---

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors, especially in names. Click any timestamp to jump to that moment in the audio.

0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. The podcast where we go behind the labs. data, and headlines to uncover the personal stories shaping the future of science and technology. My name is Linda Hernandez. I’m your host. And today, this episode is going to take us on a fascinating journey into the heart of decentralized technologies. Hello, my name is Rafael Giordano, and our guest today is someone who truly lives at the crossroads of technology, society, and human values. Dr. Jaya Clara Brekke is a chief strategy officer at NIM Technologies, a groundbreaking decentralized privacy network.

1:02She’s from Durham University and an interdisciplinary background. She’s one of the leading thinkers on how emerging technology like blockchain can reshape power dynamics in our world. Dr. Brekke works. doesn’t stop at academia. She’s an advisor to the European Commission on Blockchain Technologies and a recognized expert in the field of political economies, governance, and the ethics of decentralization.

1:30But what really makes her work stand out is her focus on the human stories and the societal impacts behind these technologies, how they challenge authority, redefine autonomy, and create new possibilities for communities worldwide. Clara, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. It’s a pleasure having you here. Thank you for the invitation. I’m very happy to be here. So to start, what is the specific moment or the passion that drew you to your attention to decentralized technologies? So decentralization has been something that I’ve been interested in since like probably my teenage years, to be honest. I became active in political activism. This was around the time of there was a global movement back in the late 90s, early 2000s called the Alter Globalization Movement. It was a movement that was coming together around environmental action, labor action, feminism and indigenous rights, and kind of pooling everybody’s ideas, resources, time, action together in order to present a united front against the spread of neoliberal economics. So at the time, I started studying political economy, and I was also looking into how more decentralized structures could actually be part of the solution. During that time, I also came across a media network called

3:00Indymedia, and this was a network of media producers that was organized in a decentralized way, non -hierarchical, people making videos and reporting from large -scale demonstrations. from political actions and really telling the story from the ground up. And this was, in fact, what we didn’t know at the time was that this was actually the beginning of social media. So this was the invention of blogging. This was the invention of Twitter, in fact, as well came out of this movement. So a lot of the kind of technologies that we’re used to today from social media. came out of this idea that people themselves can tell their stories. What we didn’t know, though, was that the social media that was to emerge was going to go hand in hand with large -scale surveillance as well. So that was a kind of twist to the story that came later on. And that’s kind of what I’ve ended up working on very much today, so looking at how decentralized… networks can actually solve the problem of mass surveillance that came after the rise of social media. In short, I’m interested in decentralization because I still believe that in many ways it can present an alternative to hierarchical power structures. But what I’ve also found in my work, especially with blockchain and also what happened with the story of indie media developing into a vehicle for mass surveillance.

4:21is that sometimes if you focus just on the technical layer, a decentralized technical architecture can actually result in centralized power at a different level. So when you decentralize technology, you create a vast open field for someone to actually harness a lot of information and data and so on. and value and economic value from people. So that’s what I’ve been focusing on ever since then, is to look at all the different layers, not just the technical layer, but also the social layer, political layer, economic layer, governance layer, and so on, to see how these interact and understand that when we say decentralization, sometimes the actual effects can become centralized.

5:00Really interesting. Yeah, maybe we can break that down a little bit for listeners, our decentralization is, and can you briefly explain? what that term really is in technology is in the social aspect of it. And how does it differ from centralized systems? And possibly what are the pros and cons? I know they interweave in some ways. Some can camouflage as decentralized systems, but they’re quite some authoritarian as per se. But yeah, it would be interesting to unpack that for maybe new listeners that are not unaware of what that really means. Absolutely. So on the technical level, when we’re saying decentralization, we’re usually talking about networks here, right? Let’s say the kind of like extreme version of decentralization, what some people like to call distributed, is when you get rid of servers effectively. So you have lots of devices and things out there that are networked and they speak directly to each other. This is what we like to call peer -to -peer networks. So that is when you have… Yeah, digital devices that somehow speak directly to each other without going via a kind of server.

6:09Then a normal architecture, usually you’ll have devices speaking to a server. The server then passes on your information or your communication to wherever the final destination is. You can have forms of decentralized architectures that include servers as well. Ours is a kind of hybrid model like that at NIM for a lot of different reasons. And they’re usually easier to scale in a sense, but that’s a deeper conversation. So in effect, when we’re talking about decentralized technologies, we’re talking about ways for communication to pass between digital devices that does not require the coordination of some sort of centralized entity, a server or otherwise, that the theory goes that that server would then be able to potentially manipulate that information or throttle that information or decide who gets to speak to who or whatever. There’s a certain understanding of what power comes along with these types of architectures, where peer -to -peer architectures, you have, you know, people pinging each other directly without that intermediation, so to speak.

7:10So that’s kind of on the technical layer. But I wanted to contrast that with, you know, the thinking in the social and political economy layer. And, you know, there we have this kind of interesting history of the concept of decentralization coming from, you know, on the one hand, political thinking. where the idea is you have what most of us are used to is like some sort of parliamentary democracy. We vote for people that then represent us in kind of decision making. And we take kind of a way of decentralizing parliamentary democracy further than you have these ideas of direct democracy, where people represent themselves in various decision making forms. And there’s been a lot of thinking there of how to scale. direct democracy and how to introduce ideas. There was an idea floating around in the early 2000s also around liquid democracy. And this was an idea of taking advantage again of technologies where instead of voting every four or five years, we can, on every single issue, delegate our decision making to various experts. So instead of having professional politicians, it’s a much more kind of fluid delegation process. That kind of gets rid of that politician class in a sense, and it becomes more, you know, the idea was it would be more kind of meritocratic and you kind of, okay, you know, on a certain environmental question, you defer to a scientist, on a certain economic question, you defer to economists or political economists you respect or so on. So having this much more kind of fluid version that sits somewhere between. direct democracy, where you have to be involved in every single

8:42decision making through to parliamentary democracy. But let’s contrast that kind of political idea of decentralization that’s very intertwined with democracy with the idea of economic decentralization. And this is a kind of market thinking that comes very much out of neoliberal economics, where the thinking is that, how about we get rid of human decision making in terms of politics entirely, and we let the market decide, right? Here, you know, communication around various issues. The idea was it was going to happen through like price mechanisms instead. Here I’m referring specifically to kind of Hayekian ideas. Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist, kind of contrasted very much with Karl Marx in terms of political affiliations. So tends to have kind of more of a right wing flavor, let’s say, and is a bit of a kind of market extremist. So the idea is like. You know, you have people out there in the world, everybody is kind of buying and selling things. And when you buy and sell things, that sends a signal across the market. So the more people that want to buy a certain thing, the more the price rises for that thing, which means that it incentivizes producers to actually produce and supply that more. So it’s this idea of price as a communication mechanism. You know, people that take kind of Hayek. to the extreme, they kind of want to see everything in the world translated into price and market dynamics, right? And they kind of see, you know, that as the route to decentralization and that as an alternative to centralized decision

10:13making. At this point, this was contrasted very much with the rise of communism and authoritarian communism specifically. That is a kind of like market -based decentralization. And the reason why I’m telling this long drawn out story about these two different imaginations of decentralization on the one hand related to democracy, direct democracy, perhaps, let’s say, a more kind of like left wing understanding. And then this kind of market price based version of decentralization is because the field that I’m working in today in blockchain, you have this wild mix of both of them. And you have people that are reading across the board and drawing in crazy ideas from both of these like long traditions without necessarily really understanding this history and this political economy. Wow, that’s very interesting. It’s like everything goes together. So you can unpack one together with, for example, the economics and the political part and everything is just stick together. As you mentioned, the blockchain and privacy networks. Can you explain a little bit more in baby words? Yeah, so blockchain. It’s a technology that’s been through a similar hype as we’re currently going through with AI, right?

11:32Everybody was crazy about blockchain for a few years there. And it’s a particular form of decentralized technologies that actually builds in markets effectively. So the idea is, and this is what I’m saying, it was drawing a lot from kind of Hayekian thinking, but with a little bit more engineering that’s gone into it, more kind of bespoke engineering. So the beginning of… Blockchain technology per se was in Bitcoin. That was the invention of this technology. And in very simple terms, it’s a ledger, right? It’s a kind of list of things that you can add to. But it’s a list of things where the agreement on what you add to that list of things happens in a decentralized way and happens via different kind of computer mechanics. So in Bitcoin, it’s a competition.

12:23The people kind of run, you know, they engage in this competition on their computers in order to find a number that then allows them to add to the list. And the list in terms of Bitcoin is a list of transactions. It’s a very kind of peculiar type of technology that came out of the idea that governments and central banks and the way that money operates has a little bit too much power involved, too much human decision making. And the idea was to… distribute this decision making and this power into computational mechanics instead. So that instead of having a government or a central banker deciding how much money to print at any given moment, it happens via an algorithm. And that algorithm is designed in such a way that it is economically disadvantageous to alter the way that it works. So in a sense, like blockchain is this kind of very strange new form of decentralization. So you know how I was talking about the political decentralization on the one hand, talking about market decentralization on the one hand. Blockchain tries to work with a little bit of ideas from both of those, but in effect is the idea of decentralization via harnessing the material world, harnessing, you know, let’s say mechanics and engineering and computation and actually distributing human decision making. into a kind of computational process instead. This was something that I got very interested in because I was like, I don’t even know, I don’t

13:53even know where to place this on the political spectrum. And you had, you know, the early kind of, I went to some of the first Ethereum conferences, Ethereum being the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. And their very first developer conference took place in the city of London. and uh the city of london is a financial district of london and it was in uh i forget the name of the hall now but the hall was like a gold you know decorated hall super elaborate um and i walk into the room and i don’t know there’s maybe like 50 to 100 people there it’s not not very big the meeting but it is this strange strange mix of bankers anarchists uh developers you know like a mix that i just haven’t really seen before And I couldn’t place people politically. People had all kinds of wild ideas. And that’s what made me interested really in the field was that there was not a kind of easy recipe to what was going on here. It was neither really left wing nor right wing, which might turn out to be far more sinister. It got me interested. So here I am today. The way that that intersects with privacy and the way that it intersects with the project that I’m working on today. Is so if you remember, I was talking about this network called Indymedia and the invention of blogging and social media. You know, the next part of that story is, you know, after social media, I think most of your listeners are probably also aware of just how much, you know, companies are surveilling

15:26their users now. Right. So you have, you know, the big scandals that came out, Edward Snowden revealing that the NSA is spying on everybody. And then, you know, subsequently, all the information coming out about how much Facebook gathers about people. And that was the outcome of a set of design flaws effectively at the core of the Internet. And these design flaws are basically like, you know, when the Internet was invented, it was invented in kind of a bit of an academic context.

15:53So it’s, you know, people that are like, oh, my God, look, we can share information with each other. How cool is that? You know, and then this thing kind of just blows up. And it was, you know, that that kind of design context where it’s like there is a certain, let’s say. trust involved. There’s a certain kind of goodwill involved. All of a sudden, we have this network that is, you know, that crisscrosses geopolitics and crisscrosses economic, commercial interests as well. So people start looking at the technical architecture and they’re like, how can we take advantage of this technical architecture? Well, it’s an architecture that’s not designed with strong privacy protections. In fact, someone that’s keeping an eye on the network can see traffic flowing and can monitor who’s talking to who, when, how often, and all that information is readily available. And even more information if you’re a social media company. And social media companies obviously had a whole other interest.

16:46They wanted to become the biggest social media company. And so they needed to find ways for people to actually stay on their platforms. So they get some of the best designers in the world to figure out how can we design infinite scroll? How can we make buttons the best color that make people want to press those buttons? How can we get the best content producers involved? every trick possible to make sure that people stay on their platforms, using their platforms, posting to their platforms as much as possible. And I mean, we’ve seen, you know, designers come, you know, out of, you know, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, so on, talking about like the work that they were doing and actually like sincerely regretting it and really seeing the negative effects and the negative impact in terms of people’s mental health, in terms of phone addiction, all these sorts of things. In short, we’ve ended up with this kind of like technical environment that is, first of all, ubiquitous, which means it’s everywhere. You know, we’ve got our devices with us all the time. We’re carrying it with us all the time. It’s become integrated with every single service that we use. So whether it’s, you know, public services, commercial services, everything, you know, you use your phone to speak to the bank. You use your phone to send emails. You use your phone to interact with the public sector.

18:00You use your phone to buy things. These devices have become part of like pretty much every single, you know, activity that we need to do in society in our relation to other people, including payments now too, right? So cash is being eroded. And so we’re using, you know, our devices for that as well. And all that comes at, brings in all these vulnerabilities that I was talking about around lack of privacy at a very core level that opens people and their lives up to manipulation and fraud and so on. That was a big backstory to say what I’m working on now is privacy. I think it’s one of the most important topics today, especially as we’re moving into an age of not just having devices with us everywhere, but artificial intelligence as well, which is the outcome effectively of all this data that these companies have been gathering about us. You know, then they train that data and all of a sudden you can automate all sorts of behavior and interactions. So, yeah, so I believe. Privacy is one of the most important things to be working on today, both for people’s security and sanity, but also as a form of kind of almost like activist blockade, you know, on the data pipeline, let’s say. So this whole kind of production industry that’s happening. For our listeners and for us to unpack a little bit about the structure of this decentralized mixed net architecture. We’ve gone a little bit into the details of privacy, the importance of it,

19:31but we’d like to understand a little bit of the project that you’re currently working on and what’s you guys’ goals pretty much. Yeah, absolutely. We’re building something that hasn’t existed before, and it’s something called a mixnet. Effectively, what a mixnet does is vaguely similar to a VPN. even more similar to Tor for those who are familiar with Tor, but it does something that none of those networks can actually do, which is it mixes your internet traffic. So the way to imagine it is, if you think about the internet as this vast network that spans the world, you’ve got people all over the world that are sending messages to each other, browsing the internet, making phone calls, making payments, this and that.

20:20And all of this, it takes the form of data packets. So these packets that are moving across the network. And we have got to a point where luckily a lot of people have been working on privacy. And we’ve got to a point where what’s called end -to -end encryption has become the norm. So what that means is the content of your messages and the content of what you’re doing is encrypted. And that’s pretty much the default for most things these days. It’s kind of become the gold standard, which is great, which is fantastic. But there’s still a major problem, which is that someone can still watch the network and see the patterns of communication. And now the patterns of communication is things like how often you’re sending a message to a certain person, what time of the day, how big are the data packets that are transferring across, where are you sending it from? And all of that can be analyzed to actually learn possibly even more than the content of your message. Now, that sounds a bit kind of strange because it feels counterintuitive to the human brain. But if you think about how a machine operates. A machine can read patterns very well, especially if it’s structured. So what I’m talking about here is the metadata of your communications.

21:30So, you know, and the metadata will usually be quite structured data. So like I said, the kind of time that a packet is transferred, size of the packet, etc. That can be analyzed with machine learning algorithms or otherwise, you know, doing kind of traffic analysis to understand things like what is your relationship to this person? You know, even what is your state of mind? Even like… For kind of voice calls, for example, it can be analyzed to such a fine -grained manner that you can actually sometimes detect what’s actually being said in a phone conversation.

22:00So and if you think about the content of a communication, it might be like, I don’t know, you might be you have a specific kind of like way of speaking to your best friend where you use a certain slang or whatever. All that kind of stuff is not very easy for a machine to understand, actually, because it’s like quite a kind of unique personal language between you and this person. And making sense of that and making meaning out of that is not that straightforward. So in a weird way, when we’re talking about surveillance that’s powered by. machine learning algorithms, the content is less important than the metadata, than the patterns of communication in the network. So that’s something that we’re working on. We’re working on, the way we like to put it is we’re adding noise into the internet. And that noise disrupts that pattern, right? And it makes it impossible for machine learning driven surveillance to actually read. what’s going on in the network.

22:55So what does noise actually mean? Noise is just a kind of word that we use to describe this kind of mixing techniques that we’re doing. And what happens in real terms is on your device, before you send anything out, it encrypts all your data packets in several layers of encryption that make all data packets look exactly the same as they come out of your device. And then we add what’s called timing obfuscation. So that disrupts the kind of pattern in terms of timing as you’re communicating. And then we send your data packets across several, like three to five operators that are running servers all over the world.

23:32We send it through their servers and mix it with other people’s communication. So that mixing and timing obfuscation and encryption make it very hard, nearly impossible to trace. what I’m sending to the destination that I’m trying to send it to. So that’s what a mix net does. It basically just adds, you know, it kind of disrupts the traffic patterns, let’s say, and make your communications untraceable. That also applies for like a different applications. For example, when they’re banking on social media, in the way that, for example, you’re talking and then five seconds afterwards, you see apps about what you’re talking like, oh gosh, this is… Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it works for any application.

24:20Effectively now we’ve… We’ve tried to make it as easy to use as possible. So it’s basically, it looks like a VPN app. You can just download the app and then you can just send all your traffic through, you know, either the MixNet or a kind of lighter version of the MixNet because the MixNet is obviously, it’s still in an experimental phase, which means it slows your traffic down a lot because you have all this mixing happening. You’re sending it through different, you know, routes across the network and so on. So we have a lighter version that’s just like. two hops without the mixing, but it’s still, you know, it still adds a lot of protection. Yeah, so everybody can use the app already now. But ideally, our ambition, you know, to be honest, is that this just becomes integrated into the everyday apps that you’re using and you don’t even need to think about it. We really want this to become basically the routing protocol for any secure communications across the whole internet. I have a question that you’re explaining. But for example, how do you contract like a legal action? Like, you know, like, or I don’t know, people watching what they… Bad people using the network. Well, I mean, the very simple answer is you can’t.

25:29Our understanding of society is there are certain things that should be available to people no matter what. And here I’m talking about clean water, for example, right? So you’re not going to poison the water of a village just because, you know, potential criminals are drinking from that water. So there are certain kind of like, let’s say, essential infrastructures. that we need as a society and that we need collectively in order to function as a society and in order to make sure that we can maintain our health, our basic rights and so on. So clean water, good housing, you know, sanitation, and from our perspective, secure communications. If you, you know, if you have insecure communications because you want to catch the criminals, well, then you’re having insecure communications for everybody. That’s the problem. The question of crime and how to kind of deal with crime from our perspective should really happen through other means rather than through mass surveillance. That’s very interesting.

26:23I have no idea about it. And in science, scientists managing the data is very important. Could decentralized systems make scientific research more open, secure and collaborative? And how this can change the way we publish and validate discoveries. Because you know that when we publish a paper, it’s always like an editorial that manages like 50 % of all of them. For me, it’s like a centralized. Yeah.

26:54Not sure, but it’s like a monopoly. Yeah, yeah. But how the centralized technology can help with science and the managing of the data. There was actually in the early days of blockchain, there was a number of experiments exactly with this, with academic and scientific publishing. I think any of us who’ve been in academia knows that the publishing, the journals are, you know, it’s a deeply fucked up economy, right? Poor academics working for free doing I don’t know how many peer reviews. And then you have the journals selling all that material back to the universities.

27:34It’s a deeply corrupt publishing industry. So, yeah, there was there was experiments early on in the blockchain space to actually develop a new economic model for for scientific and academic publishing. But I haven’t actually followed it so closely. So I’m not sure, you know, given that I haven’t I can kind of think of it off the top of my head. I don’t think any of them were like. super successful, at least not quite yet. But I’d be surprised if they’re not still around trying to kind of solve this. Decentralized technologies, like first of all, you know, there’s like peer to peer knowledge sharing that, you know, absolutely at that layer, you know, that I think there’s a number of different experiments that are happening there. And then with how to structure the economics of academic publishing and scientific publishing, that’s where blockchain is potentially interesting. But yeah, I don’t have the latest info on how successful those projects were. That would be great. Because yeah, as you said, it’s just suck. We have a special guest that is Dr. Ani Maria Cheto. And she was explaining to us all the business behind the publications and the editorials and how they get the money to like everything. And it’s just millionaire. It was like a good idea to try to figure out how to. reach out the more people and accessing to this information absolutely we can still stay on this scientific topic and like uh so scientific collaborators often rely on trust and transparency if we take these two

29:06concepts like how can decentralized systems ensure that the data integrity and the open net access uh is in research so how can scientific research take advantage or leverage decentralized or perhaps blockchain to their advantage? Well, in theory, that’s exactly what blockchain should be able to do, right? Both the transparency and the trust bit. So, you know, the transparency being, you know, that you have, you’re effectively running a public ledger of information. You know, it’s a database effectively. You know, a blockchain is a public database of information that has been verified by actors. that are part of that network. So on an abstract level, that sounds wonderful. And that sounds like something that is absolutely useful to maintain, store and validate scientific information. What complicates it a little bit, I think, has been the kind of wild economics that usually goes hand in hand with the whole kind of crypto space. But it doesn’t need to involve that, especially if you have kind of collaborating institutions and you make sure that whatever token is involved in the architecture is not out there in the open markets, but is rather just used as a coordinating token amongst kind of collaborating institutions, then absolutely it should be fine. Crypto and like blockchain, it’s in everybody’s mouth. I mean, it’s unfortunately the upcoming US president. You have Bitcoin going

30:36left, right and center. And there’s a buzz around it. So it would be interesting to unpack, you know, like the monetary aspect of it as well, because it’s very financialized. And it seems like even the far right is leveraging this whole movement as well. Even though I find it interesting because blockchain has got like the Ethereum. I was reading a fair bit about it, about decentralized DAOs. decentralized autonomy organization you know at a grassroots level very left leaning so it’s like this mix of these two sides of course is very financially driven for personal gain and stuff like is it just a trend that’s happening now because technology for me is really fascinating and I’m trying to see how scientists perhaps can leverage it i mean academics in one form or another and been been using it to one degree or another but it’s very very financialized right now and speculative i find yeah so it i mean first of all i think it’s important to say it doesn’t have to be but it’s just that you know so one of the benefits of blockchain has is in fact the kind of financial financialized aspect what i mean by that is that what happened early days was people that have been working on open source software for quite some time realize that,

32:06oh, if we put a blockchain on this, then we can raise money very easily and very quickly to actually create a project that would be almost unimaginable otherwise, or would get peanuts in public funding, or we’d need to beg grants on a regular basis or whatever. So the kind of financialized aspect of blockchain was kind of part of its early selling point. quite a bit like industry and scientific uptake that has taken the kind of database architecture and this idea that you can have different actors come together to arrive at a consensus around what should be in that database. And you can do that in a kind of algorithmic manner. That’s possible without the financialized element. The financialized element comes in if you… effectively put the token on the open markets then you’re tied to the markets right um and that’s when you need to start like maintaining the token price getting involved in like dodgy you know exchange listings and this and that and that’s where the whole kind of financialized aspect comes in and things get a little bit complicated you know all that to say that i think like you’re the potential application for for scientists um especially also for I think data engineers that are interested in a kind of more equitable direction for AI, blockchain is quite a powerful tool. And I believe it has a really important

33:38place in the kind of like future technical stack, let’s say, as we move into artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is effectively, you know, machine learning algorithms that are trained on data sets, right? And then the question is, what are those data sets? Where do they come from? Whose knowledge do those data sets actually represent? Whose perspective on the world do those data sets represent? What is the narratives that are going to be repeated and automated through AI? Are those narratives that we actually want to automate and perpetuate? Is there counter -knowledges that are not being represented here?

34:12What’s missing from this knowledge base? All those questions are really deep and important societal questions. The way to understand it is almost like… ai is going to supercharge any given kind of person or group’s understanding of the world or perspective on the world so you know it’s super super important that we have people involved in shaping ai so we don’t it doesn’t just represent you know i don’t know the perspective of elon musk or whatever do you know what i mean it’s like we need to actually have this is like this is about the the it’s effectively kind of the future knowledge repositories.

34:50So it’s a kind of like a modern day version of the library. So if the library only has books in it that like some, you know, random rich dude has picked out, well, guess what? It’s going to like, it’s going to have serious consequences for science and society. We’ll end up in, you know, the dark ages basically, which seems to be where we’re headed. So when it comes to this question of governing the data that informs artificial intelligence, which is the knowledge repository of our modern day world, that’s where I think blockchain can potentially have a lot to say as a database that has some sort of consensus mechanisms and governance built in. That’s what I’m hoping to see more of and what I’m looking forward to seeing in that space. I think it’s something that’s potentially absolutely wonderful and marvelous and groundbreaking in a very, very positive way. But to speak a little bit to the negatives, which are much more evident right now. Yes, crypto has played a huge role in the US elections. Unfortunately, you know, as someone who’s involved in the crypto industry, you know, I saw lots of people and… investors, you know, really rally around Trump when it became clear to them that Trump was supportive of blockchain and supportive of deregulation in the crypto space. But I’m also baffled by how ridiculously naive these people are to think that there’s any goodwill from the side of Trump on that front.

36:19My perspective is both Trump and Elon Musk see crypto as markets that are small and incredibly easy to manipulate. And that’s exactly what they do. So guess what? They’re making money out of it. It’s that simple. There’s nothing more deep there. They’re not in favor of any sort of political decentralization. They’re not in favor of any sort of equitable distribution of wealth in any way whatsoever. These are markets that can be easily manipulated. And they’re also markets that tie easily into their whole like more like vibes based politics. Your listeners might be familiar with Dogecoin as well. And this. Funny trick that Elon Musk and Trump pulled off of establishing the, what was it, Department of Organizational Efficiency? Department of Organizational Efficiency, I think is what it was. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, and DOGE was the acronym, right? And Musk was going to oversee that new department, which is effectively slashing 70 % of budget for federal institutions. So, you know, you see this. this like destruction of any mechanisms of accountability for those holding power. But it’s spun in a way that makes it look like they’re anti -authoritarian, like they’re all about freedom. They’re all about funny memes and cryptocurrencies, but they’re really just consolidating power and wealth at an insane level, you know, unprecedented, really. So that’s the kind of negative side to that story. We go through

37:51ups and downs. There’s going to be some dark years ahead. But honestly, I see so much wonderful and important stuff that’s happening beneath the surface of these pretty horrific headlines. Wow, that’s scary. It’s quite volatile. Yeah. I might just quickly chip in because there’s something quite positive that I’ve seen out of blockchain has given the rise and empowered a lot of digital artists. creators and created an economy for them so like i curated a few generative artists uh exhibitions and a lot of these people weren’t able to either uh exhibit their work in any other form besides blockchain so and has given an economic incentive to their work and has also brought their yeah this whole genre that was kind of some obscure in some ways uh to the limelight um so that was quite interesting like i’ve chatted to different artists uh from coming from all over the world some even have been doing this practice for many many many years like uh from decades and uh got recognition so it was quite exciting to see that and botching was able to to incentivize that for them So, yeah, there’s been some really cool things. So every now and then I dabble into some form of positivity that has come from the industry, which is really cool. And of course, the work that you guys are doing is pretty amazing. I think

39:22the Ethereum ecosystem is far more healthy in that sense. And it’s one of the biggest kind of success stories of crypto really is, you know, NFTs and, you know, digital art, the digital art world that’s kind of emerged around. And in the Ethereum ecosystem, I completely agree. I think there’s some really amazing stuff happening there. It’s kind of like the golden age for digital art, really. There wasn’t really a space for it before. You had a couple of awkward galleries here and there trying to display a few things back in the 90s, but it was never really working.

39:54But yeah, I agree. I think it’s really, it’s quite, it’s very cool. A lot of really good stuff has been made over the past few years. And with this buzz about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, how we can make these technologies more accessible to people for the average person, how we can someone begin to use or benefit from these technologies in their daily life, because sometimes it’s just so compacted that it’s like, oh, what is that?

40:20Well, I mean, I’m on the fence about that. It’s kind of like on my good days, I’m really proud of everything that we’re doing. On my bad days, I’m thinking, are we just a gateway to what is effectively a corrupt, financialized technology that’s causing, I don’t know, unprecedented levels of fraud and speculation and this and that. Technology is important as a potential leverage of empowerment.

40:46So accessibility is an important thing. But I’m also very much in favor of people taking it slow, actually, like being careful of how and when and for what we’re actually using these technologies. It feels like right now in history, we’ve got to a point where there’s been really rapid development of digital technologies. And as I mentioned earlier, integration of digital technologies into every single aspect of our lives. And I’m not sure it’s been for the better always. You know, I think there are certain things that really don’t need that digital intermediation and that our quality of lives would be better without it.

41:29So, you know, here I’m also thinking about like, I don’t know, automated checkouts and cashless payments and this and that, that like effectively hollow out a city where you have less and less of this kind of more casual engagement with other people, you know, in a shop or at a bank or whatever else. We’ve kind of stripped society of these more everyday interactions between people and instead put screens, devices, and apps in front of us for every single activity that we need to do. So I guess what I mean is, to me right now, it feels like a time to take stock of who’s pushing these developments and dynamics in that direction. Is there a direction that we want to go in? Where and when does it make sense to have an app? you know, doing something for us and where and when does it make sense to use AI and where and when does it make sense to use blockchain and start making some considered decisions around like what are the types of societies that we’re really trying to develop here. And it feels like that scale of conversation, that level of conversation hasn’t really quite found a home yet. I hear policymakers having these sorts of conversations all the time, but they end up just creating very, at least in Europe, very ambitious regulation that with, not very great effects on the ground. So, you know, I don’t know, in the EU, it’s like, let’s have these serious conversations at the European Parliament or whatever, and then it’ll end up in a PDF. And the actual real effect on the ground is just annoying cookie banners or, you know, other shit like this. It needs

43:01to happen. I don’t know, there needs to be some sort of forum for that type of conversation to happen. Policymakers are part of it, but I think it also needs to involve artists is really… My sense, actually, and I think artists should be at the forefront of these conversations, really, because that’s where ordinary people can start to understand the potential impact of the technologies that we’re seeing and that we’re using. A good advice to get a guidance before starting just crazy, jumping on it. Crazy searches. Well, the main guidance is if you’re going to touch crypto at all, just be careful, you know. There’s so much scams out there. Find a community is the first thing before you start throwing your money at it. Find a community that you trust, meet with people, have chats and make sure that you’ve got kind of sound advice. Otherwise, I think it’s also important for people to know that you don’t need to be an expert. So what I’ve also found is. some of the most expert people that are like the engineers actually building these protocols and coming up with these protocols, they are also some of the people who have the least clue about how these technologies are actually impacting people’s ordinary lives. So you as a user of, you know, whatever app, whatever blockchain system, whatever crypto wallet, whatever DAO you might be involved in, you are actually as much an expert as these engineers or, you know,

44:33people like me or whatever, because, you know, many times we’re so deep in building stuff out that we don’t actually have much awareness of the experience of using it. And that experience is the real stuff. Don’t be shy to get your hands messy. Don’t be shy to kind of ask questions. Don’t be shy to push back. The experts have no clue what the scale potential impact of what they’re doing, to be honest. So, yeah, I do invite everybody to get involved in the conversation and get their hands messy. I know it’s a really big topic, decentralized finance. We don’t have a lot of time to go into it. I just maybe we can touch base a little bit of what DeFi is.

45:16And if a user wants to get an understanding of it. Is it a way for somebody to take ownership of their assets? Because that’s my understanding of it. Or what’s your view of it? It’s a big question. Yeah, it is a big question. I mean, DeFi is a fascinating space. Yeah, decentralized finance, it sits in a legal gray zone is a good thing to kind of like mention. It’s kind of one of these places where it’s not really sure. depending on what jurisdiction you’re in, this and that, because effectively decentralized finance does not have a lot of the kind of controls that banks usually have to kind of be under, right? So especially things like anti -money laundering regulation, know your customer, this sort of thing. DeFi is a little bit more of a kind of like open wild space of experimentation still. It’s becoming more formalized, but… effectively, the core of DeFi is decentralized exchanges, right, which is where instead of having an exchange where you might buy Bitcoin, you know, you come with your whatever your euros or your dollars or whatever, and you buy some Bitcoin from a centralized exchange that’s, you know, regulated, decentralized exchanges are kind of user driven, right? So it’s like someone will put up a pool. of, you know, some tokens and be like, I’m up for exchanging Ethereum for Solana or something like this. And then, you know, you can do those exchanges at that kind of like peer to peer direct level. It’s

46:47a rabbit hole to go down, but it’s also very fascinating because there’s often a lot of very interesting experiments with governance also, because you’ve got these funds that happen or that people put up. And sometimes these funds are community governed. So people kind of have. decision -making processes around like, do we want to add liquidity to this pool over here? And if we do that, then the proceeds from that, from those exchanges will go into this fund that’s going to fund this community development project where we’re going to build out new tooling, a new kind of platform to, I don’t know, monitor XYZ networks. So it’s kind of, there’s a lot of community to be found there, but anyone that gets involved, you have to have a kind of interest also in like, finance, basically, and financial techniques and whatever. But it’s a pretty wild and creative space. So I do, I mean, I do invite people to get involved and get curious. There’ll be a lot of kind of jargon to get through and stuff. But it’s quite fascinating what’s happening there. And I have to say, I was initially like quite reluctant to look at DeFi. I mean, personally, I come from kind of more of a left wing background that’s been, you know, traditionally hugely critical of finance more generally. DeFi has something kind of like quite different. I mean, this community element to it is actually quite powerful. And especially when you see people that might not have access to lending and banking otherwise get involved and actually like become empowered

48:19by that space. It’s like it’s fairly interesting, but it does go very much against like the European left wing sensibilities of state regulation and taxation and everything being quite kind of ordered. And grounded in a real economy. I mean, this space is like, it’s pretty wild in comparison. So NIM has a crypto token. I’ll explain why. Because it gives some insight into how tokens are different from money. So, you know, Bitcoin was invented with the idea that it was going to be some sort of digital gold or digital cash.

48:53And people had a lot of monetary theories in their head. But actually… What it unleashed was the designs of tokens more generally, which can be engineered to do all sorts of things. And what’s fascinating, this is something I’ve written quite a bit about actually, is that when you have computer engineers creating tokens, they are creating tokens to solve engineering problems. So you have this like unique new kind of persona that’s like playing around with economics, but not really like. for the sake of economics per se, but more for the sake of trying to design certain types of systems. So it’s more of this engineer’s mentality where economics is just one ingredient in the same way that encryption or whatever is. So in the case of NIM, what we’re trying to do is we’re creating a decentralized network of servers that can route user traffic and mix user traffic, right? So the question is, how do you establish a decentralized network?

49:50Now, in the case of Tor and the case of many other decentralized networks, you will have a decentralized network in the sense of people operating servers, but a centralized list that says these are the servers that are part of the network. So the question is, who gets to decide about that list? You know, if we think of potential kind of attacks here, you have someone deciding over that list that is a malicious person. you can effectively create a network of malicious nodes that are monitoring and tracking user traffic.

50:22So we needed to solve this problem. And this is where the blockchain comes in, and this is where the token comes in. So we have a blockchain where anybody who gets hold of NIM tokens, and that can be they can buy an exchange, they can win it in a competition, they’re kind of out there in the world. We don’t control them. They get hold of NIM tokens. they can use those tokens to what’s called bond a node to the network.

50:49And that happens via a smart contract that lives on the blockchain. So it’s effectively entirely out of our control. So what that means is we don’t control the list of nodes that are in the NIM network. It is something that happens purely via economics, purely via people getting NIM tokens out there in the market. bonding those NIM tokens, which basically means locking them. I’m trying to use kind of simplified words here, locking them on the blockchain, which is a signal to say, I want to be part of this network and start routing user traffic. In return, they also get rewarded and paid via NIM tokens. So when they successfully route user traffic, they get paid in NIM tokens that they can then sell in the market and redeem their operating costs.

51:32But there’s even more to the logic here. The next question is, how can we make sure that these operators are actually doing a good job of routing user traffic? And that’s where we invite a broader community. So anybody who holds NIM tokens that might not, you know, feel like they’re experts in running servers, but they want to kind of somehow be involved, they can do what’s called staking on NIM nodes. So they can look at the list of nodes, they can see who’s doing a good job, who’s like, you know, providing quality service. And then they lock their tokens onto that node, which performs, it becomes a kind of reputation for that node. So the node gains kind of community reputation by getting a lot of stake from the community. And the better the community reputation, the more work is invited to perform in the network. And the more rewards it starts earning. And then it distributes those rewards to everybody that’s staking on that node.

52:29So it becomes this whole community involvement around. reputation for providing a good quality of service and a kind of distribution mechanism also for distributing the value of the network out to both operators and stakers. So that’s the use of the token. You know, here it’s both economic, but it’s also technical. And it solves a very important question of how can we actually make sure we have a properly decentralized network so that we can secure people’s privacy in a good way. And the idea is that that work is what represents the value. Yaya, thank you very much for this time, for all your knowledge, for simplifying the concepts and for bringing this topic in a really simple way. Thank you. This episode was inspired by the chorus to rethink the digital systems that shape our lives and to ask who they truly serve. Yaya’s path. shows that building technology is also about building values. She challenges to create systems that empower rather than control, where privacy, equity, and transparency are not optional, but foundational. Science Behind the Glass is an independent produced and edited podcast hosted by Linda Hernandez and Daniel Esguerra. With the invaluable support of our technical director, Rafael Giordano, and the original music by our colleague and friend, Bernardo Aguila. Follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook,

54:00TikTok, and LinkedIn. And visit our website for more stories, resources, and updates. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, colleagues, and community to amplify these essential conversations. If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to support us with a contribution via PayPal. Just click the Support Us button on our website. Your support is vital for this project to keep growing. Thank you for listening. Keep questioning, sharing, and celebrating science made from every corner of the world.

54:29Until next time.