different problem.
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We saw that we pretty much killed all of the RPC nodes.
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The RPC nodes could not handle the onslaught of all of those Zen minters that were coming in trying to grab as much supply as they could.
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The other thing I want to mention that Zen supply is not infinite.
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It pretty much ends after eight years, from October 8th 2022.
00:08:04.846 --> 00:08:22.672
It has the formula that basically decreases the inflation rewards to you as the time goes by, and actually I just saw a chart posted where you could see that there's a deflationary or disinflationary curve affecting the release of the tokens.
00:08:23.279 --> 00:09:06.759
And so, after we launched the Polygon, we just decided that maybe it's a good idea to launch on all of the popular EVM chains, and so we launched on Phantom Binance, moonbeam, which is the Polkadot ecosystem EVM compatible chain, also EVMOS, which is the Cosmos compatible EVM chain as well, and there were like many others and they're all listed on Zennetwork, you can see them and that allowed people to basically get into a choice to participate within the ecosystem in a chain that they liked and obviously, like Ethereum, mainnet was the most popular one because that's where you could make the most money, but it costs you the most one because that's where you could make the most money, but it costs you the most.
00:09:06.759 --> 00:09:30.206
And so a couple of months ago, the community that have grown quite a bit, which is, I think, over a million people right now they asked to see if we can go to the first non-EVM chain, which was basically Solana, and so we took what we learned from the rest of the EVM universe out there and designed a system that allows for mining of Xen on Solana.
00:09:30.206 --> 00:09:44.465
That's called SolXen, which is basically running Because Solana does not have the Nakamoto consensus single threading that actually ends up doing a global auction for all of the transactions.
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They actually have the local fee markets.
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What we decided to do is not to create a contract that competes on the fees, because the fee is going to be kind of low anyway.
00:09:55.028 --> 00:10:04.684
So what we did instead we designed the contract for the users to compete on the compute units, and so in Solana, the block space is measured in a couple of things, and one of those most important elements is CU, or compute units.
00:10:04.653 --> 00:10:08.654
And so in Solana, the block space is measured in a couple of things, and one of those most important elements is CU, or compute units.
00:10:09.215 --> 00:10:11.701
There's about 48 million of the units there per block.
00:10:12.221 --> 00:10:47.888
Every block ends up being produced every 400 milliseconds, and so the contract that we call Solzen, that you can find more details on solzenio, runs a calculation to find a hash with a particular target on the validator itself, and specifically in Solana, speak, it would be a leader that's currently taking transactions, so that leader will receive your transaction, execute a search for a target within the cryptographic hash that's currently running CASAC256, which is like one of the common hashing algorithms.
00:10:47.888 --> 00:10:50.067
If you find the target, you get a report.
00:10:50.067 --> 00:10:56.168
If you don't find the target, well, better luck next time you run another transaction, like you can run a bot or you can just click a button.
00:10:56.168 --> 00:11:05.429
Point is is that the hashing algorithm actually takes quite a bit of CU, and this CU is the difficulty.
00:11:05.429 --> 00:11:09.051
So like CU is limited to 48 million and you cannot have more than 48.
00:11:09.051 --> 00:11:22.306
And you end up competing with the rest of the ecosystem to mine Solzen on Solana, similar to how you're mining Zen on EVM ecosystem, and so that's kind of like where we are today.
00:11:23.229 --> 00:11:25.741
Yeah, so one of the things I got really excited about.
00:11:25.741 --> 00:11:31.828
There's a lot of things that I like about your project, but one of them is just like how huge your community is and how small your team is.
00:11:31.828 --> 00:11:33.211
How many people are on the team?
00:11:34.039 --> 00:11:36.788
So it's myself and three other people.
00:11:38.041 --> 00:11:45.933
So four people built a million person community and a token that is one of the top used tokens on Ethereum.
00:11:45.933 --> 00:11:50.369
I mean, if we just share this screen, we're going to pull up that EtherScan.
00:11:50.369 --> 00:11:52.153
What are we seeing here?
00:11:52.941 --> 00:11:56.408
So this is the today's snapshot of EtherScan.
00:11:56.408 --> 00:12:07.995
You can go to etherscanio, go to resources, top stats, and they have the link to the top tokens by the total uniques.
00:12:07.995 --> 00:12:21.393
In this particular case, total uniques are the number of addresses that are currently holding Zen in their wallets, and this number 175,000, basically is the number of wallets of the total holders.
00:12:21.393 --> 00:12:33.451
If you go to Zen contract on the EtherScan and click on it and go to holders view, you will see 175,000 holders of Zen.
00:12:33.451 --> 00:12:39.187
And the reason why there's so much is because, well, it is basically free crypto.
00:12:39.187 --> 00:12:40.490
Nobody's selling it to you.
00:12:40.490 --> 00:12:51.029
You're using the blockchain itself to generate it, which is very unique in the smart contract world, because usually there aren't really that many fair launches.
00:12:51.029 --> 00:13:04.389
Fair launch meaning that somebody does not actually pre-mint, pre-mines the assets and then sells it to you as if it's an ICO, or makes the market for you by having some sort of like a liquidity pool that sells to you.
00:13:04.389 --> 00:13:06.152
Here there's no sellers.
00:13:06.152 --> 00:13:11.982
You're making the crypto yourself and then you can make the market yourself.
00:13:11.982 --> 00:13:15.900
If there's buyers, well, you can make profit if there's no buyers, so you can hold on to it.
00:13:15.900 --> 00:13:17.725
You can also stake it for yield.
00:13:17.725 --> 00:13:21.061
There's like a way to do it where you get like 15 percent per year.
00:13:21.061 --> 00:13:29.303
So it's kind of like true DeFi, borrowing the conceptual elements of Bitcoin implemented in the smart contract.
00:13:29.904 --> 00:13:36.544
And so we have been the number three token on Ethereum for the last two years, next to USDT and USDC.
00:13:36.544 --> 00:13:49.590
So USDT and USDC is kind of like the funnel tokens, where, ultimately, people end up holding a lot of money there and they're using it as a transitional cryptocurrency to move between tokens, right.
00:13:49.590 --> 00:14:05.506
So there's a lot of pairs between USDT and USDC, and so ZEN happens to be the number three just because it's really capturing the sort of desire of the people to get into the project fairly and to produce this cryptocurrency, similar to how you have done with Bitcoin.
00:14:05.506 --> 00:14:12.143
So, anyway, for anybody out there who desire of the people to get into the project fairly and to produce this cryptocurrency similar to how you have done with Bitcoin.
00:14:12.143 --> 00:14:21.246
So, anyway, for anybody out there who did not get a chance to get into Bitcoin, this is your chance to make crypto for yourself, as if you step into a time machine and mining Bitcoin back in 2010.
00:14:22.109 --> 00:14:29.182
Yeah, it's pretty cool and because it's open source, I mean, you guys have had a lot of other people contribute to it and do things with it, right, I mean?
00:14:29.182 --> 00:14:30.707
And that's been part of your growth strategy.
00:14:30.707 --> 00:14:32.166
Can you talk about that a little bit more?
00:14:33.279 --> 00:14:33.461
Yeah.
00:14:33.461 --> 00:14:45.379
So community is pretty large and a lot of people are actually contributing the resources, whether they're running the dashboards or some sort of like analytics software elements.
00:14:45.379 --> 00:15:01.668
So, for example, zenpub is this giant resource that's pulling data from all of the Zen related projects, presenting charts and, you know, data tables where you can learn more and glimpse into the activity of the Zen universe.
00:15:01.668 --> 00:15:13.368
And there's like one guy in Canada that just loves data engineering and loves just getting things polished so that it could be visualized on the webpage.
00:15:13.368 --> 00:15:17.610
So that's basically the website right there that we're looking at.
00:15:17.610 --> 00:15:22.600
There's another one called zenturboio, I believe, or maybe it's com, I forget.
00:15:23.201 --> 00:15:32.042
And so, ultimately, because this crypto, literally you know your own, you made it by yourself, nobody sold it to you.
00:15:32.042 --> 00:15:40.431
There is no the sort of feeling that the, the founding team, should be doing everything because, because it is, it is a common cryptocurrency.
00:15:40.431 --> 00:15:47.511
Everybody kind of holds it, they can get in into it by developing interesting tools and you know various things.
00:15:47.511 --> 00:15:51.291
So it's basically like an ecosystem, similar to how you would launch a blockchain.
00:15:51.291 --> 00:16:06.812
Effectively, if you launch a blockchain, blockchain, obviously your thesis would be is publicly accessible, decentralized platform where anybody can build together, and so that's what XANA is today, except in a smart contract that kind of like belongs to the people.
00:16:07.815 --> 00:16:08.636
Just build together.
00:16:08.636 --> 00:16:10.962
That is actually the why of APK Labs.
00:16:10.962 --> 00:16:19.355
That's like our tagline, because we believe open source is the purest form of innovation and I think your approach is really incredible and a great example for other people.
00:16:19.355 --> 00:16:21.080
It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show.
00:16:21.080 --> 00:16:24.216
Let's get into like the SVM piece of this a little bit more.
00:16:24.216 --> 00:16:29.697
You guys launched onto the Solana mainnet and then now you're working on this thing called X1.
00:16:29.697 --> 00:16:33.283
What is X1 and how did you get to the idea to even work?
00:16:33.283 --> 00:16:36.136
What was the inspiration to actually build your own L1?
00:16:36.818 --> 00:16:42.592
So it actually basically community inspired project, just like Zen was.
00:16:42.592 --> 00:17:02.235
So Zen was community inspired because I was just doing streams with the Hexagon community, hexcom that was the people that got me into streaming with them, that community that was, just like you know, commenting on my stream saying when's new token launch, or something like that, which I thought was always like a joke.
00:17:02.235 --> 00:17:15.519
But then I thought about it seriously and I said, well, if community wants a token, we should like do something, but it really should be following first principles, because there isn't enough of the like pure crypto projects that follow the core innovation of Bitcoin.
00:17:15.519 --> 00:17:56.115
And so with X1, which is our blockchain that's currently in the works, community also asked to get the platform off the ground, where the idea is that you have all these end ecosystems out there across different blockchains and we want to actually have those people given the choice to upgrade their Zen tokens to X1 native cryptocurrency, and that's like one of the most organic ways to onboard a very, very large million people community into a blockchain without hyping the blockchain first.
00:17:56.557 --> 00:18:15.432
So there's a lot of blockchains out there that raise a lot of money and they're like hey, you know, we're going to give everybody dollars, just come and most of those projects they pump earlier due to some sort of like narrative that's getting wins and then when the VCs dump, well, the chart will end up looking like Celestia.
00:18:15.432 --> 00:18:22.717
So if we look at Celestia chart, before Ethereum got their blobs out, celestia was pumping and I think it was above $10.
00:18:22.717 --> 00:18:23.839
Now it's back to $2.
00:18:23.839 --> 00:18:30.901
And that's because there aren't really that many people on Celestia or on Aptos, for example.
00:18:30.901 --> 00:18:37.617
So Aptos has really really cool innovations behind their technology, but they really don't have community.
00:18:38.672 --> 00:18:41.836
And so what we're doing with X1, we're kind of like approaching an universe.
00:18:41.836 --> 00:19:02.340
We have this large group of holders of Xen assets that we want to give a path towards X1 and bring everybody together across this one relatively large platform that can basically consolidate everybody in.
00:19:02.340 --> 00:19:04.438
And, of course, that is not enforced.
00:19:04.438 --> 00:19:09.982
If you want to stay on Ethereum, if you want to stay on Fantom or Binance or Polygon, by all means stay there.
00:19:09.982 --> 00:19:15.612
Polygon, by all means stay there.
00:19:15.612 --> 00:19:18.818
But we want people to have an option to go into X1 through the paths that we'll be creating across all those chains.
00:19:19.320 --> 00:19:20.683
You've got this huge community.
00:19:20.683 --> 00:19:26.332
They were like when token, and at first you rejected that idea and then you were like, well, maybe we should give them the token.
00:19:26.332 --> 00:19:30.932
There was this story you told me last time we talked about like you posted some video to Twitter.
00:19:30.932 --> 00:19:35.124
You were like hacking on the validator code or something and you posted a video of it.
00:19:35.124 --> 00:19:35.846
Can you talk about that?
00:19:36.426 --> 00:19:38.231
was that the solana solana?
00:19:38.271 --> 00:19:46.330
node yeah so, anyway, as zen landed in all those chains, it literally pushed all those chains to the limit.
00:19:46.330 --> 00:19:52.753
So ethereum's gas just went through the roof and ethereum turned deflationary from october 8th 2022.
00:19:52.753 --> 00:19:55.461
Polyggon's RPC servers died.
00:19:55.461 --> 00:19:57.013
Binance just got stuck.
00:19:57.013 --> 00:20:08.832
Nobody could transact on Binance, and there were a couple of chains where they just actually started to censor Zen contracts, exposing themselves not being decentralized.
00:20:09.011 --> 00:20:15.671
So the community quote unquote decided that Zen is bad, and ETHMOS is one of those examples.
00:20:15.671 --> 00:20:21.472
They basically said that, look, your community came to ETHMOS and you took all of the block space.
00:20:21.472 --> 00:21:04.853
There's nothing else that exists now except Zen on ETHMOS, and we really like to give capacity to the rest of the builders, which I kind of get, but the problem is that they have initially underpriced the block space, and so Zen obviously came and ate it all, and so, should they have done a better economic design, it would not have happened, and maybe their validators would have gotten paid through either burn or some sort of like other feature, but anyway, so EVEMOS basically now censoring Zen, and so, looking at this whole EVM ecosystem, we thought that, well, definitely we could maybe make a better EVM, and so we decided to work with Phantom Codebase, and as we worked with it.
00:21:04.853 --> 00:21:08.962
We actually pushed the TPS to about 9,000, which is pretty great.
00:21:08.962 --> 00:21:12.577
I don't think there's like any EVMs out there, maybe Monad will have like 10,000.
00:21:12.577 --> 00:21:16.959
But we pushed the Phantom's TPS to about 9,000.
00:21:16.959 --> 00:21:24.570
But then, like I kept thinking, if I were to tell anybody, tell my friends, hey, we have this really really fast EVM it's 9,000 TPS.
00:21:24.570 --> 00:21:27.114
Somebody would ask well, what about Solana?
00:21:27.114 --> 00:21:31.439
They're like doing a lot more than that, or could do a lot more than that, like 65,000.
00:21:31.439 --> 00:21:48.092
That's what the marketing material from Solana was indicating, and so I thought that well, at the very least they deserve a much deeper look into the code and into the architecture to see can we learn something from SVM that we can implement in our EVM chain, which was like the Phantom Fork at the time?
00:21:48.092 --> 00:21:49.531
It was like the Phantom Fork at the time.
00:21:50.512 --> 00:21:51.232
As I looked at it.
00:21:51.232 --> 00:22:01.378
I ran a benchmark on the Solana's SVM node and I actually did achieve 65,000 TPS pretty much day one.
00:22:01.378 --> 00:22:07.622
So for the naysayers out there that it's all not true, it actually is true.
00:22:07.622 --> 00:22:12.884
It can do 65,000 TPS on a beefy server straight out of the box.
00:22:12.884 --> 00:22:18.567
Whether the cost of the servers lead to centralization, that's like another topic we can get into.
00:22:22.170 --> 00:22:26.402
But for me, as a code monkey, I just thought that, well, hey, this is actually pretty great that you can do that many transactions per second.
00:22:26.402 --> 00:22:52.098
And so what I decided to do is I decided to tweak the node to actually run a little bit faster, and one morning I just like discovered a way to rearrange the way that the transaction scheduler works and I ended up pushing it to about 100,000 TPS, and so I published those results on Twitter, on X, where I basically said that, by the way, here's like a demo of an SVM that's doing 100,000 TPS.
00:22:52.098 --> 00:22:58.721
So, like all of the haters out there, you know, I actually have data that I can back up with the real actionable code.
00:22:58.721 --> 00:23:05.502
And I think totally responded looking at it and he asked me like a bunch of technical questions.
00:23:05.502 --> 00:23:08.598
We had a conversation and then I think that conversation ended.
00:23:08.598 --> 00:23:24.398
He's like, hey, you guys really should like fork an SVM codebase and run a public testnet to implement all of those things that you're adding and have people play with it, and that's great for the SVM ecosystem, which I totally was on board with to do.
00:23:25.180 --> 00:23:44.777
So we decided basically to stop the development of the EVM, and actually what didn't help with Phantom is that they have switched to a different consensus algorithm called Sonic, which they have had the portion of the code actually closed source, and I'm a big proponent of open source.
00:23:44.877 --> 00:24:10.248
I hate when people close source because what Phantom is doing they have forked an EVMm which is open sourced by ethereum foundation, but then they're adding other things that you cannot actually use unless you're working with phantom directly, so you cannot actually innovate on anything that they have produced, and so that was like a big downer and definitely caused us to shift gears towards like alternatives.
00:24:10.248 --> 00:24:23.762
And solana was like right there with 100,000 TPS with juiced up nodes and I thought that okay, well, definitely maybe we should just like do a testnet and get the community to run the validators and so like.
00:24:23.762 --> 00:24:25.309
Currently we have about 60 nodes running.
00:24:25.309 --> 00:24:34.730
The website is x1valonline and if you share them, bring it up, you can actually see the network is functioning.
00:24:34.730 --> 00:24:36.673
It has some minor tweaks.
00:24:36.673 --> 00:24:54.403
The scheduler works a little bit faster for transactions, so it's a tiny bit faster than solana due to the code changes as well as the fact that there isn't any meme coins and there's no pumpfun on X1.
00:24:54.403 --> 00:24:58.260
And therefore you actually get faster throughput.
00:24:58.789 --> 00:25:02.777
Some dev out there right now is starting to hack on an X1 pumpfun for sure.
00:25:03.720 --> 00:25:04.642
Yeah, and they should.
00:25:04.642 --> 00:25:06.076
We obviously welcome that.
00:25:07.010 --> 00:25:10.837
I don't know if this is the website you wanted me to show, but this has got some data on it.
00:25:10.837 --> 00:25:12.594
What was the one you wanted me to show just now?
00:25:12.615 --> 00:25:13.718
X1Val one word me to show.
00:25:13.718 --> 00:25:14.801
But this is, uh, got some data on it.
00:25:14.801 --> 00:25:16.929
What was the one you want me to show just now?
00:25:16.929 --> 00:25:25.266
X1 val one word.
00:25:25.266 --> 00:25:25.758
X1 v-a-l dot online right here.
00:25:25.758 --> 00:25:30.156
X1 nodes yeah, so you can see they're actually switching and like where your mouse is, that's where the blocks are being produced and you can see like the block latency production.
00:25:30.156 --> 00:25:31.419
So it's.
00:25:31.419 --> 00:25:34.505
It's a real network with real community nodes running it.
00:25:34.505 --> 00:25:48.375
We run one or two nodes ourselves, but the rest belong to our technical group and they're running across the world and some people are launching interesting projects on it and we're continuing to test.
00:25:48.375 --> 00:25:48.877
Basically.
00:25:49.832 --> 00:25:51.116
And it's a testnet phase right now.
00:25:51.990 --> 00:25:54.932
Yeah, so that's basically a testnet, public testnet.
00:25:54.932 --> 00:25:59.651
You can get in, get an airdrop, start kicking the tires and like, compare it to Solana.
00:25:59.651 --> 00:26:04.721
But it's fully compatible with the SVM and Rust ecosystem out there.
00:26:04.721 --> 00:26:08.717
So anything that you can run on Solana you can redeploy and test on X1.
00:26:09.538 --> 00:26:15.498
I really love your project because the open source ethos it's one of the biggest things that resonated with me when we first talked.
00:26:15.498 --> 00:26:17.577
It's the reason I came to Salon in the first place.
00:26:17.577 --> 00:26:27.739
Like totally his attitude of hey, fork this and make it better, like building together with other people to improve and having that purity in innovation is what gets me out of the bed in the morning.
00:26:28.259 --> 00:26:29.021
Yeah, that's super great.
00:26:29.021 --> 00:26:35.672
Yeah, that's super great.
00:26:35.672 --> 00:26:35.993
I totally agree.
00:26:35.993 --> 00:26:37.582
And it also, like, I think, acts as an anti-Maxi kind of like the tech you know.
00:26:37.582 --> 00:26:43.721
Like, basically, if you're a Maxi and you're afraid and you don't want anybody to do anything, well, where's the innovation going to come from?
00:26:44.250 --> 00:26:48.569
You guys have already contributed to Solana right Like to the, actually like upstream.
00:26:48.569 --> 00:26:50.711
I know we talked about that at the beginning of the show.
00:26:50.711 --> 00:26:53.893
I don't know if you can talk about it publicly, but can you talk about that?
00:26:53.893 --> 00:26:56.035
I don't know if Anza wants you to do that or not, it's written in Rust.
00:26:56.055 --> 00:26:56.835
Documentation is excellent.
00:26:56.835 --> 00:26:59.317
And so, like, my personal interest is optimization.
00:26:59.317 --> 00:27:30.555
So I come from Google, and when I was hired in Google in 1999, google had like 20 employees the founders like told me like hey, your job is to make Google run faster and I was 24 at the time.
00:27:30.555 --> 00:27:41.663
I actually, you know, was learning on the go and Google was running faster like within six months, because that was like my 100% focus on optimizing the search engine and optimizing the infrastructure behind it.
00:27:42.250 --> 00:27:53.642
And so I kind of approached SVM code base and like in Solana, with the same kind of like lens, and so I thought that, okay, so I'm running a node and there's no traffic to the node.
00:27:53.642 --> 00:27:56.554
Where do I see bottlenecks, if any?
00:27:56.554 --> 00:28:10.111
And so I immediately saw that the voting handling threads were running hot, even though there was no voting coming in from other nodes, because it just was a single node.
00:28:10.111 --> 00:28:21.742
And so, as I engaged the ANSI team, they pointed me to a piece of code asking me to take a look at it, where I saw an infinite loop running, waiting for work.
00:28:21.742 --> 00:28:27.730
So basically, it was a consumer loop that's just like was eating up resources, waiting for work to do.
00:28:27.730 --> 00:28:33.703
But while it was waiting it was just like spinning so hard it was eating the CPU of the server.
00:28:34.609 --> 00:28:52.044
And so I introduced kind of like a logic gate into that code and immediately the threads unloaded and the server actually became more quiescent, able to receive votes and process those votes without extra waiting for the CPU to be capable to do it.
00:28:52.044 --> 00:28:58.398
And so I pushed those changes as a PR to the Solana guys and they actually found a bigger problem behind it.
00:28:58.398 --> 00:29:00.455
I believe now they have fixed it.
00:29:00.455 --> 00:29:13.221
So the new code version is going to be ANSA 2.0, which will have the fix that will actually allow the servers to synchronize and run voting consensus much faster and better.
00:29:14.289 --> 00:29:28.021
Yeah, and this is why I'm so excited about the SVM space like this alt SVM space, these network extensions that people are building is because eventually the good stuff, the good ideas that come out of that come upstream, as long as you're building open source.
00:29:28.021 --> 00:29:30.541
I actually don't know what the validator code base is licensed under, but it's GPL.
00:29:30.541 --> 00:29:32.269
I actually don't know what the validator code base is licensed under but it's GPL.
00:29:33.049 --> 00:29:41.038
Yeah, okay, so it's GPL, so anything you contribute to that has to be open sourced in the future because it's GPL licensed, which is what we want.
00:29:41.631 --> 00:29:42.454
That's the way to do it.
00:29:42.454 --> 00:29:56.352
I mean, we're looking at the creation of Linux and I was a Linux user from version 0.83b, which wasn't even version 1 yet, and there were so many contributors in like back then.
00:29:56.352 --> 00:30:01.042
We used the net news or forums just basically to share, like, our insights.
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