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[00:00:09] Fergulati: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another one of hashing it out. Amazing interviews. Excited about this interview today we have with us Kieran joining us from rogan.org. And Kieran is a contributor over there. Welcome.

[00:00:28] Kieran: Hi. Well, thanks for having me on.

[00:00:31] Fergulati: Hey, you're more than welcome. So I tell you what. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience? Give us a brief breakdown of who you are and how you came into crypto, and then how you came into rogue.

[00:00:41] Kieran: Yeah. So I'm Kai or Kieran. I've been in crypto for about as long as I can remember. I got into crypto. Probably was a bit too young to really understand what it was, but you know, I'm still around stuck around because I think it's where I can make the most impact. And yeah, I mean railgun fairly. Yeah. Probably one of the the technical contributors there. You know, design a lot of the, the smart contracts some of the cryptography. Yeah.

[00:01:20] Jessie Broke: How did railgun get

[00:01:22] Jessie Broke: Mean, railgun came on my radar you know, a few years ago, but I'm actually unaware of the roots and how it how it all began. Could you talk a little bit about that?

[00:01:32] Kieran: Yeah. So you know, as far as I know, the, the name for railgun actually came out from quake two railgun weapon which people just like quake two, I guess. But no,

[00:01:47] Kieran: You know, it's it's been launched. Remember three years ago. Going on four soon, you know. Yeah, it's been been running strong since then. Dow from pretty much day one. And just just a bunch of privacy enthusiasts. Going at it. So. Yeah,

[00:02:15] Jessie Broke: Come from? Like

[00:02:17] Jessie Broke: You guys meet?

[00:02:18] Jessie Broke: And kind of. What was the selling point for you guys meeting up and deciding to work on this?

[00:02:24] Kieran: Oh I mean, I think, I think we all just sort of came in all of the different contributors, like, you know came in in, like, different kind of ways, mostly like, I don't know what amounts just finding out about it in random, like telegram groups or you know, maybe you got, like, another friend that's, like, been following the project for a while. It's just. Yeah. It's been a it's been a crazy mix.

[00:02:52] Fergulati: Cool beans. Let's dive into it a little bit. I wanted to know, you know, and you can get as deep technically as you want to. I can't promise I'll follow all of it. But Frank and Jesse, they definitely will. How do we turn this zero x address into the zero K address and then spit it out again as A0X address?

[00:03:16] Fergulati: How do we do that?

[00:03:17] Kieran: So, I mean, not a school railgun is basically just like, what it does is it adds a new I don't know what it is like. I think my. Yeah, this phone's glitching out or something.

[00:03:36] Jessie Broke: Experienced that. No worries.

[00:03:38] Kieran: Yeah, I understand like any of the active features of. All right, but seems to have gotten rid of it. Nice. Yeah. So out of school. Welcome is just protocol that adds, like, a new address type to Ethereum, right? So rather than, like a Xerox address where everything's, you know, public by default, and everyone that that cares to look and kind of stalk your activity on chain you get a series address, which you know, doesn't publish all of your info or if your private financial data on chain publicly by default. Right. And so, yeah you know, the going from a Xerox address into a zeroc that's an action called a shield. And essentially what that does is it just takes you know, the, the tokens from a public wallet and sends it over into a private wallet. You get a utxo representation of that. And you know, you as the private key holder, presumably can, you know view that balance, view your transaction history and all, and send those around and shield them if you want. But yeah, it's it's only you as a key holder that can that can view that.

[00:05:15] Jessie Broke: It might be a good thing to clarify for the audience in terms of the different tools that are available for obfuscating transaction origins. Some also kind of obfuscate transaction amounts. Railgun is more towards the former, right where you're kind of you're obfuscating not necessarily the amounts. Super. Well, you're maybe you can explain a little bit about that, about the details there.

[00:05:40] Kieran: Yeah. So railguns really geared towards being a like a private address rather than anything else. Right? So, you know. With that in mind, like your, your able to, like, hold balances in a or hold tokens in a private balance and then from there, from there go and interact with various DeFi and all privately. It's probably not very good if you just want to go in and out. Right. That's not what it's designed for. So Yeah, it's it's a, it's a private wallet first. Or a private wallet protocol first. And that's that's where you'd get the most benefit.

[00:06:30] Fergulati: So it's designed. So if you wanted to do, like, if you had a long term trading strategy, you didn't want anybody, obviously, to see what you're doing because, you know, it's your strategy which, you know, and then you send it through everyone. And now you can do all your DeFi there. And then when you're done, you close it out. Then you go back to Xlk or zero X.

[00:06:53] Kieran: Or I mean, ideally, you never go back to Xerox, right? But,

[00:06:57] Kieran: No, it's. Yeah. So you you know, like, that's that's one of the use cases. I mean, if you if you've, like, spent a lot of effort developing this kind of alpha. Right. If you like, go and do it in public. Like that. That stuff's going to be, like, figured out within days. And now you've lost your trading edge, right? And

Episode hosts - Demetrick Fergurson & Jessie Santiago

In this episode of "Hashing it Out," Dee and Jessie interview Kieran Mesquita from Railgun, discussing the platform's approach to cryptocurrency privacy. Kieran elaborates on how Railgun adds a private address type to Ethereum, allowing for obfuscation of transaction origins while still facilitating participation in DeFi protocols. The conversation also delves into the technical challenges of gas costs and the design trade-offs Railgun has made to optimize privacy while maintaining security and efficiency.

<p>Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.

Dr. Corey Petty

Jessie Santiago

Demetrick Ferguson

Hashing It Out

<p>In this episode of "Hashing it Out," Dee and Jessie interview <a href="https://x.com/mesquka">Kieran Mesquita</a> from <a href="https://railgun.org/">Railgun</a>, discussing the platform's approach to cryptocurrency privacy.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Kieran elaborates on how Railgun adds a private address type to Ethereum, allowing for obfuscation of transaction origins while still facilitating participation in DeFi protocols. The conversation also delves into the technical challenges of gas costs and the design trade-offs Railgun has made to optimize privacy while maintaining security and efficiency.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>