Deeply Intents

Respect the Graph - Shoaib Ahmed

Episode Summary

In this episode of Deeply Intents, I talk to Shoaib Ahmed, researcher and engineer for Cycles Money / Informal Systems. We begin the episode with Shoaib's background, including his time working on SlockIt. Thereafter, we begin to unpack Cycles Money, discussing the concept of bringing liabilities on-chain, examples of debt-clearing cycles, and different types of settlement. Later, we discuss QuanTEEum, a new research paper published by Shoaib. Here we discuss the notion of quantum money and a marketplace for decentralized quantum compute. We conclude the episode by discussing the Cosmos ecosystem and trade-offs between building products and protocols.

Episode Notes

In this episode of Deeply Intents, I talk to Shoaib Ahmed, researcher and engineer for Cycles Money / Informal Systems. We begin the episode with Shoaib's background, including his time working on SlockIt. Thereafter, we begin to unpack Cycles Money, discussing the concept of bringing liabilities on-chain, examples of debt-clearing cycles, and different types of settlement. Later, we discuss QuanTEEum, a new research paper published by Shoaib. Here we discuss the notion of quantum money and a marketplace for decentralized quantum compute. We conclude the episode by discussing the Cosmos ecosystem and trade-offs between building products and protocols.

Timestamps

(00:00) - God was a protocol designer
(02:28) - SlockIT experience
(03:53) - Gödel's incompleteness theorems
(10:19) - CoFi & Speculation resistance
(16:43) - Cycles Money
(22:26) - Bringing liabilities onchain
(29:49) - Walking through a cycle example
(33:57) - Settlement
(37:00) - Atomicity and blockchains
(42:24) - Quartz, remote attestations & ZKPs
(45:28) - Product
(53:10) - QuanTEEum and One shot signatures
(58:31) - Endgame: decentralized quantum compute
(1:03:58) - Quantum Money
(1:09:55) - The Cosmos ecosystem
(1:12:23) - Protocol design vs. productÂ