Latest / Monero Talk / Trust-Minimized XMR Liquidity: Atomic Swaps Without Bridges or KYC with Omar Espejel | EPI 374

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Trust-Minimized XMR Liquidity: Atomic Swaps Without Bridges or KYC with Omar Espejel | EPI 374 · Monero Talk

• Doug Alright, we are live, what's going on? Omar, how's it going? Omar It was fine, just finishing my tweets announcing that we're live. Doug And yes, it should yep grow your love. Yeah, if you can't really retweet it on my end as well Yes All right guys people who are out there, please like and share retweet let's get the word out I know there's a lot of people that are uh, I think more interested than ever in privacy coins and Monero and zcash. It's stark net I know and I'm very little about stark net I all I know really is that the the guy behind it Eli Is also one of the creators of zcash? Exactly. I've been seeing them a little more a little I'm getting a little more interested I've been going down the started to go down the stark net rabbit. Oh That really I've got today. I'm gonna take a deep dive down. I'm ready to jump in You reached out to me via EML You said you were working on an interesting project That you think the Monero community would be excited about that you're that you yourself are in you know Are I'm an into Monero, right? Yeah, I think as well and that you want to essentially use stark net to do Monero atomic swaps and I I really I really don't know more than that So I would love to love to get into it But maybe before we do that you can quickly introduce yourself and then you know We could do as we do here on Monero talk I get to know you a little bit your Monero story your crypto story and then we could get into the juicy parts Omar Perfect. All right. So thank you very much for invitation. And yes, that's the story I wish to you in my email interested in participating in Monero Topia, which is happening in Mexico City, my hometown. So it's it was the best timing and yeah, happy to do something with Monero. And so, yes, I work in the Starnet Foundation. I've been working in the Starnet community for already four years. Before that, I worked in Star Wars. Eli Ben-Sasson, as you mentioned, he's the founder of Starnet, of Star Wars and creator of Starnet. But also he previously co-founded Zcash. So he's kind of like a mastermind in the theme community with everything that has to do with zero knowledge proofs, which is something that we will be using today for atomic swaps. Right. So so, yes, I'm myself. I'm also user. What most of the standard people are fans of Bitcoin and of Monero, as, of course, we believe in the same values as Monero, Bitcoin, etc. I think personally that Monero now is very relevant. He's more relevant than ever. Zcash has its own issues. I am not that much of a Zcash user, to be honest, personally, but still, Monero, I think, is it hasn't been the anonymized like Zcash has been. So I think it's surviving all this chain analysis and I'm only hoping for it to get better. And just the fact that it has been the least that so many times already shows that there's something behind it, right? Like the fear that it creates in some regulators or institutions shows that there's something there. So yes, that's why I decided to build this. I think this is a way opportunity to do it. And yes, and I think the standard values goes very hand in hand with the Monero ones. Doug Awesome, man Interesting to hear that you're a start like a stark net guy you're into the whole stark net sphere But you're more of a Monero guy than a zcash guy because I feel like stark net is very like Those two worlds are connected a lot. All right, because they share the same founder, right? Omar that's the similar technology you would say behind that you have the zero knowledge proofs. But again, I think that the fact that privacy is optional in C-CASH, I think is not a good thing. It's often that, I don't know, it's much more easier to de-anonymize. I mean, I don't know, ArtKam, I think, is the one who managed to practically tack around 50% of the users of C-CASH, which is no good. And I prefer, I think it's more user friendly. Doug transparent address, the transparent addresses, right? Exactly. Omar Something like that, 50%, 51% something like that, it was huge, and the fact that you cannot do it in Monero as easily, just because it's private by default, I think it's a huge asset that you guys have. Doug I love the Ring Signatures Cartier. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Omar Yeah, I'm working on a blog post for the Atomic Slab project, and this is one of the... So I didn't want to show my background, my real background, so I prefer to show one of the blog posts degrees that I did. Doug Thank you. That's awesome that you're out of Mexico City as well. How'd you find, just curious, how'd you find out about Monerotopia? It was just through, just from watching like Monero Talk or I'm just curious how it even came across your radar. Omar Exactly. What I mean by monotopy is saying, you see, it's the biggest monero conference out there. So it's a go-to place. And now that I will be in Mexico City for it, why not try to assist? And actually, I will be having a talk there. Thank you very much for accepting me. And I'm more excited. So if anyone wants to talk there, I will be live there. Doug Yeah, you're going to love the people that are there and everything. I'm sure you're going to have a lot of great conversations with the Monero devs as well. Omar No, and honestly, I'm very happy with the Monero community. For example, in order to build this that we are creating is, I know it's very technically difficult, to be honest. It's something that is very interesting, but it's made much more easier because a lot of coding Monero is open source, plus audited by a community. So there's a lot of community around open source in Monero. Of course, it makes sense, right? Monero open source, they seem to go hand by hand. So without all these DIA's that already builds amazing codes, for example, CRI, the Centralized Exchange or Commit Network, those guys are amazing. They publish their open source reports, and thanks to them, we managed to do, to port this into Starkman, right? So, I mean, I'm very happy, already very happy with starting with the Monero community. Doug Awesome. And so, yeah, tell us more about your Monero like crypto Monero story. Like, how did you get into Monero? When did you start, I don't know, you know, try to work out Monero? Yeah, it is, of course. Omar So, the story goes a couple of years ago, I used to have a girlfriend and she was, it was a girl named girlfriend. Doug What? Oh boy, oh boy. She got you into Manera, like Colombian government. Omar Yeah, I think most of you already know what I'm going to. But yeah, yeah, suddenly we finished the relationship. But I realized that she was, she knew where I was physically. And so she sent me an email like, I know that you're here, back in Colombia, who are you with? What the fuck are you because I'm not Colombian, Mexican, right? What are you doing here in Colombia? Who are you with? And I was like, what the fuck? How does she know when I'm in Colombia, right? So it turns out that she could track my after a lot of researching, I realized that she was tracking my Airbnb. So when I don't know if people in the audience knows this, but whenever you, you hire an Airbnb, it's published publicly. So everyone can see where you are and when you're there. So it's awful, right? So that was that one. And then I started thinking, okay, how else can she track my movements, right? So then it came to money. So, okay, I was using at that time, Ethereum, Bitcoin. So, man, I need to move out of here. I, I hired a very good VPN, proton VPN, very well, I recommend it. And then how can I move this to money? So okay, so there's e-cash, there's Monero, but Monero seems to be like the default goal for persons looking for privacy. So yeah, let's go for it and move some amount of it there and Bitcoin to Monero and never come back. Now, about this brings me to the topic today, Douglas, because the issue is that everybody did that with Binance, I think, back in 2022, right? So now you cannot do this. It's, you can't do it because it's the least. So it's, I think it's harder, harder for people at that time, like me, that were looking for privacy. And how can they find them is if it's not in some of the exchanges, right? So yes, that's basically my entry. Doug I love that it's a crazy Colombian chick that I force you to figure out how you could hide hide your money from being traced that's amazing yeah I mean Omar I'm guessing that it's not the only story out there, right? I'm guessing people in your audience already have something similar like this. Doug Yeah, everybody realizes they have a need for privacy. There's a lot of different scenarios out there. Basically, it's everybody. Most people just haven't realized it yet, that there's going to be a time when you don't want your money to be traceable. We're all using Venmo and eventually Bitcoin, which is just a Venmo replacement. It's not going to be pretty when we're all being tracked and traced. Exactly. In addition to what the government can do to it, like you said, just others that can attack you. People like you. Omar Yeah, probably secret. I love that. Doug Makes it so so very cool. All right, so that's how you so that's how you found your way to your way to your Minera And to Minero and then did you start when did you start working? I'm like thinking about like trying to contribute to Minero or you know Omar Yes. So basically, something amazing in the external community is that Star Wars, the company behind the technology, looks forward a lot. So it's developing a lot of stuff. It's shipping a lot of interesting code. So they plan an interesting move in the architecture. So we will be moving from a Poseidon hash to a Blake 2S hash. So we moved to this hashing function last month. So it will be implemented now in mainnet. So all transactions are using this new hashing function. And this hashing function goes very well with Monero. So it allows us to make transactions. For example, the plan right now with atomic swaps is for you to be able to move money from Monero and into StarNet and vice versa, only by paying around one cent of a guess. So it's cheaper than ever to make a transaction like this. So before it was much more expensive. There's a project actually that I think it was done by Farcaster, if I'm not wrong, but you managed to do atomic swaps between Ethereum and Monero. However, I don't think it came out of the ground because it was very expensive. So Doug And it was yeah, there was um, there was another implementation because she um, elizabeth aetherium Elizabeth right elizabeth aetherium. Uh, she spoke at manero topia a couple times. Yeah, she worked on Manero to aetherium atop atomic swaps And then yeah, there was there's been implementations of bitcoin to manero atomic swaps Um, so yeah, so let's get into it then so explain to me because i'm not really understand So stark net how does stark net come into play here? What technology does stark net provide and when you say you're moving? Manero into so is it an atomic swap from manero? Into stark net i'm like Okay, so you're basically atomic swapping manero for stark net and then once you're in stark net you could turn it into other cryptos It's exactly so you can Omar Basically, yes, you can do that. You can bridge your money from Monero into Starnet, and of course the swap, right? So Alice and Bob make a swap. Alice wants some Monero, for example. She's on Starnet. Maybe she has some Ethereum in Starnet, right? So she sells her Ethereum for Bob's Monero. Bob wants to get out of Monero for some reason, so he gets into Starnet, and once the money of Bob is in Starnet, he's able to, I don't know, maybe bridge it to Bitcoin, for example. There's also atomic swap between Bitcoin and Starnet, so something very good about atomic swap is that you are talking about native Monero, native Bitcoin, right? So it's much, much secure. There's not something like a trusted bridge, like a multisig bridge, something that is like a honeypot for hackers. That doesn't exist here, right? So you can bridge your, imagine that you can go from Monero to Starnet and then to Bitcoin if that's something that you want to do, or you can get into Starnet and then get into DeFi. For example, from inside Starnet, you can use your Monero that is now Ethereum or Bitcoin. You can put it as a collateral for, you know, you can ask for more money or something like that. So you get access to all the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem, right? And it's important to mention that this is not RAP Monero, right? So this is, you are RAP, you're exchanging Monero for something else in Starnet. We haven't decided what, but it could be, it could even be USDC, you know? So it's like selling your XMR for USDC, for example. So, yeah, that's the, Doug What would it compare to like what other coins are doing this and using this Omar This is a relatively new technology right now here, as far as I know, as you mentioned, there's a tonic sauce between between Bitcoin and Monero always incising 2020 or something like that. I'm actually using code from that project. I think was commit. Doug Are you familiar with the basic swap? Familiar with the pop- Omar I think basic I think this is the code also from basic swap let me check here okay I think commit convert I don't know what happened there exactly but yes this is this is the kind of code and the and we were using some of the Doug So somebody's asking for example, like how does it compare to I get wallet? Okay with them like they do it on atomic swap I don't know much about them I'm looking get them on the show as well and get them to Monero topia as well actually But they're relatively relatively new and they're doing I believe Bitcoin to Monero atomic swaps in the wallet I believe yeah, if you know about them Omar Yeah. They contact me in Twitter. They seem like amazing guys. Okay. Okay. So I am what used to be unstoppable swab also, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a monitor. Okay. Okay. Okay. So yes, taking a look here at the webpage. Um, yeah. Okay. All right. So yeah, it's a BTC to exit our, uh, swap. So yeah, you would say it's practically the same. Oh yeah. Okay. They use the adapter signatures from commit network. So it's the same process that we're using here, but they are using for Bitcoin and XMR. So you would say it's kind of like the equivalent both for star net and the Ethereum community, but we, I started to XMR to XMR. Yes. Doug And then so effectively, how will that be different? Like what will you be able to do with that versus what you can now do with something like an Eigenweil? Eigenweil, you're just going between Monero and Bitcoin, but with this, you're saying effectively you'd be able to atomic swap between multiple things, right, via StarNet. Omar Yes, so in this case the the and that's a good point totally with more about the startup But it started basically the goal that it has is to do all the heavy lifting of chain so it does a for example, you have a serial knowledge proof that you verify of chain and By mathematical magic you manage to get a result out of it so what we're doing here and is different from and it's different from my game wallet is that a In this case you're using well I don't know exactly what hell I can what it is doing it But the point here in the standard part is that you're moving all the heavy lifting of the verification of the of the With a swap into Starman's in a smart contract. So it from the side of Monero It will be like a simple a transaction I like and you don't know who who sent who and what what how much she sent to who but you it's like a simple transaction you don't know that this is a swap atomic swap, right and from the side of the star net you have a contract that does all The heavy lifting all the cryptography all the only hard part is done in the standard side So this theoretically will make it much more cheaper to do this transaction between a star net and Monero Hey, I mean, I get this is well-knowing exactly how I and what I managed to do it. I Need to do more research on it. Yeah Doug Okay. And so what other coins are already doing like atomic swaps on StarkNet? Omar Bitcoin is the only one that is doing it. As far as I know, this is not a new technology, but it's something that hasn't been implemented a lot of times before. I think it's partial because it's heavy. It's heavy and expensive to do it. So I think I need to check the fees in again wallets. I can ask Jamie Nye or something like that in a minute, but I'm guessing they will be expensive to do this swap because you're using too heavy, you could say heavy, heavy networks. And in the case of the startups, now we have certain technology that allows to be much more cartographically efficient. And yes, as far as I know from the startup, it's only Bitcoin right now. But yes, I'm happy to create something with Monero. I think it's something that is required. Particularly, I mean, the end goal here, the thesis that we're looking for is, I mean, the regulators have been squeezing a lot Monero, right? Over all privacy coins. So I think this is great, or might create a liquidity crisis very soon. Like it's getting harder than ever to get into Monero, and harder than ever to get out of Monero, right? So it started as a well-connected blockchain with a lot of liquidity. So the goal here would be to help provide this trustless liquidity into Monero. But again, I'm not asking you to trust me. This is why it's called trustless. It's more of a mathematical proof and a system that use cryptography to make it as secure as it could be. You're basically not trusting no one, right? Doug Right, right, right. Yeah, no, we definitely need more on and off ramps when you decide like this is very exciting Wait, this is exactly what we need And so you're familiar with Sarai decks. Yes. We're using some Sarai decks Omar exposing in our project. Doug Okay. Now, Sarai DEX uses liquidity pools, right? It's a different kind of a different architecture than what you're just talking about, pure atomic AOPs. Maybe help me understand that because in my understanding, with atomic swaps, how do you make that kind of scale, right? With Sarai DEX, with liquidity pools, theoretically, you make those liquidity pools large. You can move large amounts of Monero in and out of there, right? You don't have to wait for another trader on the other side to be ready to trade. You could just always trade with that liquidity pool. How would things look with this implementation that you're talking about? How do you get it to the point where it's kind of as seamless as a regular instant swap that we now do, right? Like on centralized swappers? Omar Excellent. So this question then is, so we don't have a lot of information yet, like the part of the liquidity, how can we provide liquidity is something for tomorrow. Right now what we're having is the technology behind it. This will be more of a business case. How can we manage to get liquidity? Most likely we will be able to use, for example, inject some artificial liquidity. I don't like, for example, let's say $10,000. And from that $10,000, put it on a front end. And you can think of it like a peer-to-peer network, right? So you see all the offerings from the other side. Because this is a peer-to-peer transaction. It's not from a bigger pool. It's a peer-to-peer transaction. So you check who's selling Monero, who's selling Ethereum and Starnet, then you agree on a price. We need to do a proper mechanism to define a proper price. Well, you agree on a price and then you make the transaction. The magic behind this is that there's no way that you can. There's no way, really no way, that this is called an atomic swap. An atomic comes from a swap or a transaction where no one, either both parties win or both parties lose, right? So there's no way where one party comes with all the money from the other person and also from his money, right? So this is something that we are enforcing here, right? So it's a peer-to-peer transaction with cryptography proofs that allow you to make sure that it's atomic, right? And now that we're talking about Sarai, I need to say that we're using a lot of Sarai research and technology here. And again, I'm very thankful to the community because, yeah, it's open source and Sarai code is amazing. So, for example, we're using adapter signatures and the Leq proofs from them. We're using their libraries for this. So without their research, their technology, and without it being open source and outlets, we couldn't be doing what we're doing now, right? So, yeah, it's because of them. Doug That's that's great to hear and I can't wait to that Sarai Dex launches oh my god but it's great to hear that it's already had an impact and people are already using the code that's coming Omar I love it. It's amazing. It's part of why we want to do it also open source, right? If they're doing open source, want to do open source, ensure that someone else will come and use part of our code and so on. So, yeah, I was very happy with this. Doug When you say we, who is we? So who's working on it? Like, who's this team that's working on this? Omar Well, it's me as the main person working on it and a couple more persons from the community. I don't know if they will be comfortable with me telling their names here, but yeah, we got a couple of persons more, but I think it started as a proof of concept, right? But it's getting more and more power. We're using more and more amazing libraries like this one from Sarai. So I think my expectation here is that more people from the Sarai community who are hardcore developers will join because they believe in this, right? They believe in Seacatch, for example. They believe in Monero. It's just a matter that they need a place where to contribute, right? So I think, to be honest, among the Ethereum community, I think the Starnet and Star War One are the most technically advanced, right? So I'm sure that once this gets a little bit more abstraction, we will get to have a lot of amazing engineers working on this and I don't know, yeah, we've got a mission here and no, yeah, we'll... Doug Is it funded in any way, or you just- No, you're just pursuing this with your own time. Omar Yeah, we're pursuing this with our own time. It's not funded. We want to get it audited, so I think we will make a small ask there to, I don't know, inside the standard community itself to see if we managed to get it audited and then launch it. But it's not funded. No, it's completely open source. It's free for everyone to use. I don't know. Eventually, we can turn this into an actual frontend with a company. Technology is down there. It's just a matter of making it a business decision. Doug Awesome, man, very exciting And so yeah, you mentioned zcash, right? Cuz there's a lot of the stark neck guys. I imagine are into zcash So is there already? There's not I'm surprised there's not already like zcash atomic swaps on stark net Omar There is no, there is no, I don't know exactly the reason why Google has to be honest. We're working on a kind of like a different kind of bridge between Starnet and Seacash, but I don't have exactly the details. But yeah, there's, we can say that both are kind of broader projects, right? We have Elevens as well, he's an amazing founder. All the things that he managed to create this amazing, technically wise, they are brutal. And again, thanks to their technology, pros of technology from the Monero side, I think this is that unique moment where we can do this, right? This wouldn't be, we could do this like maybe one year ago, but the Serai code maybe wasn't audited yet. I think the Serai code was audited on May, May 2025. So it's very recently audited, right? And from the Starnet side, the release of the new Blake Toews function to hash was released last month, right? So we're in a special particular moment in time when we're able to do this, right? Okay. Doug Yeah, Ian, could it could it eventually be that this would allow for like atomic like you could effectively atomic swap from a narrow into Zcash or vice versa via start bet is that Omar I think we can do it, I think we can do it. The integration between Starlight and C-Cache, so there's a whole team from Starlight that is working on this, integrating Starlight and C-Cache as much as possible. So actually one of the things, so the point that we have right now is, and as I know that you and your audience are aware, there's nothing like 100% privacy, right? So we're trying to maximize the privacy here, but of course we're using something completely private like Monero with something that is public like Starlight. So how can we manage to do this as private as possible? We have our own ways to, we're trying to ideate how to do this and also using the best practices from, for example, a commit network and so on, but there are some ways to make it even more private. For example, instead of using starting directly, we can use C-Cache. So I don't know exactly how it will work. It's something that we are thinking about it, but for example, what if we pass Monero through C-Cache and then through Starlight? So it will be like a triple step, but it's like when you have a VPN and you use like a double, I don't know how to call it, but you tag to one country, for example, Sweden, which is a very privacy respecting country, could be Switzerland, and then you go to another country and then it shows that you're maybe in the States when you're actually in Mexico, for example, but you pass through Switzerland. So those kinds of VPNs, it's kind of like similar to this. You go to C-Cache and then to Starlight and then tap into the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So it's something that we can do and we could make something that is, of course, a little bit more expensive, but much more private, something like a computer beast that has never been done before. Doug Yeah, so tell us more about StarkNet, then, because I really don't know much about it. I mean, why isn't StarkNet private? Given that Eli built it, he's using zero-knowledge proofs, I guess, for the scalability component, but why not also for the privacy component to achieve? What is the goal with StarkNet? What kind of e-ability does it provide that other cryptos don't provide? Omar So, you would say that, for example, Starboard, a company that is behind, so, I work in the Starboard Foundation, but there's also Starboard, who is the technical arm of the creation of Starboard. And their goal is to take the Stark proof, the Stark proof, which is a serial knowledge proof, to make use, the best use as possible from the Stark, right? So, they create this language called Cairo, and they are implemented wherever they can, right? Where it makes sense to bring this Stark proof, this cryptography that they created. So, they are applying it to blockchain because it makes sense to apply it in blockchain right now. It's like the straight path forward to do it, right? So, and actually my code for this atomic slops is practically almost purely Cairo, right? So, the end goal for Starboard is to, I mean, and this is, I'm talking personally, I'm not representing the Starboard Foundation or Starboard here, but as far as I know, their goal is to expand the usage of these cryptography proofs that we will be using, of course, in this swapping. And from a Starklet side, our goal is to scale Ethereum. However, we're also scaling Bitcoin right now. So, it's something that we have in the roadmap right now, trying to scale Bitcoin the same as Monero, provide access to liquidity, access to DeFi to holders of Bitcoin, right? So, why it's not private? Because exactly as you mentioned, the serial knowledge component is being used to practically sip data, right? Like you have a lot of information of chain, you sip it as if you were sipping a lot of documents in your computer and then you send it to the main chain where there's a verifier that verifies that this proof is correct and everything goes well, right? So, now the next step is to think about privacy. Privacy is a whole other beast, right? Today, there's not a single, I'm trying to think, but there's not a single chain that has smart contracts in it that is completely private. So, for example, we have Aztec, which is going to come soon into mainnet, but it's not private yet, right? So, it's completely private, but it's not in mainnet yet. I think we have also Polygon, CK, Doug Darkfie is trying to be that, Tari is trying to be that, but they're not fully, I haven't launched their second major, which has all the smart contracts. And then there's, there's Zanno. I'm not okay with Zanno. No, Zanno has, yeah, Zanno is something you should take a look, they'll be at Monero Topia. Right. Okay, let me. And they were, the creator of Zanno was one of the, was the guy that created the first implementation of the crypto protocol that became Monero, actually. Yeah, they have privacy. It's, you know, so it's, it's, it's built similar to Monero. So, you know, it's similar to Monero. It's same, same crypto code. It has smart contracts built into it. But still, it's not, it's, it's limited a little bit of what you could do. You know, they're still working, you know, obviously evolving. But yeah, like you said, I don't think there's anything that's like seamlessly has smart contracts that's private by default. Omar Yeah, it also has been barrel-tested, right, like it has liquid on top of it, and talking about millions of dollars on top of it, it has proven to be working, right? So, however the artists... Doug Is the idea for Stark net to add privacy is that part of it? Yes Omar Part of the roadmap is to have privacy at different layers. Not natively, like for example Aztec, which is the one I'm most familiar with, both to have, for example, privacy transactions. You have a pool and you put that amount in the pool so you don't know exactly who you send money to, but you are able to see that you interacted with this pool. We're exploring other kind of privacy using the Starkproofs, but yes, it's a priority for Starland this year, so it's going to be the first year that we put a lot of effort into privacy. Part of it involves the integration of see how can we integrate SeaCache with Starland in some way and on the other side help to integrate more narrow and Starland in some way, which is this order for that that we're creating here. Doug Awesome, man. Awesome. Yeah, if there's uh, if there's anybody else you think we should try to get to attend that you know from your from your neck of the woods in the stark net community or Uh, even in the zcash community if you have any crossover people that are like zcash stark net guys Omar I know who, I know who. But, so you're also interesting to see cash, okay? That's... Doug Yeah, it was a few minutes. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, Monero, well, Monero topi itself, right? We try to open it up to more than just Monero. I want it to be, you know, where the best, let the best privacy tech win, right? And it stays gassed out in the open. Obviously, Monero dominates there. It's the most, most. So he's not afraid of it. Yes, yeah, yeah, not afraid. And if anything, I see it as the only way we could, you know, stay on top, right? We've got to learn. We've got to understand what others are doing. It will amet the things that, you know, that work. And then ZCatch itself, I have high respect for that project, given what it's achieved to date. I used to be much more critical of it, but it's overcome a lot of its major shortcomings that it initially had. No longer has the trust set up, which I think is the biggest thing. It's, you know, more scalable, all this stuff. So there's some interesting things that they're doing and I think they've earned respect over the years. And then also it's just different than Monero in that it integrates better with the established banking system, right? Obviously in Monero, the idea is F you, we want nothing to do with it. We have our own system over here. We don't care if you list this on your exchanges. We're never going to bend the knee. We're never going to add, you know, transparent addresses to be listed on exchanges. ZCatch is like, you know, we'll have these, and there's something to be said for that, right? It allows more liquidity to flow into it from centralized exchanges. So for all these reasons, you know, I definitely, and trying to get them involved in Aerotopia, but they're because of all the friction between the communities, they don't want, they don't want just a bit. So maybe you could be a good bridge because you're kind of like in, I think. Omar Of course, I know someone who is... I will ask them, of course, but I think they will be very interested and yeah, I think also I also read that the Sykesh, I mean, from the technical side, they are amazing, they are doing very interesting things and yes, they are acting very intelligent. It's just that I'm a little bit more of a monero than you were, personally. Doug Yeah, well and I love that. I love that about you. That's the fact that you work on stark that but you're more with that's Omar There's a lot of people in the Star Wars ecosystem that are Monero people. Let me tell you about this. Sometimes we get criticized a lot for interacting with other blockchains that are not ETU, for example. I mean, ETU is amazing in a lot of sense, of course, but there's more than it. In this case, for example, Monero has a lot of assets that we can use, right? So why not make this option for both worlds to join each other? I think it would be great for Monero's side because it will be able to access more liquidity, it will be able to access DeFi, the central finance in Ethereum, which is huge. And for the ETU people, they will be able to access Monero in a simpler way, get access to privacy. I mean, privacy in the default go-to when someone is looking for privacy, right? So yeah, I think it's good for everyone here. Doug Mm-hmm. Do you follow Monero development closely? Have you follow the Do you keep up with the be honest? Omar I'm relatively new in this. Since I started developing this, I've been following the community, I've been following these open source repositories, these recent audits. I also saw that there's something very cool happening in 2026, right? Some upgrades are going to be amazing. Doug Full shame, membership proofs. Omar Yeah, okay, okay. Doug Yeah, I don't know how closely you follow that, but that studying upgrade that's coming down the pipe for Monero, yeah. Amazing. Omar I love that it's not a static community, right? It's a set of development taking... That development is happening though, yeah. We're happy to contribute wherever we can, for example, with this repo. I mean, for everyone in the audience here, if you are listening to us, I think maybe my only ask would be for you to look into the code. Do not trust me about what I'm telling you here. Just verify it by yourself. Take a look, see if there's something that you think could be better. For example, as you mentioned before, the Eigen wallets people reach out to me and they told me, hey, you need to change this part because this will be much better if you want to apply it. So I implemented some of Eigen wallets. I think I implemented their wallet RPC, Monero RPC. So I used it instead of one that I developed myself. So it's much better now. And I didn't know about it. It was only because they reached out to me. So yes, so thank you very much for that. And yes, everyone here, if you're interested, look at the code. And if you want to participate, also reach out to me. And yeah, this is an open source project. And I think we can do something very cool here. Doug You have, uh, some technical question here. I don't know somebody saying, uh, whose chain is that? So in referring to the atomic swaps, when we were talking about them before between Monero and stark net whose chain is the hash time lock on two chains or three chains, uh, true atomic, only two chains. Yeah. They have you were talking about the atomic cell. Omar perfect so let me look exactly at the where the hash lock is okay so it's in the started network both let me look for the exact details here in the repo but just a second so this is something that was very difficult to do we need to we need to apply some changes after looking into the AM wallet code but yeah it's used into in the Cairo in the Cairo part so yeah it's a forced location yes we have it in the contract storage yeah in the constructor so yes it's in the standard part not on Monero so this is the an issue that we have at the beginning is that we implemented also in Monero but we realized that there was a recent upgrade in Monero that didn't allow for something like this I don't exactly remember how so we implemented it on the standard so it's on the standard side so practically all the heavy lifting is in started nothing happens in Monero aside from the so so we have a safe where where the money is stored and this basically you can see it like a simple transaction between two parties in Monero as simple as that could be and from the standard side the hash lock is happening all the time value is there yes I don't know if there's some more questions from that part I can Doug I don't know if this is a question seems it's fortunate enough. Somebody's just I think we're heavily that Speaker 2 Do you love coffee and Monero as much as we do? Consider making gratuitous.org your daily cup. Pay with Monero for premium fresh beans and if you like what you taste, send a digital cash tip directly to the farmers that made it possible. Proceeds help us grow this channel, gratuitous and Monero. Doug Please do let us know if you could get the word out in your in your circles in Mexico City and all the crypt Like tell all the people you know to come on out. Please do Omar man can we can with that and also with the strong community with the crypto people in in Mexico and yeah I think again I think Monero is kind of easy to to be I don't know how to call it to be empathetic with the values behind Monero so I mean it would be very good for someone not to be Monero pro-Monero so a lot of people will be interested in the community of course awesome probably it couldn't get pro-Monero like yeah yeah yeah by the folder Doug Yes, if you could get out locally to the Mexico City Bitcoiners and Ethereum people, please spell them to come out. You know what? Google it. Yeah. Omar No, no, just to mention that, you know what, we can do even a mid-top, like a small mid-top before the conference, so it's happening, we can do like a small, let me plan that, and I can execute it, but we can make a small Monero community pre-Monero topia conference, something like that, talk to people, and talk a little bit more about Monero, I would love to present this, and get more open source contributors, that would be amazing, and yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, I will contact you on that, and if someone is here listening to us, and it's in Mexico City, please, feel free to reach out, and we can do something very cool. Doug Yeah. I mean, because the conference is great and we have people that come in from all over, but we really don't do enough locally to get like, I want, because Mexico City, you know, whenever 20 million people, there's like, there's got to be so many people that would, if they knew it was happening, would come out for it, that would want to stop by. And we make it very accessible too, because obviously you could buy tickets to get access to the dome, but then also, I don't know if you've ever been to Huerta Roma. Have you ever been to venue in Mexico City, Huerta? Oh, beautiful. It's like a, it's like a public park. So people could just walk in essentially for free and they could be in the marketplace. And then, then if they want to pay, they'll, you know, they could pay and then we can let them in the dome and in the other areas. But it's very accessible. So yeah, definitely. Omar I saw that you have a discount for local people, right? Doug Oh yeah, yeah. Locals can essentially come for free, or if they want the swag, we only charge them. I don't know. I don't even know. We probably like 500 pesos or something. Omar I will get the word out and also make this small pre-monetopia meetup to warm up us before the conference. Doug Fantastic. Yeah, let's definitely coordinate for that. What is the scene like there for you in Mexico City? I mean, is there a good crypto scene? Are there a lot of meetups and stuff that you go to? I mean, is there a cypherpunk kind of crypto scene? I mean, obviously, I would put you in that category, right? Like, you're into the privacy aspects. Omar It's an honor. It's an honor to be categorized like that. I would say that Mexico, to be honest, I'm not based in Mexico City, but I was born here most of my time. I mean, right now I'm with the family for the holidays and so on. But I don't know that there are an interesting scene that is coming up. Also, there's a lot of Americans, for example, living here, who are also working on these. A couple of interesting crypto companies have their offices here also. For example, Optimism, another layer to have their offices in Mexico City. And the Mexican particular community, I need to do more research, but they are mostly into Bitcoin and Ethereum. I haven't heard yet about the particular Monero community or more Cypherpunk style. I was recently in Argentina. In Argentina, you can see it very clearly. In Argentina, you can see very clearly the community there. But in Mexico, I would love to look out for it. But don't worry, let me do some work here and look for some people. I'm guessing that some Ethereum people would be also very, very interested in coming into more Monero related conferences, meetups, getting to know more about Monero. And part of my goal here is to make it as easy as possible to get money into Monero and back from Monero to Ethereum, for example. So yeah, it's boned off. Doug Yeah, man. Very, very excited. Very excited. So what is maybe you want to give us like your overall take on things right now. You know, people are excited about privacy season, right? It's a saw, you know, Minero, I feel like has been holding up better than pretty much any other crypto, right? Everything's kind of got sour. Minero has got up a little bit. Zcash had its mega pump, you know, a month or so ago, and that is also holding pretty strong right now. I mean, yeah, Stark net itself, I think, but that's it's not a privacy coin, but it seems to be tied into the Zcash pump. What do you think about quote unquote privacy season? How you feel about it? What are your thoughts about it? Omar And to be honest, I am not much of a traitor myself, I'm very stupid for that kind of stuff. Doug So both. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Most people around here don't really, you know, they just don't focus on the trading part, so that's I'm listening. Omar what I think is, as you mentioned, I think Monero will hold. So I hold my Monero, for example, I hold my VidCon, my Ether, my STRK, which is the standard token. But I mean, I don't know exactly what caused the privacy winter. I don't know how to call it. As you mentioned, Ccache got a huge pump, Monero also is into that. I don't know exactly why is the reason behind this. But I'm very happy because more and more attention is getting to, for example, more attention from the start is going into Ccache. So now we're putting more and more resources into supporting Ccache, how can we reach Ccache with the start and how can we integrate them together. And now, for example, here with Monero. So I think it's like putting more, it sounds ironic, but putting more eyes into privacy, right? So we have more eyes into Monero, and I think it will help the development, more resources into Monero, more resources into Ccache. So I don't know exactly what caused this, but hopefully it will last for some time. But particularly, I think it will last for some time. For example, as I mentioned before in the start, and again, I'm talking by myself, I'm not representing here the start of foundation, but in the start, there are some plans to apply more and more privacy related stuff. And this is planning for 2026, but also for 2027. So I think it's something that is going to last. So more people are looking to privacy, and more people are looking to Ccache, more people are looking to XMR. So I think that, I don't know, something really cool is going to happen. As you mentioned before, there's this operate in Monero, which is going to be amazing. Ccache is also moving around and improving. So I don't know, I think things are getting better and better. Even though, as you mentioned, which is ironic, by the way, because we have observed a cascade of the listings of XMR, 2024, the listed from Binance, OKX, Kraken, local Monero shutdown. So ironically, we're getting more and more, it seems to be like a bad moment for private coins, but at the same time, it seems to be like a boom right now. So I don't know, it's very interesting. Let's see how it goes. And that's why we're trying to build this, because we don't want to depend on these centralized exchanges. We don't want to depend on the... This sounds very weird. And again, I'm talking by myself, not representing anyone, but not to depend into governments or into regulators to take a decision or not. And also at the same time, not to fight them. We don't want to fight them. We just want to create our own cryptographic bridge that is practically unstoppable. Make it unstoppable. Just trust the math here, trust that the standard will not fall. At the same time, the standard is the centralization itself. So it's becoming much and more secure. So it allows us to have something that is unstoppable practically. And if you want to do a slap, you can do it with someone else, peer to peer. Doug Yeah, I see on X after I tweeted it out originally a lot of a lot of people are excited about this They're excited about man Omar I'm excited about this, I don't know what everyone else, yeah. Doug Yeah, any odd ramps, off-ramps to Monero is like, is much needed and something like this is the purest version of it, right? Via and atomic. Via. Translates. Omar Yeah, that's what we want to push. To be honest, it was technically hard to do it, but it was made easier thanks to all the open source repos out there in Monero, with amazing implementations audited. I also saw that the audits were funded by the community, which is amazing. There's no centralized entity that is funding the audits of this code. It's the community who is funding themselves. I mean, it's amazing. This is something that you'll see every day. Doug Do you think we will see a working version of this? Omar There's a main blocker here. As I mentioned before, we're using state-of-the-art technology here, crypto, cryptographic technology. So StarNet is the only blockchain, as far as I know, that is using a Blake 2S4 as a hashing function, and it needs to be audited by StarWar. So once it's audited, it will be released not only in the compiler, but it will be released on mainnet and testnet. So once we have the audit of that cryptographic primitive, the Blake 2S, they will be able to launch the softs as soon as possible. So maybe, I mean, the code is practically there. I mean, if people can go there and take a look and try it, you can try it in the development network and you can check the cryptography and so on. It's just a matter that we need to audit this primitive, because of course we want to make this the right way, right? So we don't want to have vulnerabilities. So yes, we need some exploits, but I'm hoping for the next six months we can have it done. I will update you on this, and yes, hopefully multiple will be using it more and more. Doug Cypherstack will be at Monero topia. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Oh yeah, Nellitor's, yeah. Omar Yeah, they all it's this right. This is right cool. Yes Doug Yeah, so maybe it would be there. Okay. Okay. Sure. They'd be interested in taking that on as another project. Omar I would love to talk with him, yeah. Doug Yeah, that sounds great. And so adminerotopia, maybe we even see a demo potentially. Yeah. Omar I mean, we can create a demo using the DevNet development network, but hopefully, from my side, I have this work, this job, to try to push the audit as soon as possible, so we can have this immediate as soon as possible. Doug Awesome. Anything we could do to help push along with the audit, let the Manero community know. I'm sure they'll be behind the effort. Omar Mais, no, thank you very much. I'm happy to share these values with the Monero community. I've been exploring more in the developing community. It's amazing. The repos are amazing. I don't know, it's a very interesting community by itself. It's very interesting. I'm also very united and very accessible. It's very interesting. And Douglas, let me tell you that I've been in the Ethereum community, I've been in the SANS community, a little bit in the Bitcoin community, and Monero is very interesting too. It's like a separate beast from other communities. And I like it. It seems to be very united, very technical also, and very active on X also, which is great. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, man. And yeah, we're looking forward to hanging out with you in person at Monero Topia. You'll really get to know the community firsthand. Obviously, it's just a small portion of it, but it's a great group of people that comes out for the conference. You're going to have a good year. Omar happy to say hi to everyone in my home city and we can dance on Kumbay if you know how to do it. I know an expert, but I mean I need to know something, right? Doug We're holding awesome. Yeah, if you if you know anybody also to that just wants to participate locally in the conference Let me know that wants to come and because we have vendors there and they sell Everything's being sold for Monero. If you have anybody locally that wants to participate in that way or anything What wait for relay? That wants to come and set things up. It's like sell stuff for Monero sell a circle Okay, I mean I've decided you have you might have some local local connections there or even That wants to perform we have some like local or you know people that come out and perform just music and stuff But uh amazing. Yeah, let me know any idea any ideas you have ropa to it We're always looking to collaborate and this is how we grow. It's great So right, you know meeting people like you getting you into the conference Omar Doulas, take it for a fact. I will look into that. I will look into the meetup that I mentioned before. Yes, I'm very happy to go there and contribute as much as possible, Doulas. This is the least I can do for you guys since, again, the period couldn't be possible without the open source community that you have. Doug Fantastic. All right, Omar, thank you so much, man. Thanks for jumping out today and yeah, looking forward to the project. I hope you get that audit done soon. I hope they could help get that done and we'll see you in person in February, man. Omar Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you, all the community. Hope to see you very soon, and I'm on X. Please message me if you need anything. I'll be there. Happy to connect with you guys. Doug Yeah, if you want to put out any other information that you want to direct people to any websites or anything. Omar Maybe just go to my Twitter account which is here, espechelomar, and I need to pin a tweet with the repo, so you can take a look if you want. I will do that as soon as tomorrow, I think I will do it. So if you want to go in there, you will be able to see the repo, and my main ask here is for you to go, don't trust me, verify it by yourself, and check what can be better, what can go wrong, which is very important, and yes, we can build this together. And yeah, thank you very much for having me. God bless. Doug All right, Omar, thank you so much, man. We'll be in touch. Adios. Perfect. Adios. Omar Thank you. Speaker 2 Hi, Monero Land. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to our show on YouTube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go to MoneroTalk.Live for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. If you want to interact with us, guests, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, or any of our social media platforms. MoneroTalk is also made possible from contributions by viewers and listeners like you, and supporting us is easier than ever. By typing in MoneroTalk.Crypto in your Monero.com or cake wallet send address field to send us a tip. Once again, thanks so much for listening, and we look forward to being back next week.