Reimagining the Future of the Web with Psy Protocol

GM GM! Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic edition of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Carter Feldman, who is the founder of Psy Protocol. So if you're not aware, Psy Protocol is a reinvention of what it means to be a blockchain built on first principles. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Carter, learn all about Psy Protocol and how you can get started using it today. Alright, let's get into it.

GM GM! Welcome to the show Carter, I'm ecstatic to have you on today man.

Doing great, thanks for having me man.

My pleasure, my pleasure. I know we had to reschedule a couple of times, time zones were janky but I'm happy it finally worked out. I guess before we get into all the great things Psy Protocol related, would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Sure, I'm Carter Feldman, I'm the founder and CEO of Psy Protocol. I've been in the blockchain industry for quite a long time, like since my early teenage years when I was a rather well-known grey-hat hacker you can say. But yeah, I've been around for a while and we've been reinventing the blockchain and trying to bring those blockchain values back. So yeah, I guess a brief intro for me.

I'm also on the board of Ninjas in Pyjamas, I don't know if there's any eSports fans out there, but you know, if you like to watch LPL or anything you've probably seen us.

Oh wow, awesome! I had no idea. I guess I'm curious like the brief side quest that you've had leading up to you becoming a founder. I guess what drove you to deep dive into the field of tech and crypto itself?

Well, like when I was a kid I had a fine motor disorder, so I was always typing everything in class. And like the reason why I learned to program was I wanted to automate my homework. Like there are these stupid flashcards where you have to like write down the definition of words, I just scraped it from dictionary.com, right? So it would take me two seconds to do. So like things like that.

And also I liked to cheat in video games since I wasn't particularly good at them. So I was probably the best-known Call of Duty hacker on the Xbox 360. And around then people started paying for our hacking services. I was a member of a group called Xbox Underground, which later everyone was arrested. Fortunately, I left the group like shortly before everything kind of fell apart. And then I joined a group that later everyone was arrested too, but I was on a study abroad trip in China when that happened, so lucky me. So yeah, but around that time we were receiving payment in Bitcoin. I remember that was like, it's gotta be like 2012, 2013, somewhere around there.

So yeah, like I got interested in the crypto stuff, I'm kind of a cypherpunk. I'm also a little bit of a libertarian, I'm a big fan of Javier Milei over here. Actually, I got a signed book from him, that's pretty cool. But yeah, so I'm libertarian, I'm a hacker, naturally I like crypto, and that's kind of my villain's origin story.

Hey man, everyone's origin story is different and I'm glad yours is so unique and fittingly so, being in the crypto space everyone has a bit of a character behind them which is awesome. I guess kind of deep diving into it a little bit, like what would you say is your description of what Psy Protocol is, what problems does it solve, why was it founded?

Sure. So like Psy is a new blockchain that is super scalable and has privacy. So like I'm one of the very few people who believes in Web3, in building like an internet which is decentralized and privacy-preserving. So basically like this user-centric or, yeah, I would say user-centric internet where like you are not the product and the internet is a tool for your betterment rather than a tool for large companies to make money off of you. And you know, I'm a capitalist, right? But like the problem of course is that we're pretty much spending most of our lives, or at least me, you know, because I'm a nerd. And I think most people, especially with AI coming around, right? This is happening. Like I spend most of my life on the internet and I don't want to live in a digital dictatorship. So I'm going to be on my computer all the time. I don't want to like be in Elon Musk's fiefdom, even though we love Doge and we love Elon. I don't want to live in anyone's fiefdom, right? So Psy is an attempt to build a blockchain that can support internet-scale applications while also preserving privacy and having smart contracts, which is kind of a tough little thing to do.

We're also I would say like the other sort of really exciting thing about Psy is, frankly, in a world where like all these companies are trying to replace you by training models on your data, Psy is kind of a refuge for that. And I think the privacy movement in general is going to be picking up a lot of steam as people realize that losing their privacy wasn't just a matter of oh, you know, if you don't have anything to hide then it's fine. No, actually you'll lose your job and they're coming for you and you'll lose your way of life. So privacy matters and hopefully people find out before it's too late. So I guess I'll end my introduction of Psy on that wonderfully positive note.

I mean, I don't know, I know you might have just woken up and I don't know if you've seen the news yet, but Jack Dorsey actually laid off like 4,000 people from Block. Yeah, like fresh off the press. I guess what's your reaction to that, as it's somewhat of a segue into what you just mentioned?

Alright, this is unpopular. What exactly do they do?

I know they hold Bitcoin and do some payment stuff.

Does anyone use what they make?

Is it popular?

I think they do like the Squarespace stuff with like the payment processor thing. I've seen it sometimes in like mom and pop shops, but beyond that I haven't really seen it.

Oh, Square I've seen a lot of! Is it Square or is it a blockchain thing?

I think it's Square is one of their more popular products. Blockchain-wise I've seen him doing some like open-source things around it, I don't know how far they went.

Oh yeah, and they did the chat thing was cool, like during the the Blue Tooth or whatever, that was cool, that was cool. The peer-to-peer stuff. I'm a fan of that. So and I love Jack Dorsey and you know, while he looks a little strange and seems to be sort of going in an interesting direction in that respect and sort of like the libertarian or isolationist vibes or doomer kind of of a situation, which I'm not, I'm not an AI doomer.

But yeah, no, it's definitely telling. Like this layoff stuff is coming. So you know, hold on, get ready to hold on and like I think the only way, AI is probably right like not a good thing right for humanity. Like this is a Pandora's Box situation. But unfortunately, it does seem more and more like you kind of have to just get with the program or you know, there's no use fighting it because you'll just end up getting flattened. Which is why Psy Protocol is so important because we can build like provably fair applications that no AI can manipulate. You know, if you have an agent that's working for you, you can ensure that it's not doing things it's not supposed to do, and especially when it comes to the most important thing that agents will be doing, which is spending your money. So yeah, I would say Psy is very we've decided to deploy at a very interesting time, not only in the market, which of course, you know, positive sentiment is higher than it's ever been for crypto, but also in world history. So yeah, I hope that sort of answers your question in a meandering way.

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. I mean, it just happened so everyone's reactions are fresh. And yeah, I mean, I see both sides of the coin for AI. Like I think it's a really cool, it feels like an alien tool almost when you're using it to code and it can spin up things that would have taken people like big teams like half a year to ship and like an hour or 30 minutes, I that's like the wow the wow factor. But the other side of the coin is kind of situations that happen like today, whether it's the unemployment stuff or God forbid anything worse. But yeah, it's going to be certainly interesting year to see how things unravel.

And I guess shifting gears back to Psy Protocol, you mentioned it's a layer-one, which I think is really cool in the sense, and I've taken a look at the docs and you guys are really heavy on like the ZK stuff and whatnot. And it's interesting the sentiment that Vitalik has also had recently where he basically says oh, do we need L2s anymore? So I think we're kind of going into this world where you'll see more L1s come back, that narrative where it was like oh, we don't need more L1s, we have like a couple of them already, and then you got the L2s and now it's coming back and getting all these L1s.

I guess like from your perspective being in the space for quite a while, like what do you see as kind of being more important? More of these L1s perhaps being niche, catering to specific needs of different users, or do you still see a world where we still need some of these L2s?

So I wouldn't say that like oh, we need more L1s, we need more L2s. What we need is we need more more chains that solve problems that people actually have. So like on Psy, people have a problem where okay, let's say I want to have some like wrapped Bitcoin or some USDT and I want to have private payments. There's not that many good ways to do it. Especially like some of these privacy things like you've got to go through KYC, like what the fuck? Then what's what's what what why would you, oh let me just tell this random blockchain company what my passport is so I can finally get my privacy, right?

So like I think you know, if there's a layer-one that solves a problem that users actually have, not an imaginary problem which we've seen some blockchains doing, then I think whether it's a layer-one or layer-two it'll be successful. So I don't think this whole distinction, it's like for the users it doesn't really matter because you know, folks don't really care or even really know about like consensus most they've heard of the word, perhaps they've been to the conference, but they don't understand what it means to settle on Ethereum and they don't really care. So I think if your product is good and solves that utility, people won't care whether it's a layer-one or a layer-two.

100%. It's only like the super nerds that are interested in like picking apart the little details or whatnot.

Well, we're we're a layer-one because we're proof-of-work blockchain. And there's no good proof-of-work blockchains and except for like for smart contracts. There's no we love Dogecoin, as you can see, which is another proof-of-work blockchain. You can probably see that I've got some Dogecoin art, I'm a bit of a fan. But yeah, we're fans of proof-of-work and you know, we think at least on our team that it's nice to build a blockchain where everyone can be a part of it or anyone can make a block or participate in a block. And that's also like really important for something that we don't really talk about that much anymore in blockchain, which is censorship resistance.

And censorship resistance of course is like more than just you know, oh you don't have freedom of speech. It's also things like sandwich attacks. What we've seen you know, frankly on these proof-of-stake chains is that the nodes have turned into PvP servers where you're playing against like the the people that operate the infrastructure. Like they are trying to profit at you like on your behalf. They're trying to exploit the fact that they're infrastructure providers to squeeze extra money, to steal from you, and those are called sandwich attacks, right? Or MEV, maximum extractable value, from you, right? So like we think that's kind of fucked up and yeah, proof-of-work is superior. So that's why we're a layer-one and we believe in proof-of-work and proof-of-math. But yeah, certainly I am not under any illusions that normal folks care about that even though I do.

Yeah, I mean, that's fair, that's fair. But this is a developer-heavy show so we're free to nerd out. Yes. And and you mentioned it, you guys are a proof-of-work chain but it seems like you guys have a slight twist on it where you guys call it Proof of Useful Work. Just wondering if you can go double-click into that a little bit.

So, yeah, Proof of Useful Work is all about not wasting work. So normally on blockchains that are proof-of-work, we're going to be hashing hashing hashing, everyone is trying to solve the same problem, right? So it's basically just a question of who solves it faster. But adding more hash power for instance to the Bitcoin network doesn't make Bitcoin's user experience better or capacity higher. And you know, in the traditional Web2 world, when you add more servers to the network, your capacity for users and speed is going to go up, right? People are going to wait less time.

I've actually got a little animation that perhaps explains it even better than I can if I could share my screen real quick. That might be interesting. But yeah, so Proof of Useful Work, everyone chips in and we split the work of building a block. So you can see over here, this is an actual block that we did on Psy. It had 9 million transactions in it. And if we zoom in over here, let me just keep zooming. Sorry. There we are.

And here we go. So these are actual transactions from users, right? And we'll have our network start proving those transactions. And as you can see, what we do is we build a tree of these zero-knowledge proofs. So the useful work that our network does is that you know, miners around the world will take users' transaction proofs and aggregate those zero-knowledge proofs. So as everyone in the audience probably knows, if you build a binary tree out of something its height is going to be log of n. So because of that, we're able to build our blocks in log of n time. So we have a special state model that also enables this. But basically, the main idea is that we're able to build these very, very large blocks which prove millions of transactions in just a few seconds.

So yeah, and anyone can participate, all they have to do is prove that they're doing useful work for the network. And the most important useful work for any blockchain is making it very easy to verify the blockchain from genesis, which in the case of Psy, you just have to verify the latest proof. So you can think of the useful work as being something like okay, we start with 9 million transactions and then we make it into 5 million proofs and then 2.5 million proofs. So as we reduce the number of proofs that are required to verify in order to verify all the transactions in a block, we're doing useful work for the network by improving its ability to reach consensus. And by the time we've reached one proof which recursively verifies the previous block proof as well as you know, the two proofs which prove the left half of the transactions and the right half of the transactions, we've actually generated a single proof you can verify on your computer in you know, half a half a half a millisecond that's proved every transaction is valid on the entire chain starting from genesis. So we find that work to be useful. And yeah, that's Proof of Useful Work for you. Although, the longest chain of blocks and this is kind of an interesting one, is determined by the most amount of gas fees paid. So the more total gas fees have been paid by the network, that's how we do like a canonical consensus for ordering. I hope that makes sense, but I thought I wanted to share our cool animation.

By the way, if anyone wants to try out our prover, you can click on any of these proofs and do a little time trial to see how long it takes for you to generate on your computer.

So like if I come over here, you can just copy this command and you can actually like reproduce it locally. So it'll like run the prover on your own machine, generate the same proof, and you can see if we're lying about our TPS figure because I know a lot of people kind of bullshit on the TPS stuff. But you can you like you can pick any of these nodes in the tree and walk your way up the tree and see how long the total time is and see if it actually is you know, like 13 seconds-ish on your machine and so you can check our stuff. I know we it's it's difficult to build a block explorer for a privacy-preserving blockchain, right? So we're kind of doing some some interesting experiments in UI. I like the animations though.

Yeah, it looked amazing. And and yeah, those are certainly some monster numbers there. Exactly. And and we'll have that, we'll have that block explorer so you guys can fill around with that after the show. But are you guys live on mainnet or are you guys still on testnet?

We're on testnet. We're going to be launching mainnet soon without a token without a token. We'll probably be like subsidizing the token or like the gas fees in the beginning because like you know, obviously right now frankly the market is not in the best place that it's ever been. But like we also have a lot of like these these privacy applications that are very eager to deploy, so we want to kind of get them onboard.

And some of the AI agent stuff that we're doing with like agentic payment because like you know, one of the benefits of the ZK and just having everything ZK is that like our public keys are just you know, the hash of the verifier key for some arbitrary zero-knowledge circuit. So you can build like programmable keys where your AI can do transactions on your behalf, but it has to work in these parameters, right? It's like Turing-complete keys. And we'll also be releasing if any there's anyone that wants to not be an AI doomer and wants to get on board the AI bandwagon but in a safe way, you should come talk to us.

Add us on X, we're releasing a bunch of tooling for like agentic toolkits, basically like programmable guardrails for your agent built on Psy. Let us know, we've got some cool things coming, the privacy stuff is really killer and we would love to have you in our dev community.

Awesome! And we'll have again, we'll have those details for you to get on that Psy Protocol train. And I guess shifting gears just slightly, you mentioned at the beginning of the show that Psy Protocol also supports smart contracts. Is it different in terms of the development experience if somebody is coming from the EVM side of the world?

Yeah, so we are in fact crab people, we are rustaceans at Psy. So the smart contracts are written in Rust. We may change, we may add support for other things in the future. If you've written a Solana program, I can promise that it's easier than that. Although, I guess perhaps that's not saying that much. The bar is low. But we've got like browser IDE. We actually so for the EVM devs out there, we made what we think is an under-an under-appreciated tool. Shoutout to Remix IDE for people that are kind of first picking up a chain for the first time, just the ability to kind of like see what the state of things is and just quickly hack up a contract, but to be able to have like multiple blocks and different states and see how contracts interact with each other without like running a local environment is like such a big win, and we just finished it for Psy. So that's going to be going up soon.

But I think you know, usually with smart contracts there's not like the actual like grammar and stuff with the language isn't so bad because like the logic isn't that much. It's more like the integration testing and all that stuff so hopefully even those that you know, maybe are newer to Rust, maybe you can become a crab person too, right? You never know.

Oh yeah, oh yeah! And interesting you mention Remix, they're actually coming on the show tomorrow! Oh, cool! Well shoutout to them. I copy them but you know, highest form of flattery, right? Indeed, indeed. You just do. Yeah, that's awesome. And I guess shifting gears slightly again, you mentioned it, I mean I totally agree with you privacy's going to be I think a much bigger deal in terms of the AI scene and even like the blockchain Web3 space this year. There's a lot of hoopla around like verifiable agents, which I think it still has its important use cases but I think we've seen quite a lot of examples recently of just people's data just going up in smoke getting stolen. I mean, I think Mexico's government got like hacked or something yesterday or the day before and a bunch of people's records got stolen from like a AI-centric attack.

So I guess for our our developers here, what are perhaps some useful AI agents that can be built with Psy Protocol and and might help combat some of this?

Yeah, so like you know, I'm more on the practical side like in and again, not a doomer. So my optimistic thing is I want my AI agent to do the things that I don't like to do. Like I'm not a fashionista, you can see this shirt is like 12 years old, this is like my high school shirt, right? I thought I was so cool back then maybe. But I would like AI I would just like to upload a picture to AI and you know, you know, give me a makeover, just buy the stuff, just have it sent to my house. So a lot of the things that people don't want to do that they would like to delegate to AI involve buying something. So on Psy, you can build like a an account in our account abstraction because we have these like programmable keys. You can set like reasonable spending limits. Or oh you can only work off of this vendor list, so like don't like don't like spend all of my money or like send it to some like random people or something that you know, maybe someone is doing some prompt injection on one of the websites that the AI is visiting. Like and these things isn't the or these things aren't logic that like you put into the prompt for your Claude but whatever, it's mathematically guaranteed by the constraints of the circuit that is required um to for it to generate a signature proof.

So like yeah, like I think honestly like the biggest thing for for like AI is just going to be payments and doing it on Psy. And one part is the guardrails. The other part is frankly, you know, if in the future like AIs are going to be like doing most of the buying of stuff and like you know, we're just kind of it's going to be like oh, I want a so-and-so, I want a new speaker, right? Find me a domain name that isn't being squatted, that isn't like super expensive for my idea for a company, right? And it's just going to do it. Well, you know, if it's going to be on blockchain, it better have privacy because I think like for most people, um, they wouldn't feel comfortable like publishing their credit card history. Like I don't know Narb, would you feel comfortable like just you know, throw up the Visa statement on stream right now? No pressure, right? Yeah, fuck that! That sucks, right? And like with blockchain we have anonymity, but we have we really have like the worst privacy, like it's it's really bad. But it's necessary to make you know, something where everyone can verify until you add ZK, right? Because you know as we all know, the way that a blockchain is secured is by just making it so that everyone can verify every transaction on their own machine, so like you don't have to trust me, right? You you run a full node and uh, you can you can know what the state of the blockchain is.

So like so yeah, like I think in the future if if it's if it's not going to be dominated in this like weird situation where it's like Visa or Mastercard or Coinbase or something you know, who knows, right? One of these centralized folks is is just going to own all of the payment rails. If it's going to be decentralized, it needs to have privacy if like normal people are going to be using it. And merchants aren't going to integrate it unless normal people use it because you need to have like that scale right. And then also it needs to be able to support the scale that would be required for merchants to use it. So Psy is kind of the only thing that ticks those boxes. So for us, we're very bullish on this like AI payment and like maybe in in the doom of the most privacy-losing potentially humanity-ending cataclysmic event that we're all going through right now, perhaps we're able to at least take some control of our payment system back from like the governments and Visa and Mastercard, right? Because like you know, 60 years ago there was no like oh, the government can see every payment that that you make, right? Or like you know, for 100 years ago till the dawn of humanity, we all survived just fine without like Uncle Sam looking over your shoulder and seeing every time you, you know, perhaps rent an adult movie or um you know, make a payment online, right? So that's like yeah, I think hopefully we can bring some freedom back in this time of of great loss. But certainly there is a massive attack on privacy that's going on and we're all kind of being told that um we're too far gone at this point. Like no one's pretending that privacy wouldn't have been a nice thing for your industry. Like you know, frankly, a lot of devs feel kind of like oh, so you trained all these AIs on my GitHub data and now you're like going to fire me. Well thanks, right? Maybe I wish that it wasn't just there, right? So I think everyone agrees privacy is important, but um you know, hopefully we can we can bring bring some of it back. Like a little bit is better than nothing, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

100%. 100%. And yeah, I mean, that's always been kind of the kind of the dream, at least ever since I I entered the space and started reading up on everything. So yeah, we'll see, we'll see how it plays out. I'm hopeful that we do get a shred of privacy back. But yeah, we'll see how it plays out. And as we're approaching time, I want to get a couple more questions in from you. One is, I guess are there any open-source opportunities or are you guys hiring at all for anybody watching today interested to get involved?

Yes. So we have some so specifically we have a few like ecosystem projects that we're kind of like incubating that we need humans for. Because you know, frankly, smart contracts should be written by by humans unless we want the AI to set the rules for our lives and our our financial infrastructure. So if anyone there out there Rust devs, although you know maybe we can consider some other, we are again crab people, if there's any other crab people that would like to join us, please contact us on X, we would love to chat.

Awesome! And like I said, contact info is in the description of this podcast so whenever you watch and and have your interest peaked, definitely reach out to Carter and and the folks at Psy Protocol. And I guess to end things off, you mentioned that mainnet is on the horizon. Is there anything else that you'd like to perhaps reveal some alpha on on what's coming up on the roadmap for Psy Protocol?

So in the in the next six months, we will we will be having some very exciting partners coming on board. Something some kind of stuff that you know, we aren't a very famous company but you know, we've had the benefit of working with some very excellent partners that you guys have probably heard of. So the time to get on board is is is now. And I think you know and obviously I super biased, but I think there's going to be a lot of there's going to be a lot of assets on Psy because of the privacy part. We've got some very large partners that are going to be onboarding a lot of assets, just because Psy makes it really easy for you to like bridge over assets from other places and make like privacy-wrapped versions. And in any for like as all blockchain devs know, like the best place to build a dApp is a place that has like a lot of USDT and assets where like people can actually like, you know, it's liquidity for people to use your DeFi or to use your dApps. Like come on build on Psy, be the first one there, build your monopoly in our in our privacy-preserving smart contract environment and you know like maybe like the AIs will work work for you or maybe you'll be the AI overlord. You never even know! But this is the opportunity, join the privacy movement, hop on Psy and take your slice. So there's still there's still many many things to dominate. The privacy-preserving version of a DEX, swap, like all of these things we need privacy-preserving versions of and it's sort of the last frontier for people to like do something that no one's done before. So come on over.

Beautifully said and and I think that's a great place to end off on. Carter, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today. I'm really excited to see Psy Protocol continue to evolve here and like I mentioned, I think privacy is going to be a big dominating theme of this year and beyond. So you you guys are definitely building in the right space.

Thank you so much man. I'm sorry for ranting and raving, I know I've sort of been all over the place, I just woke up but I really apologize for that. Hopefully your listeners aren't too bored by what I had to say.

Not at all, not at all, no need to apologize. 30 minutes flew by. I feel like we could have gone in like another hour or whatnot. But I guess for another time.

Amazing.

But I guess to end things off, just want to wish everybody watching today, listening today, a very happy Thursday, Friday, wherever you may be. and that will catch you back here tomorrow for another episode of DevNTell to cap off our double hitter. Till then, have a good one folks! Cheers!