we're just gonna live my dream life now. "do it now". every single moment, just do what you actually want to do. let's have fun then.
Silicon valley season 1; ep; 8 rn.
3:08 am
we're running it real close, pitching at 5pm today, in goa!!!!
rihgt now, im learning some stuff at iit DELHI haha.
so in like 14 hours, i gotta fly to goa, learn everything i need to learn, and build this whole thing out. this shit is what i live for tho, the urgency, lets fucking go then hahahahaha
leaving for the airport now, im gonna get this done. i know i am
and im gonna keep going and working after that. fr man.
6 am
im in the flightttt
i had downloaded a bunch of stuff to read, like docs and stuff, which is what im doing rn, life is actually perfecttt.
when i was in delhi airport, i got sooo excited, cos i was like damn, in 2 years, ill be flying like this for YC haha. life is just actually gaoted.
forget pogo meme sped up on loop, just have fun, literally perfect life damnnn. this is my life man, its really a fucking movie, lets go.
9:33 am
We're in goa now, i went for a quick swim. btw this hotel is sooo nostalgic.
We got like 2:30 + 5 hours left. and a lotttt of stuff to be done. let's get to work then, this trip has got to be worth it. enjoy life letsgo.
we'll have to sort of work non stop lol, so be it.
10:52
we're making good progress. this really aint shit, im understanding everything. just keep going. literally feeling like richard in sv s1 e-7 rn... where he's just sort of knocking down module by module.
wrapping, static, commitment nullifiers ahhhh. i do think this project is going to hit a roadblock soon.
ERC 4626 is literally perfect.
11:02
Avalanche c-chain, all these terms that seemed magic before are now just.... obv.
damn im actually smart asf, i can actually be the whiz kid billionaire of this generation, life is literally perfect ahaha, just do the stuff you actually want to every sinlge second. let's fucking gooooo. we're getting this shit.
11:33
we vibing man. i feel confident. we're really gonna pull this through. for a fact i know that. the finance part is sorta tripping me up rn, i dont really understand swapping, i mean i guess i understand AMM' sbut yeah really need to internalise lending, swapping, borrowing in crypto rn.
11:39
lol i met a couple other kids. ok anyways, i'm gonna be the one presenting, it's on me bro. go get it. just have funnnn
11:48
bro a nigga is vibing cos hes working hard, and these three aunties keep looking at me lmao. we locked in tho ~\_/~ let's build this shit out woohoo.
this is literally the richard episode hahahha. i think ill just down a few redbulls and crank this shit out. ahhhhhh lock in and get this shit right fucking nowwwww
12:30
dang i kinda slacked off, there's literally no time left. i need to lock in and get this shit done, right fucking now. im just not gaonna stop gngg, we can really win this shit.
12:50
"e.g. deposit 1 ETH ($2000), borrow $1000 USDC, buy 0.5 ETH more — now you have 1.5 ETH exposure.
→ if ETH goes up, your gains are amplified (if it drops, you’re wrecked)."
borrowing finally makes sennse fgs.
12:58
well market finance seems interesting. the AMM math is actually sorta interesting. no time for that right now tho haha. i dont really care what you do with privacy, i just want to provide privacy to you ^_^
1:27 pm
I think it turns out the key to understanding this whole thing was UTXO... ahhh lets learn this shit man.
1:42
Ok I think i understnad how UTXO works, also the onchain and off chain creation of UTXO i understand. but damn this still seems completely stupid, cos the first transaction is always fucking public bro wtf.
1:48 pm
the main problem is:
"Ok so especially here (and in off chain thing to but to a lesser extent) what is the fucing poiint of this?
Because let me tell you what hapens, everyone can see all transactions bw Alice and my smart contract (say SC) . they cant see transactions bw SC and aave due to wtv magic math ok. but say alice wants to swap 10 mony$ for USDC (say 100 USDC); she'll have to send 10 mony$ to SC (everyone sees this) and then the SC will do the swapping and it'll hold 100 USDC now. and in a while when alice withdraws, everyone will see 100 USDC from SC -> alice... so then it doesnt take a geinus to figure out oh, alice sent 10 mony$ and got 100 USDC dang. right? wtf are we doing? Then you can talk about mixing or batch sizes or wtv but then you're trying to create a new solution... what is the fucking point of this whole UTXO creation drama... please think carefully"
2:16 pm
Ok ijust got a brilliant idea. i just pitched it to shivam, he said ok, i need to tell this to sahitya or someone man. ill explain reason later, no time rihgt now.
3:34 pm
ok finally pitched it to sahitya, and we're a go. bro this is literally fucking crazy, literallly the fuckin plot of silicon valle season 1 episode 7 and episode 8. this is our "middle out".
6:21
basic functionality works.
let's fucking gooooo!!!!
time to make the UI better and then record the demo video now ^_^
7:09 pm
i'm working on the ui still, its still very htmly well atleast it works (exos and uiexos work)
i need to update the ui and then prepare a banger ass pitch. lets goooo
2:35 pm, 7 novermber
well, im back in college, ready to achieve my dreams. let me just write a quick recap of the goa trip and what we were doing first, i mean that time, it was just so much urgency, but yeah now im here, lets go...
Ok, so basically at the mumbai hackathon, the thing we had built was, privacy for lending borrowing from aave on avalanche.
I mean the thing is, like at the time i started this blog post, i did not know anything about any of this stuff at all, and it was like 14 hours to the hackathon, so im so proud of myself for learning all this stuff, finding new ideas, and building this out completely.
ok so these guys had called us out to goa to pitch our "project" to i guess more people, but at this time, we had not worked on that project at all, i mean at the mumbai hackathon, we had just discussed a lot and then sahitya had basically one shotted this project. i did not really understand much of it.
So right now, if i had to pitch this, i first off obv had to understand everything, and then at the hackathon we had built a veryyy minimal thing, with no frontend at all, just a cli tool, so we had to fix that also...
so yeah i started learning everything, at the airport, i was feeling soooo inspired, i really felt like in 2 years, its literally gonna be my flying for YC at exactly this airport. like this was so fucking inspirational. we were bout to board the flight with no wifi, so i told chatgpt to give me a bunch of resources i could download and read in the flight. it was cool, cos i was feeling sleepy as fuck, but i just decided to push through and read in the plane also...
I mean during the flight i learnt a bunch of terms; i mean lemme list a few of the things i learnt etc etc, then ill juts focus on my day:
i read hinkal docs, commitments, nullifiers, UTXO's ; off chain, on chain both, avalanche vs aave vs ava labs lmao, avalanche's 3 chains, main is c-chain, ERC-20, wrapped crypto tokens, some zk and snark stuff, AMM's, DeFI and normal fincance, how lending borrowing, swapping ect works, ERC 4626, i mean yeah
Also, i was listening to forget pogo meme part sped up on loop lol.
Then i mean yeah, i read a bunch of stuff on flight, we reached goa airport, that was so nostalgic ahhh. Took a cab to the hotel, approx 40 mins, i tried sleeping so i'd be more productive once we reached, cos we were still in the learning phase, like i had so much stuff left to learn, let alone build.
i guess we reached around 8:20 ish, chekc in was supposed to start at 2, i was literally feeling like richard in sv episode 7 (Go watch silicon valley if you wana get these references lol)
i set up my work station, and i was feeling soooo good, and like nostalgic in this place... i went for a quick swim adn then went right to work. so i guess from like 10-3:30ish, i was non stop working... like just learning stuff, getting ideas etc ect.
you knwo at some point i basically realised, what we had built before, was badically a worse (as in no zk) version of railgun, only diff. is we were compatible with erc 4626, which doesnt help you at all, unless you complete the EERC-20 vault integration, but we had not built that at all, and thats a completley non trivial part.
So essentially our project was a worse railgun...
and another problem is my rant above, which was the railgun doesnt fucking work, what it does is, you send railgun some money, then railgun does all the trades using a bunch of mixing and zk and merkle trees and commitement/nullifiers and batching and what not, and then you can take out the money from railgun, but i mean the problem still remains, even if you cant really maek out the railgun transactions, everyone sees the first and last transactions, so it's like,
everyone sees I sent 100k to this random person, no one knows what that random perosn did, but 20 days later, a ferrari showed up at my house. then i mean where tf is privacy, everyone can figure out what happened, even if you dont see the middle part.
so like the problem we're trying to solve, HFT's trading privately, to avoid frontrunning and private mempools; that whole usecase is runied.
at this point, i started thinking of ideas to improve this, and like SV middle out lol (obv not that smart) the idea i setteled on was: "user goes to our website, and he makes a normal fiat transaction, which is he deposits 1000$ to our bank account. (the user never touches the chain, all his things are secured with a username password). The moment he does this, we buy USDC on our externall owned account (MEOA (Mony EOA lol)) Then this money stays there in the EOA (Reason for this MEOA is that an EOA is needed to call a smart contract) then we provide the users with a trade button, where they have three options: buy/sell/swap (simplistic for now) Whenever the user calls an option (like say i think ETH is going to go uppp, this is what traders speculate like),so like he says to swap 100 USDC of their with ETH (10 eth say); what we'll do is we'll relay this information to the MEOA via normal backend. Then this EOA will call our smart contract (Mony Smart Contract) and tell it to do the swapping with AAVE. (what is the reason we even need a SC here? think of some good reasons, like i want to have one cos else it looks tooo decantrlised, this way atleast there's some crypto. i guess smart contracts can deal with AAVE easily?) The smart contract will do the swap and immediately send the eth it gets back to the EOA ( no point in storing it in the SC right?) Then whenever user wanna withdraw their money, user will just click sell 10 eth (like their in our normal website, they will see what all stuff they "own") and the MEOA will sell 10 eth and send the money back to our bank account, at which point we will do a normal fiat transaction to send this money back to the user's bank account. So i guess we have replaced UTXO etc. with just a normal centralised database, where i tell you to do trades on my behalf etc etc."
go read the whole chat where we did this
At like 2:15 ish i had gotten this idea, by 3:30 we were a go, after pitching to sahitya and shivam.
Then, we finally went into the room
At this point, i was literally feeling like Richard from ep-8 lol...
it was like 3:40 at this point, i finally decided on what the final architecture was going to look like, what the demo was going to look like etc ect.
At 6 o clock, the pitches were supposed to start, we lied to the organises like there's a big frontend bug, let us go last (15 teams) (actually nothing was built yet haha)
so that bought me like 2 hours extra. i mean codex did kind of one shot the basic functionality, but there was still a lot of UI stuff and a lot of other things to do to make this pitchabe, so i sat outside for like 2 hours, with complete urgency, just trying to complete this thing. And I mean tbh, I'm pretty proud of what I built,
Right in the nick of time too (i came in during the 13th pitch)
Go look at my pitch here: pitch
i did kinda mess up a lil bit, in that didnt quiet show the swapping mech but wtv
go look at the thing i built here: platform
pretty happy with what i built to be honest. pretty satisfied with the work.
yk then a bunch of things happened, like the judges were talking about centralisation, i was like idgaf bro.
i also had a bunch of retarded disucssions with a judge which were like
judge: jane street will never trade crypto
me: why
judge: cos they cannot guarentee privacy w railgun etc
me: but our solution guarentees privacy
judge: jane street will never trade crypto
and then loop lmao
this happened 5 times.
i also had a bunch of other revalations, about the whole space...
i also had like a bunch of revalations about my life, like what i wanna do with my life ect etc...
i will talk more about this in a later blog post (since i spent too much time writing this and now i gotta work lmao)
but yeah,
now i have complete conviction in myself, i have realised, all i gotta do is what i want to do and all my dreams are going to come true.
i filmed a bunch of hi me vidoes in goa, on the cidade de goa pool, drinking a strawberry colada, where i decided, i am going to achieve all of my dreams, and do this my way.
All The Way Up.