Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist Podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Moltz, VP of business operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting brave browser and search engine.

Luke: Now powering AI with the Brave search. API. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Rob Vig Leone, who’s a co-founder and CEO of Horizon Labs, the development studio behind several leading Web3 projects, including zk Verify and Horizon. Rob served in the US Air Force for several years and was deployed to Afghanistan where he supported his special operations task force intelligence efforts.

Luke: During his time, he developed an early interest in Bitcoin, recognizing his potential benefits for countries with unstable economies. Today, Rob’s work focuses on Web3, scalability, blockchain efficiency, and zero knowledge proofs. With the [00:01:00] growing convergence of AI and blockchain, horizon Labs is also exploring how ZK proofs can be used to help verify AI model outputs without compromising privacy.

Luke: In this episode we discussed is transition from military intelligence in Afghanistan to co-founding a blockchain company. Zero Knowledge proofs. What are they and why are they so important in today’s digital landscape and real world examples that show how DPS and Web3 can enhance privacy and the user experience for the average person, and what’s stopping privacy from becoming the default.

Luke: Now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist.

Luke: Rob, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? I.

Rob Viglione: Great. Thanks for having me, Luke. Happy to be here.

Luke: Yeah, no, I’m excited for this interview. We’ve been wanting to have more folks from this DK side of things on the show to kind of get in the weeds on this a bit and really looking forward to this one.

Luke: I, we did a little bit of looking into your background a little bit. It seemed pretty interesting too. You kind of went from military intelligence and Afghanistan, a co-founding of blockchain company. What kind of got you into that mindset and put you on that journey? Just [00:02:00] for the, to kind of set the table a bit.

Luke: Yeah, I, I mean, I, think the, for me, the through line is I’ve, I’ve been a big libertarian and that’s how I got into Bitcoin early on. So it was kind of the, the domain of like cipher punks and libertarians early. So for me it was more of like, I’ve loved the idea of programmable money. The idea of competition in the monetary domain just was super cool.

Luke: It just happened to work out. I mean, it was kind of crazy early on, right? That no one would’ve guessed that Bitcoin would be where it is now. But for me, there was a gap in between, you know, going from the military world into running a Web3 company. The gap for me was AC academia. So I, I actually shifted careers, so I took a little bit of time off from my former career as a physicist, a mathematician working.

Luke: with the US Air Force to go and getting my PhD in financial economics.

Luke: What was the timeline?

Rob Viglione: Yeah, so I, I mean like timeline for me, like in, in the Bitcoin, I guess world. I started getting involved in 2013. Oh, wow. Like I was at Camp Leatherneck in Hellman Province of Afghanistan.

Rob Viglione: I was putting together like [00:03:00] seminars, teaching people how to set up wallets, giving away Bitcoin, right. This’s, probably a lot of happy gis and nationals that, that have Bitcoin or, or had it at least early. And then I went, I kind of cut career there. Personal story was. I got married and I think, oh wow.

Rob Viglione: I thought I had the coolest job ever when I was there. So at the time I was running like basically like a, like a small data science group for us special forces, and we were doing a whole bunch of data work around the 2014 Afghan presidential elections around a whole bunch of operational things in country.

Rob Viglione: My primary mission was actually counter IED, which to me felt good helping remove roadside bombs from the country. From there, I had to make the choice personally was I got married and my next gig that I was offered was to embed with an Afghan commando unit, which again, if I was 10 years younger and I was in my mid thirties at the time, would’ve been super cool.

Rob Viglione: But I took the other option that I had on the table, which was to go back from my PhD, and that was in 2014.

Luke: I think it’s just super fascinating. People lose sight to how much tech and, and how technical [00:04:00] these battle spaces were having to work from that mindset. And, and it might have been a little bit different kind of contextually and, according to the mission, but you’re talking about pretty serious stuff.

Luke: I feel like it almost prepared you well to get into this identity space with crypto where you gotta care about certain things. There’s important pieces that have to be protected along the way. I would imagine. I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. No, no. Look,

Rob Viglione: you’re, you’re going in a great direction.

Rob Viglione: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot to it. So I, I think you’re, you’re spot on. First of all, like the, the battle space today is extremely technical and for me, the battle space that, that I was working in in 2014 is, is probably different frankly, than the one that we have now over 10 years later. With, with, you know, probably more of an emphasis on smaller drone type of warfare and a lot of things out there and, and the kind of electronic warfare and so forth.

Rob Viglione: But a few takeaways for me. So I definitely appreciated. Complexity of battle space and complexity of like my new battle space, which is in Web3 competing in this marketplace. And then I also really appreciated from kind of like where does this stuff actually have value? Where’s, where’s the utility in crypto, the first and earliest use case for crypto is literally [00:05:00] just the ability to get your assets into a global financial system and out of your kind of idiosyncratic, just where you happen to be born, where you happen to live.

Rob Viglione: And, and a lot of people around the world unfortunately, happen to be in jurisdictions that are quite hostile to their personal freedom. Quite hostile to privacy and just are just governed extremely poorly. So the ability to get your assets into something different and greater than that, you know, like in, in the digital domain with Bitcoin was the killer use case.

Rob Viglione: Like we’ve gone beyond that. But it made me appreciate, and like my, my PhD was actually focused in crypto. Like I got my dissertation done in like topic was crypto finance. Oh wow. And the idea was looking at. Cross country differences in like crypto acid prices and looking at kind of some of the explanatory like determinants of that, and governance was one of the biggest ones.

Rob Viglione: So I just realized early on that crypto had as biggest marginal value to people that were kind of outside of mature capital markets, mature economies, or well governed countries.

Luke: Super interesting. I mean, it’s kind of, you kind of have like the emergence of, of [00:06:00] Bitcoin right after the financial crisis.

Luke: Just at the time too, when even today, parts of the world where in, in the west and the US you think banks are just everywhere and you have access to this system, but still in a lot of the parts of the world, even in 2025, it’s really hard to kind of access a lot of financial systems and even though, you know, it’s years later, but that’s super interesting.

Luke: Tell me more about what you guys are doing with ZK Verify and, and in the crypto side of things.

Rob Viglione: Yeah.

Luke: Besides having cool t-shirts,

Rob Viglione: so the company that run Horizon Labs, like we, we do, the way I look at it is we, we have a collection of about 60, you know, brilliant people around the world working towards the shared vision of basically trying to make the world free or fair and to bring modern EC economics like everywhere and, okay, broad, lofty ambition.

Rob Viglione: The way we tackle it, our little niche in this market is on the cryptography side, like basically zero knowledge cryptography, which is a class of cryptography that allows you to, you basically have cryptographic proofs of information off chain, on chain or whatever, but like [00:07:00] keep preserve privacy, but still have applications that can make use of the data without leaking the data.

Rob Viglione: It’s a really powerful type of tag and we can talk about its implications here. But two projects that, that we work on at Horizon Labs, like our, our names say Horizon is, you know, privacy preserved execution layer. We actually, we were the third zk project to launch in crypto back in 2017, but now what we’re doing is we’re actually rolling that as a privacy layer on top of the base ecosystem.

Rob Viglione: So super cool and excited about that project. This, again, had this, this brand new life. Basically providing this privacy utility, which I think is really important for getting kind of end-to-end workflows in, in finance, but also a lot of other economic activity into the base ecosystem, which I think is one of the hottest like sources of activity right now on Web3.

Rob Viglione: The second thing, the T-shirt that I’m wearing is zk Verify is tackling like a modular piece of this cryptography or ZK stack of basically every statement that that we want to prove on chain. It starts by generating a proof. You can aggregate them, which means like [00:08:00] adding them together and making them more efficient to float through the system.

Rob Viglione: But at the end of every process, you need to verify cryptographic proof. Now, if you just took a snapshot of Web3 today, that might not be as interesting because we have what we call cryptographic verifiers. On chain today as an example, like you can have an application that preserves the privacy of a transaction, generate a proof and verify that proof in a verifier baked into the Ethereum blockchain, right?

Rob Viglione: So Ethereum basically every node that’s running, basically processing a verification of the proof. Now, that works today in the currency of Web3, but the world that we’re building for is one where you have about a trillion proofs a year being, you know, generated from every single device that we have.

Rob Viglione: Whether it’s your browser, whether it’s, you know, your mobile device, your tv, your solar panels, whatever it is. You’re generating proof so you can actually proof certain pieces of information, preserve the privacy of kind of provenance of the info, in some cases, the content of the info, but still make use of it in the global kind of composable world that we have of wipe through it.

Rob Viglione: So kind of do a state snapshot. Off chain could be your bank account, [00:09:00] like how much money you have. In fact, you pay your bills on time, your credit score, bring that information on chain. You can unlock value in an application like a Defi app.

Luke: Let’s walk through just like a really simple use case. Because I think people are pretty familiar with the current situation.

Luke: Okay. I go, I go send Rob some crypto on chain and my address might be also attached to my Luke dot Soul or Luke dot based ether, whatever. Mm-hmm. Crypto to my name. So all of a sudden my activity is kind of exposed and it’s public and it’s out there. How does, what do you guys do change that dynamic?

Rob Viglione: Yeah, so, so first of all, big shout out to Z Cash is the first organization to bring ZK proofs on chain.

Rob Viglione: It was kind of the, the mind blowing breakthrough that that happened that spawned like, you know, Zen Cash and Horizon and, and what we’re doing today. And I bring them up because they provided the basic application, which is literally the ability for Rob to send Luke money and like it, it can execute completely on chain.

Rob Viglione: The consensus of the blockchains to all the modes that are running the software can verify that Rob does in [00:10:00] fact have enough money and Luke has a valid address and we send money from me to you. The beautiful thing about ZK technology is the world can verify that a valid transaction happened without seeing any of the details of that transaction, which is kind of nuts.

Rob Viglione: So like on a block explorer, basically like the, the portal or the the tool that you have to go look at the what’s happening on a blockchain. You can see that some transaction happened, but it’s basically like a blank in terms of the content. You see that a valid transaction happened, but no one in the world can see that it was me, it was you, or how much was sent in between us.

Rob Viglione: That’s the starting point. It’s probably the simplest application is just literally transferring value on chain, but then that there’s so many other kind of richer use cases that get much more sophisticated.

Luke: Yeah, I love it. I mean, we even started doing some of this stuff in Brave in 2016 with anani for Zero Knowledge for doing reporting and things like that, like anonymous reporting where we had to kind of.

Luke: You know, map out events in a marketing funnel and support to creators or whatever, and we could do it in a way that we could have confirmations [00:11:00] or, or validations and, and, and still actually like give them information that was meaningful without exposing the user’s identity. That’s why I was super excited to have you on today because I think that this area is just gonna get more and more important and people are starting to see now that we’re moving to a more and more cashless society.

Luke: But one of those great properties of cash is that I could just go hand you cash and nobody would know. So how do we get parody with these things? And, and it sounds like you guys are working on some important tech that can help us to kind of get into that kind of a world. A hundred percent

Rob Viglione: agree with you.

Rob Viglione: I would say what’s really held it back this far and, and maybe like the earliest implementation of this stuff, and we came from this early world as well, was just the, throw the technology out there into the wild. We, we have the tech, we can actually, you know, create like a shield pole that could. You provide the capability so that I can do money anonymously.

Rob Viglione: The problem is, and I think crypto’s big problem today is it’s not yet really connected to the, the kind of legal world, and I’m not saying that that everything happening on chain is illegal far from it. Mm-hmm. It’s just that we need to connect what’s happening on chain with smart contracts. [00:12:00] To be like enforceable, real contracts.

Rob Viglione: We, we need to make sure that, at least from the point of view of the US government and for, you know, US citizens and the audience and us as the US company, that all the things that we’re doing on chain are actually not violating like OFAC sanctions list. We’re not, you know, helping facilitate money laundering in any way.

Rob Viglione: So. Now we have the technology. So what I think is most interesting about this point in time with this technology is that we have an intersection of capabilities and technology so that we can actually scale this stuff into what I would say, kind of like real world digital tech systems so that we can one, check that.

Rob Viglione: Is a user kind of a valid user of a system who’s not on an effect sanctions list? Is he not on some terrorist financing list? Is he not on some sort of other like criminal list? Is the information here accessible to their tax authorities? Right? These are those things that in the early cipher punk days of crypto.

Rob Viglione: Sort of like would make us puke to think about these, these types of concepts. Yeah, no, I think it’s a

Luke: really good point that you bring up too, because it is kind of like we’re hitting this next iteration where this last [00:13:00] year was all about, okay, institutions are are starting to adopt things. And for a while it was almost like.

Luke: They kind of had put cold water on all of those players even getting involved in the space, like after FTX collapsed and all of that. But now, this past year you’ve seen more, okay, ETFs are starting to get approved and now you’re starting to see this wave of the banking ecosystem adopting, you know, stable coins are just this really, really hot area right now.

Luke: And it sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong here, we’re, we’re kind of at this stage where you’ve got this base case where. Everything can be super private in this way. Mm-hmm. That is just like a base, like a Zcash type of shielded transaction condition set. And then you’ve got this new layer where we need to be able to maintain privacy for individuals while connecting them to these highly regulated.

Luke: Players. Is that fair?

Rob Viglione: It is absolutely fair. And even now when you’re not connected to highly regulated players, but like as an example, and we, we all in the US just went through this with April 15th, tax day is when you need to [00:14:00] report, you know, sort of the, the year for last year’s, like financial activities.

Rob Viglione: Like you need some sort of credible statement of what happened like with in your financial life. So you can report it to the IRS. Okay. We may not like that for like early crypto adopters, but it’s the reality that we live in if we’re in a jurisdiction. Where we just want now crypto to be a normal part of our lives.

Rob Viglione: We don’t want it to be something different from the normal world. We want Web3 and financial trad five to come together. They have to like, it just makes a ton of sense. So in order to make that happen, we need to make sure that we have systems that are actually compliant. So as an example. Like Horizon is kind of the, this OG zk crypto project that we’ve had that was, you know, originally fully anonymous, that now is having a new breath of life on base as a regulatory complaint privacy layer.

Rob Viglione: Mm-hmm. Because we want users to be able to participate in a way that’s not gonna kick ’em in the butt later on for doing something. Maybe they shouldn’t have.

Luke: It just kind of shows some of the evolution of the space and the progression where now that you’ve got, [00:15:00] okay, we can work on an L two and offload some things and kind of focus in on these other things, and it just seems like discovering that market fit where you have a good chance of that happening.

Luke: The funny thing with crypto, I was gonna ask you about this. We deal with challenges. Within the ecosystem from crypto native people and across the entire range of that spectrum. And then with more traditional, whether it’s regulators or traditional finance players. Ida, have you been working with the traditional side very much And what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen on both sides of that?

Rob Viglione: So, interestingly enough, as customers, not so much. If you look at our customer book right now, it is largely wic. Three companies. Mm-hmm. You know, part of that is just because we’re, we’re crypto native ourselves who have been in the space for a while. We have certain key infrastructure that the crypto companies use.

Rob Viglione: Now that said, we’re gearing up and why we’re going over to the base ecosystem is because we think that it represents one of the more credible kind of sources or like destinations for our institutions and, and businesses, frankly, to come on chain. And Coinbase has done a phenomenal job leading the way there.

Rob Viglione: So I’m really [00:16:00] excited about that. I, I think it’s still early days, but it’s really important though for us to actually meld these worlds. Stop, like siloing these things where it’s either crypto or tradify. Like I don’t think that makes sense long term and throw AI into the mix. Like we all have to, you know, drizzle the AI hype onto everything we do these days.

Rob Viglione: But the reality is like, I think crypto’s the currency and the rails for ai, like hands down, I don’t think agents are gonna be kind of autonomous. It’s issuing micropayments with bank wires. Not gonna happen. They’re, yeah, they’re gonna use cryptocurrencies, right? So like. The, the future is definitely gonna include crypto.

Rob Viglione: It’s no longer a question and I, I think that, you know, humans need to come along for their ride. How far along are you guys with these different pieces of your stack? Yeah, so Testnet is where we are, right? I mean, like Horizon’s has been a long operating blockchain since 2017, but we’re the version two of it that we’re launching on base is on Testnet right now, and we’ll be doing the token transition first.

Rob Viglione: End of June and then we’ll be launching the platform shortly thereafter. ZK Verify. It has been a test night for about six months now, and we’re really just battle testing that [00:17:00] for Green Lightning. That launch, to me, it was all about business metrics. I wanted to show that there’s actually PMF here, a product market fit, so that we’re actually not just launching something for the sake of it, which I think we do too much as an industry and making sure that we actually have, oh my God.

Luke: Yeah, credible user

Rob Viglione: attraction and we’re solving real problems out there for customers. The good news for us is that now we have a pretty fantastic. DD pipeline that has solid conversions and a great cross section of use cases that I’m pretty excited about. So internally with green lit, that thing, it’s just kind of a matter of TG for the token exchange listings and all those kinds of things that we have to worry about in Web3 that normal businesses in web two don’t really have to think about.

Luke: What are some of the applications for ZK Verify? Are people using it for various different things or what’s kinda the focus?

Rob Viglione: No, so the solid cross section here, so one of the kind of like Web3 native things just makes a ton of sense and, and is consistent with everything that we’ve been talking about is private dark pools actually.

Rob Viglione: So, like beyond the fact that a lot of institutions don’t want to come on chain and, and have their transactions visible to the public. [00:18:00] There’s also just the, the pragmatic reality of what we call MEV or extraction of value. Just by virtue of blockchains being transparent and by broadcasting transactions, there are people that can front run you in the systems.

Rob Viglione: Mm-hmm. So it’s pragmatic, like value loss or slippage by people trading on chain, that having a, a dark pool out there and, and again, regulatory compliant, private or dark pool. Is our first kind of flagship application that we’re launching, and super excited about that. And we, we have an amazing partner and and user of the system that that’s running that project.

Rob Viglione: Others though are also like I, I would say equally interesting. One use case that I think is gonna be a killer use case for crypto is actually, and for ZK it’s called Z-K-T-L-S. And what it is is getting a cryptographic snapshot of data off chain and bringing it on chain. So basically like, you know, with TLS where you can have your browser do a secure handshake with your bank server, and the bank server serves your browser information about your bank statement.

Rob Viglione: Mm-hmm. Well, what we could do is actually generate a cryptographic proof [00:19:00] snapshot in time that this was in fact the correct server or, or this was the server that’s publicly registered to serve the information. We have that data kinda encapsulated in zk proof so that the public can’t see the data.

Rob Viglione: But now you can ingest that, that proof into a defi system and actually maybe borrow, like, execute like a lending transaction or borrow, borrow assets using your credit history and collateral. I. To unlock value on chain. There’s a massive amount of value of just bringing information off chain, on chain for a lot of different reasons.

Rob Viglione: That’s one use case with customer that we have that we’re super excited about. There’s other things as well, like just the ability to bring invoicing information on chain so you can do factoring of invoices. I think super huge. Interesting.

Luke: Yeah. Digital, I mean, this is things that people don’t really.

Luke: People think my, it sounds boring or something, but they’re actually like really big problems in the space. You know, like, exactly. I wanna do a business, I wanna pay people, but I can’t connect this on chain space to someone to buy groceries. Yeah, exactly. How do I get that value

Rob Viglione: from A to B? You know, or, or the $8 trillion [00:20:00] underserved market for SMEs internationally that just exactly can’t, you know, syndicate loans to expand their business or capitalize their companies, but they.

Rob Viglione: They’re solid credit qualities. They pay their bills on time. They have a viable business with like actual transaction records, but they can’t share this information in a credible way with say, a hedge fund in New York that could actually syndicate a loan to finance their business. So like these are those types of things by providing the rails and connecting the dots.

Rob Viglione: And in a composable Web3 type of way that has to be privacy preserving, right? Because like there’s so many elements of a stack here, whether it’s. Giving away your invoicing data to your competitor or, or whatever that you don’t wanna do as a business or can’t do. Now we, we have the technology to handle.

Rob Viglione: So another amazing use case that kind of closes the, the loop on that is. Digital identity on chain, and I think the important thing here has to be privacy preserving, because everything that we do on chain is linkable forever, right? So like even if I can’t figure out what the weird hex address is for your e address and know that it’s you today, you know someone tomorrow will be [00:21:00] able to figure out that that’s your address and then correlate everything that you’ve ever done.

Rob Viglione: You know, on chain with that and you as a human. So I think having privacy to on chain identity and linking this to all of the financial applications that are going to be on chain soon is critical.

Luke: The identity piece is really interesting. I think we’re seeing this right now in Europe where you have GPR, right?

Luke: Which has these right to be forgotten elements to it. And there’s laws, and then there’s the, are people even gonna really enforce them fully or whatever that, that whole bucket of, of things. But then you’re dealing with immutable blockchains on the other end of the spectrum, right? Like, and, and you almost need to have something in between those two.

Luke: And this is what’s really interesting about what you’re talking about, right? Because if you can prove somebody’s identity without having to put those identification properties. Accessible on chain for somebody, then you’re kind of able to have something exist in this current, I mean, right now it’s all over the place.

Luke: They’re talking about, oh, we have to be able to delete a blockchain. It’s insane, but like when it gets back to earth, you’re gonna have to have some kind of ZK solution, I would imagine, in order to do [00:22:00] this. Is that fair? We saw a bunch of protocols, and I’m talking 2017 ish, right? ICO era where they’re like, oh, we’re gonna put all your data on chain and da, and we’re just like.

Luke: That’s not compliant. Even in a best, worst case scenario, whatever. Now it’s actually getting the point where with AI you need to be able to prove that somebody’s real that’s putting something out there, whether it’s payment, royalties, whatever, zk is gonna be that missing link. Is it that fair to say? I’m just kind of wanna make sure that’s super No, I, I, I think you’re

Rob Viglione: spot on.

Rob Viglione: So first of all, let’s hope that regulators remain sort of reasonable. You have to be like a hundred percent just sort of like ballpark, reasonable. There’s a lot of value that having immutable ledgers brings to the world. So don’t try to kill the technology. It’s not gonna happen. Right? So trying to force like that is the wrong path of legislation.

Rob Viglione: But I’m not a legislator, so take my opinion for what it’s worth. Not much. But I, I think the missing piece of technology, though, it is zk, because if we can actually keep information off chain, but do like cryptographic proofs of that information and then make use of it on chain to unlock [00:23:00] certain types of transactions.

Rob Viglione: Then I think we’re good. Now, again, it does require regulators to be sort of reasonable because mm-hmm. Like there’s gotta be some types of things that are allowed to happen on an immutable ledger. That means the information is there forever. But there’s certain types of information like PII that probably wanna keep off chain.

Rob Viglione: It just generates state snapshots of that information. Bring it on chain for specific reasons, for specific durations, right?

Luke: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rob Viglione: But like, regulators have to be okay with that in order for this whole thing to work. But I think there’s a, a reasonable middle ground.

Luke: Yeah, and it’s such an interesting time right now too, because even how some of these things are classified as like a personal data.

Luke: It’s great that people have tried to define that, but also it really is a double-edged sword in a lot of ways. And now you’ve got use cases popping up all over the place. Even this coining things where people are like, someone took my picture, put it online, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like, and, and, and, and you’re starting to, and it’s all part of the process, right?

Luke: When things, new technologies and, but I feel like now we [00:24:00] haven’t had an opportunity over the past, I’ll even stretch it out to six years, where you could experiment enough to get that market fit that you need. And I feel like we’re much more optimistic about the potential. I mean, you talk about this.

Luke: Money that’s potentially unlocked for us or otherwise industry that this could open up and it’s just huge. And the stable coin adoption is just huge. You know, it’s really exciting. So I’m really stoked to hear that you guys are doing this work and that it’s getting out there. You mentioned something earlier and, and I just was reminded of it.

Luke: You mentioned shielded pools. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Rob Viglione: Yeah, so, so the concept of shield pool is basically you use cryptography to create the safe zone so that you can actually transfer assets into a sort of black box that they’re there and there’s basically the state of those assets is maintained in the black box and things can happen.

Rob Viglione: You can transfer them within the black box and then when you wanna make use of them outside of the black box, you can transfer them out. We call this black box in like the ZK world, especially the the zc. [00:25:00] Type of ZK world, A shield lip pool. Right? So it, you can view it as like really this kind of overlay or kind of like element within a system.

Rob Viglione: And you can send things in there. Now there’s some potential issues with it, right? Like from like a regulatory perspective and then Yeah, like once, once money’s in there, like it literally is a black box and, and you have no idea who’s doing what, right? And then it’s also permissionless systems like Z cash for money to go in and out of these things.

Rob Viglione: But it’s an easy intersection of technology is to have like a KYC am l. Gating on the front end or back end of that black box. Mm-hmm. Right. So I think that’s where we are now with the T and that’s at least how we, we look at it.

Luke: Cool. Cool. I know this is pretty technical area. Are you guys working on trying to kind of unpack a lot of this for developers and individuals?

Luke: How do you feel the level of understanding is among people, even at the developer level around this stuff? Because I see stuff all over the place, even in the privacy space, it’s like some of the things that I hear from hand wavy kind of projects is alarming, but I, I’m just [00:26:00] curious. You are working in it and you’re trying to like implement these things.

Luke: Are you finding that it’s easy for developers to adopt once they get the concept? So

Rob Viglione: I would say that the current state of awareness is probably terrible. Just be frank, right? I’ll be honest. Running a company that’s in this space, right? This is clearly a problem. Like it, it is a headwind, but we know it and it’s really a product problem.

Rob Viglione: ‘cause like, how, how do you just simplify things and make it easier? People. So I think some of the best entrepreneurs in the space are working on the products just to make things way simpler. Mm-hmm. I’m not gonna say we’re some of the best entrepreneurs in the space, but we are also working on tools to make things way simpler.

Rob Viglione: You can think about, one example here would be, historically, in order to execute on ZK within an application, you do have to write what’s called a circuit, basically, which handles all of the types of constraints and logic and everything of. What are you trying to prove? How are you proving it? What proving system are you using going from like math to constructing this thing in into software?

Rob Viglione: Very complex, and this used to be all bespoke stuff. And we have a team that for years, has been doing the bespoke stuff. These days you have [00:27:00] things like zk, virtual machines, zk beyonds, that actually allow you to, you know, code and a language that you’re used to. Maybe like a zk, A BM, where you’re still coding solidity and then it compiles actually, you know, underneath all of that into the ZK circuit.

Rob Viglione: So it’s actually. Much more generalizable and much easier from the perspective of a developer. There’s other SDKs that people use. What we’re trying to do from like a horizon level is if we’re successful, we’re gonna be providing SDKs in middleware, so the applications on base and other ecosystems could just pull them in and actually run the privacy layer like through Horizon, even though it technically sits as as an L three on top of base.

Rob Viglione: But just you have a very simple integration to an application that shouldn’t have to move from base L two. Liquidity shouldn’t have to move, and you’re just able to execute your logic privately, end to end using the horizon module that’s on that side. On the ZK Verify side, the state of the world was basically you need to write your circuit and your verifier, plop that verifier onto some piece of infrastructure like Ethereum, maintain it over time.

Rob Viglione: Hope you didn’t, it’s not [00:28:00] buggy. Right? And like upgraded systems themselves upgrade. Right? And, and this is not a, a, a nice thing to do. And if you want your app to run on other pieces of infrastructure, cool. You’ve got your verifier on Ethereum. Good luck figuring out how to convert that thing into Ross, into playing it on Solana, right?

Rob Viglione: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there’s, there’s just toughness of like barriers for developers. So with Z Key Verify, we’re supposed to be like, the way we’re going to market is a single stop for just send us your proofs period. Don’t worry about the verifiers, don’t worry about maintaining ’em, don’t worry about security.

Rob Viglione: ‘cause we audit, we do all that stuff ourselves. We run the bug penalty programs like we’re the gold standard for verification layers. And you don’t have to worry about deploying this on lots of different platforms ‘cause we already do and we maintain all of those things. So literally just worry about your application, use a module or that makes it easy to RPC into our system.

Rob Viglione: Send us your proofs and we handle everything else. We send them the results wherever you need them. These are the kinds of things that at the end of the day, you have a lot of different companies like us that are maybe not a lot, but you have some, some companies like us that out there, it’s [00:29:00] definitely more trying to make it way

Luke: easier.

Luke: Yeah, it’s great to see like that there’s more variety kind of popping up because it just kind of shows the demand for privacy is increasing. Is there a conversation that’s currently not being had in this space that you really wish that people would be having? This could be related to what you’re doing or not.

Luke: So

Rob Viglione: I, I’ll, I’ll blend this with what you just said on, on like the, the demand for privacy is increasing. I don’t think it’s increasing fast enough or just enough or fast enough. I’ll, I’ll say, because I think what really stalled privacy, we felt this as an organization and, and with our open source project with Verizon that launches a privacy coin, was we felt persecuted to be frank.

Rob Viglione: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like we felt that privacy was bad from like regulators perspective, not from our perspective, and that we were always being persecuted. We, we were getting. Exchange delists for tokens, privacy tokens. Right. And I think that this just like put like a, a hard stop in a lot of people’s minds.

Rob Viglione: Like you still had your hardcore privacy projects like us, like rail gun and others. They were still building, but most people just thought of privacy is basically they [00:30:00] wrote it off like, okay, can’t do it. Not gonna invest a lot of time or, or kind of like mental energy into it. All of that’s changed, guys.

Rob Viglione: So the war on crypto in my mind is over in, at least in the us. Mm-hmm. Which I think is probably the biggest, most important market for that to happen. And now it’s just a matter of like, guys, get out there, race and build. The thing is just make sure that you’re doing it in responsible way. Where if your users in the US.

Rob Viglione: Intersect with an A am ML or you know, KYC am ML system. So you can actually verify identities. And like the cool thing about like a Zika ID as an example is I can verify that you know, Luke, you’re a human. I don’t care which human you are. I don’t care what you’ve done with anything else in your life. I just care that you are a unique human being and you can prove that I’m chain.

Rob Viglione: And then that’s the starting point to interact with a whole like rich world of privacy preserving applications.

Luke: No, I totally agree on it. Not moving fast enough either. It’s really interesting too, because we’re getting this point where you’ve got these big entities that are starting to look at crypto seriously or even integrate it at some levels at the same time, where you’ve got this [00:31:00] real need for solutions around things like tiktoks and social media where you’ve got kids that are accessing these things younger and younger and age verification’s.

Luke: So easy to be, and if there’s gonna just be a better way to do this and get more. At least more options on the menu, the rubber’s meeting the road on all the tires kind of at this point in time. So I, I think it’s super important, like what you’re saying, where just having that conversation and, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m like, super glad you made the time to come on here and really appreciate it, because I think the more we get different voices like working on these projects out there, the better because nobody can describe it the way that you can when you’re in charge of putting the work out there.

Luke: So really appreciate you making the time today. Where can people find out more about what you’re working on and then follow you online to see what you’re posting about? Well, on their brave browser, they can go to Twitter or x.

Rob Viglione: Appreciate that. And they can find me there. I mean, I, I, I do wanna shout out, [00:32:00] you probably get this all the time, but myself, my team, and like most people that I know are big fans of Brave.

Rob Viglione: Love it. Thank you. You guys respect privacy. Fundamentally, and also like you’ve been supportive of, of the Web3 ecosystem from almost the beginning. And that means a lot, especially to companies and, and people like me anyway. Like if, if you wanna reach out to me, it, it’s GL on X or just come to the website like horizon labs.io now Horizon is Horizon Zen, like ZN because you know, our, our cryptocurrency, the Zen, but which I think was a super cool name or ticker symbol for a currency.

Rob Viglione: It’s awesome. Every token, but that’s it. Like we’re, we’re always available. The teams, basically we, we make a point of we’re just out there like, you know, with our community. It is kind of like one of these things of community market fit more so than product market fit. And we’ve just been out there with our community for years.

Rob Viglione: So come and out, you know, join the conversation.

Luke: I appreciate the kind words. It’s such a cool thing to now to see, like when we started people were saying like, doubting whether people even cared about privacy. Now we’ve got folks like you on [00:33:00] talking about ways that we’re able to connect privacy to, to the bigger world and the bigger financial ecosystem and, and everybody to kind of make this a worldwide thing.

Luke: And yeah, I’d love to have you guys back on after you guys launch and, and get some updates and see how things are going. So folks, please check out Rob stuff and thanks again for making the time to come today. No. Thank you so much, Luke. I I really appreciate it. Have a good one. You too. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast.

Luke: To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave Browser, you can download it for free today@brave.com and start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately. Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers and other creepy stuff following you across the web.