Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Their Impact on Digital Identity and Privacy
33:46 Share

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 Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API. ♪

You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Rob Viglione, who is a co-founder and CEO of Horizon Labs, the development studio behind several leading Web3 projects, including ZKVerify and Horizon. Rob served in the U.S. Air Force for several years and was deployed to Afghanistan, where he supported Special Operations Task Force intelligence efforts.

During his time, he developed an early interest in Bitcoin, recognizing its potential benefits for countries with unstable economies. Today, Rob's work focuses on Web3 scalability, blockchain efficiency, and zero-knowledge proofs. With the 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. In this episode, we discussed...

His 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 ZKPs and Web3 can enhance privacy and the user experience for the average person and what's stopping privacy from becoming the default. And now for this week's episode of The Brave Technologist. ♪

Rob, welcome to The Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me, Luke. Happy to be here. Yeah, I know. I'm excited for this interview. We've been wanting to have more folks from the ZK side of things on the show to kind of get in the weeds on this a bit and really looking forward to this one. I would do a little bit of looking into your background a little bit. It seemed pretty interesting, too. You kind of went from military intelligence in Afghanistan and co-founding a blockchain company. What kind of got you into that mindset and put you on that journey just to kind of set the table a bit?

Yeah, I mean, I think that for me, the through line is I've been a big libertarian and that's how I got into Bitcoin early on. So it was kind of the domain of like cypherpunks and libertarians early. So for me, it was more like I loved the idea of programmable money, the idea of competition in the monetary domain, just really.

was super cool. It just happened to work out. I mean, it was kind of crazy early on, right? That no one would have guessed that Bitcoin would be where it is now. But for me, there was a gap in between going from the military world into running a Web3 company. The gap for me was academia. So I actually shifted careers. So I took a little bit of time off from my former career as a physicist and mathematician working with the U.S. Air Force to go and getting my PhD in financial economics. What was the timeline? Yeah. So I mean,

Timeline for me, like in the Bitcoin world, I started getting involved in 2013. I was at Camp Leatherneck in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. I was putting together seminars, teaching people how to set up wallets, giving away Bitcoin. There's probably a lot of happy GIs and nationals that have Bitcoin or had it this early. And then I went, I kind of cut career there. Personal story was...

I got married and I thought I had the coolest job ever when I was there. So at the time I was running basically 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. 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 a 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 my mid thirties at the time would have been super cool. But I took the other option that I had on the table, which was to go back for my PhD. And that was in 2014.

Yeah, I think it's just super fascinating. People lose sight to how much tech and how technical these battle spaces were. Having to work from that mindset, and it might have been a little bit different kind of contextually in terms of the mission, but you're talking about pretty serious stuff. I feel like it almost prepared you well to get into this identity space with crypto where you got to care about certain things. There's important pieces that have to be protected along the way. I would imagine. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

No, look, you're going in a great direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

a few takeaways for me. So I definitely appreciated complexity of Battlespace and complexity of my new Battlespace, which is in Web3 and competing in this marketplace. And then I also really appreciated from kind of like, where does this stuff actually have value? Where's the utility in crypto? The first and earliest use case for crypto was literally just the ability to get your assets into a global financial system and out of your idiosyncratic, just where you happen to be born, where you happen to live. And a lot of people around the world

Unfortunately, it happened to be in jurisdictions that are quite hostile to their personal freedom, quite hostile to privacy, and just governed extremely poorly. So the ability to get your assets into something different and greater than that, like in the digital domain with Bitcoin, was the killer use case. We've gone beyond that, but it made me appreciate it. And my PhD was actually focused in crypto. I got my dissertation done and the topic was crypto finance.

And the idea was looking at cross-country differences in crypto asset prices and looking at some of the explanatory determinants of that. Governance was one of the biggest ones. So I just realized early on that crypto had its biggest marginal value to people that were outside of mature capital markets, mature economies, or well-governed countries.

Yeah, super interesting. I mean, it's kind of you kind of have like the emergence of Bitcoin right after the financial crisis, just at the time, too, when even today, parts of the world where in the West and the U.S., 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, that's super interesting.

Tell me more about what you guys are doing with DK Verify and in the crypto side of things. Yeah, besides having cool t-shirts. The company that runs Horizon Labs, we do, the way I look at it is we have a collection of about 60 brilliant people around the world working towards this shared vision of basically trying to make the world freer, fairer and to bring modern economics everywhere.

And okay, broad, lofty ambition. 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, whatever, but like keep preserved privacy, but still have applications that can make use of the data without leaking the data. It's a really powerful type of tech. And we can talk about its implications here.

But two projects that we work on at Horizon Labs, like our namesake Horizon is, you know, privacy preserving 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. So super cool and excited about that project. It's going to have this brand new life, but basically providing this privacy utility, which I think is really important for getting kind of end-to-end workflows in finance, but also a lot of other economic activity into the base ecosystem, which I think is one of the hottest sources of activity right now on Web3. The second thing, the t-shirt that I'm wearing, ZK Verify, is tackling a modular piece of this cryptography or ZK stack of

But basically, every statement that we want to prove on chain, it starts by generating a proof. You can aggregate them, which means like adding them together, making them more efficient to float through the system. 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 available.

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? So Ethereum basically every node that's running is processing a verification of the proof.

Now, that works today in the current state of Web3, but the world that we're building for is one where you have about a trillion proofs a year being generated from every single device that we have, whether it's your browser, whether it's your mobile device, your TV, your solar panels, whatever it is,

You're generating proofs so you can actually prove certain pieces of information, preserve the privacy of kind of provenance of that 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 Web3. So kind of do a state snapshot off-chain. It could be your bank account, like how much money you have, the fact that 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.

Let's walk through just like a really simple use case, because I think people are pretty familiar with the current situation. OK, 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 base dot ether, whatever crypto domain 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?

Yeah. So first of all, big shout out to Zcash. It was the first organization to bring ZK-Proofs on-chain. It was kind of the mind-blowing breakthrough that happened that spawned Zencash and Horizon 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 it can execute completely on-chain.

The consensus of the blockchain is all the nodes that are running the software can verify that Rob does in 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.

So like on a block explorer, basically like the portal or the tool that you have to go look at 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. That's the starting point. It's probably the simplest application is just literally transferring value on chain. But then there's so many other kind of richer use cases that get much more sophisticated.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, we even started doing some of this stuff in Brave in 2016 with Anonized for Zero Knowledge for doing reporting and things like that, like anonymous reporting where we had to kind of, 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 can have confirmations or validations and still actually 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 going to get more and more important. And people are starting to see now that we're moving to a more and more cashless society. 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 parity with these things? And it

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.

100% agree with you. I would say what's really held it back this far and maybe the earliest implementation of this stuff, and we came from this early world as well, was just let's throw the technology out there into the wild. We have the tech. We can actually create a shielded pool that could provide the capabilities so that I can send you money anonymously. The problem is, and I think crypto is a big problem today, is it's not yet really connected to the legal world.

I'm not saying that everything happening on chain is illegal. Far from it. It's just that we need to connect what's happening on chain with smart contracts to be like enforceable real contracts. We need to make sure that at least from the point of view of the U.S. government and for U.S. citizens and the audience and us as a U.S. company, that all the things that we're doing on chain are actually not violating like OFAC sanctions lists. We're not helping facilitate money laundering in any way. 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 systems so that we can one check that is a user

kind of a valid user of a system who's not on an OFAC 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 cypherpunk days of crypto were sort of like would make us puke to think about these types of concepts. I think it's a really good point that you bring up too, because it is kind of like we're hitting this next iteration where this last year,

was all about okay institutions are starting to adopt things and for a while it was almost like they kind of had put cold water on all of those players even getting involved in the space like after ftx collapsed and all 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 and it sounds like and correct me if i'm wrong here

We're kind of at this stage where you've got this base case where everything can be super private in this way 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 players.

Is that fair? It is absolutely fair. And even when you're not connected to highly regulated players, but like as an example, and we all in the US just went through this with April 15th tax day is when you need to report, you know, sort of the year for last year's like financial activities, like you need some sort of credible statement of what happened like in your financial life so you can report it to the IRS.

OK, we may not like that for the 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, 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 this OG ZK crypto project that we've had that was originally fully anonymous, that now is having a new breath of life on base as a regulatory compliant privacy layer, because we want users to be able to participate in a way that's not going to kick them in the butt later on for doing something maybe they shouldn't have.

It just kind of shows some of the evolution of the space and the progression where now that you've got, okay, we can work on an L2 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.

The funny thing with crypto, I was going to 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, 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?

So interestingly enough, as customers, not so much. If you look at our customer book right now, it's largely WIP3 companies. Part of that is just because we're crypto native ourselves. We've been in the space for a while. We have certain key infrastructure that crypto companies use. 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 technologies.

kind of sources or like destinations for our institutions and businesses frankly to come on chain. And Coinbase has done a phenomenal job leading the way there. So really excited about that. I think it's still early days, but it's really important though for us to actually meld these worlds

and stop like siloing these things where it's either crypto or TradFi. I don't think that makes sense long-term and throw AI into the mix. Like we all have to drizzle the AI hype onto everything we do these days. But the reality is like, I think crypto is the currency in the rails for AI, like hands down. I don't think agents are gonna be kind of all times issuing micro payments with bank wires. It's not gonna happen.

They're going to use cryptocurrencies, right? So like the future is definitely going to include crypto. It's no longer a question. And I think that, you know, humans need to come along for that ride.

How far along are you guys with these different pieces of your stack? Yeah, so it's testnet is where we are. I mean, like Horizon has been a long operating blockchain since 2017, but 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 end of June, and then we'll be launching the platform shortly thereafter. ZKVerify, it has been a testnet for about six months now, and we're really just battle testing that.

For green lighting that launch, to me, it was all about business metrics. I wanted to show that there's actually a 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 credible user traction and we're solving real problems out there for customers.

The good news for us is that now we have a pretty fantastic AD pipeline that has solid conversions and a great cross-section of use cases that I'm pretty excited about. So internally, we've greenlit that thing. It's just kind of a matter of TGE for the token, exchange listings, and all those kinds of things that we have to worry about in Web3 that normal businesses in Web2 don't really have to think about.

What are some of the applications for ZK Verify? Are people using it for various different things or what's kind of the focus? No, so the solid cross section here. So one of the kind of like Web3 native things that just makes a ton of sense and is consistent with everything that we've been talking about is private dark pools, actually. So beyond the fact that a lot of institutions don't want to come on chain and have their transactions visible to the public, there's also just the pragmatic reality of what we call MEV or extraction of value just by virtue of

of blockchains being transparent and by broadcasting transactions, there are people that can front run you in the systems. So it's pragmatic, like value loss or slippage by people trading on chain that having a dark pool out there 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 have an amazing platform

and user of the system that is running that project. Others, though, are also, like I was saying, equally interesting. One use case that I think is going to be a killer use case for crypto is actually for ZK. It's called ZKTLS. 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. Well, what we could do is actually generate a cryptographic proof snapshot in time that this was in fact the correct server or this was the server that's publicly registered to serve the information. We have that data kind of encapsulated in a ZK proof so that

The public can't see the data, but now you can ingest that proof into a DeFi system and actually maybe borrow, like execute like a lending transaction or borrow assets using your credit history and collateral 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.

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 it's super interesting. Yeah. Digital identities. People think it's boring or something, but they're actually really...

big problems in the space, you know, I want to do a business. I want to pay people, but I can't connect this on-chain space to someone to buy groceries. How do I get that value from A to B, you know? Or the $8 trillion underserved market for SMEs internationally that just can't, you know, syndicate loans to expand their businesses or capitalize their companies, but they're, they're solid credit qualities. They pay their bills on time. They have a viable business with like actual transaction records and,

but they can't share this information in an incredible way with, say, a hedge fund in New York that could actually syndicate a loan to finance their business. So these are those types of things by providing the rails and connecting the dots in a composable Web3 type of way that has to be privacy preserving, right? Because there's so many elements of the stack here, whether it's

giving away your invoicing data to your competitor or whatever that you don't want to do as a business or can't do. Now we have the technology to handle. So another amazing use case that kind of closes 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 even if I can't figure out what the weird hex addresses for your ETH address and know that it's you today, you have someone tomorrow will be able to figure out that that's your address and then correlate everything that you've ever done 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.

The identity piece is really interesting. I think we're seeing this right now in Europe, where you have GDPR, right, which has these right to be forgotten elements to it. And there's laws and then there's are people even going to really enforce them fully or whatever that that whole bucket of things, but then you're dealing with immutable blockchains on the other end of the spectrum, right?

spectrum, right? Like you almost need to have something in between those two. 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. They're talking about, oh, you have to be able to delete a blockchain. It's insane. But like when it gets back to earth, you're going to have to have some kind of ZK solution, I would imagine, in order to do 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 going to put all your data on chain. And then we're just like, that's not compliant even in a best worst case scenario, whatever. Now it's actually getting to the point where with AI, you need to be able to prove that somebody is real, that's putting something out there, whether it's payment, royalties, whatever. ZK is going to be that missing link. Is it that fair to say? I'm just kind of

I want to make sure that the audience understands. I think you're spot on. So first of all, let's hope that regulators remain sort of reasonable. You have to be like 100% 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 going to happen, right? So trying to force like that is the wrong path of legislation, but I'm not a legislator. So take my opinion for what it's worth, not much.

But I think the missing piece of technology, though, is ZK, because if we can actually keep information off-chain, but do cryptographic proofs of that information and then make use of it on-chain to unlock certain types of transactions, then I think we're good. Now, again, it does require regulators to be sort of reasonable.

Because there's got to 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 want to keep off chain. It just generates state snapshots of that information, bring it on chain for specific reasons, for specific durations. Right. But regulators have to be OK with that in order for this whole thing to work. But I think there's a reasonable middle ground.

Yeah. And it's such an interesting time right now, too, because even how some of these things are classified as like personal data, 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, like and you're starting. And it's all part of the process. Right. When things new technologies and but online.

I feel like now we 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 money that's potentially unlocked for U.S. 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 I just was reminded of it. You mentioned shielded pools. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So the concept of Shielded Pool is basically you use cryptography to create this safe zone so that you can actually transfer assets into a sort of black box. They're there and there's basically the state of those assets is maintained in the black box and things can happen. You can transfer them within the black box. And then when you want to make use of them outside of the black box, you can transfer them out. We call this black box in the ZK world, especially the Zcash world.

type of ZK world, a shielded pool. So you can view it as really this kind of overlay or kind of element within a system and you can send things in there. Now, there's some potential issues with it from a regulatory perspective. And then yeah, once money's in there, it literally is a black box and you have no idea who's doing what. And then it's also permissionless in systems like Zcash for money to go in and out of these things. But it's

It's an easy intersection of technology is to have like a KYC AML gating on the front end or back end of that black box, right? So I think that's where we are now with the tech and that's at least how we look at it.

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? 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'm just curious, you're working in it and you're trying to like implement these things. Are you finding that it's easy for developers to adopt once they get the concept?

So I would say that the current state of awareness is probably terrible. This is clearly a problem. It's a headwind, but we know it's really a product problem because like, how do you just simplify things and make it easier for people? So I think some of the best entrepreneurs in the space are working on the products just to make things way simpler.

I'm not going to say we're some of the best entrepreneurs in the space, but we are also working on tools to make things way simpler. You can think about one example here would be historically in order to execute on SDK 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 into software basically.

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 things like ZK virtual machines, ZK ABMs that actually allow you to code in a language that you're used to, maybe like a ZK ABM where you're still coding in Solidity and then it compiles actually underneath all of that into the ZK circuit. 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 an L3 on top of base, but just you have a very simple integration to an application that shouldn't have to move from base L2

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, hope it's not buggy, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And upgrade it, as the proof systems themselves upgrade, right? And this is not 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, then good luck figuring out how to convert that thing into Rust and deploying it on Solana, right? So there's just toughness of barriers for developers. So with ZKVerify, we're supposed to be, 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 them. Don't worry about security because we audit. We do all that stuff ourselves. We run the bug bounty 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 because we already do. And we maintain all of those things. So literally just worry about your application. Use a module that makes it easy to RPC into our system. Send us your proofs and we handle everything else. We send them the results wherever you need them.

So 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 companies like us that are out there trying to make it way easier. 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.

So I'll blend this with what you just said on the demand for privacy is increasing. I don't think it's increasing fast enough or just enough or fast enough. I'll say because I think what really stalled privacy, we felt this as an organization and with our open source project with Verizon, the launch of the privacy coin was we felt persecuted.

to be frank, like we felt that privacy was bad from a regulators perspective, not from our perspective. And that we were always being persecuted. We were getting exchange D listings for tokens that privacy tokens. Right. And I think that this just like put like a, a hard stop in a lot of people's minds. Like you still had your hardcore privacy projects like us, like rail gun and,

and others, they were still building. But most people just thought of privacy as basically they wrote it off. Like, okay, can't do it, not going to invest a lot of time or kind of like mental energy into it.

All of that's changed, guys. So the war on crypto, in my mind, is over, at least in the U.S., which I think is probably the biggest and 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 a responsible way, where if you're a user from the U.S., intersect with an AML or KYC AML system so you can actually verify identities. And, like, the cool thing about, like, a ZKID as an example is that 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 on chain. And then that's the starting point to interact with a whole rich world of privacy preserving applications. 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 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 is so easy to beat. And if there could 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 think it's super important, like what you're saying, where just having that conversation. 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. 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. I appreciate that.

I mean, I do want to shout out, and you probably get this all the time, but myself, my team, and most people that I know are big fans of Brave. Love it. Thank you. You guys respect privacy fundamentally, and also you've been supportive of the Web3 ecosystem from almost the beginning. And that means a lot, especially to companies and people like me. Anyway, if you want to reach out to me, it's robviglione on X, or just come to the website, like horizonlabs.io.

Now, Horizon is ZEN, like Z-E-N, because our cryptocurrency is ZEN, which I think was a super cool name or ticker symbol for a currency. It's awesome. But that's it. We're always available. The team's basically... We make a point of we're just out there, like...

And with our community, it's 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. So come and reach out and join the conversation. 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 talking about ways that we're able to connect.

privacy to the bigger world and the bigger financial ecosystem and everybody to kind of make this a worldwide thing. And yeah, I'd love to have you guys back on after you guys launch and get some updates and see how things are going. So folks, please check out Rob's stuff. And thanks again for making the time to come today. No, no. Thank you so much, Luke. I really appreciate it. Have a good one. You too. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. 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 at 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.