S17 E36: Yonatan Sompolinsky on Kaspa Covenants, DAGKnight & Coordination Markets

I met Yonatan Sompolinsky in Romania during his summer holiday, so we decided to do a roadtrip interview about covenants, the state of Kaspa development, why intents are more interesting than smart contracts & stag hunts.

00:00:54 – Intro: a road trip with Yonatan Sompolinsky

00:01:50 – Life since S16 E41: Oxford Union & the state of Kaspa

00:02:53 – Kaspa shipped covenants while Bitcoin debates OP_CAT

00:04:24 – Sequencing commitments & based apps explained

00:06:48 – Why OP_CAT alone can't do censorship-resistant based rollups

00:07:21 – BitVM & optimistic vs optimistically verified rollups

00:08:05 – ZK was born for privacy but lives for scaling

00:09:18 – "For the record, I'm very bearish on rollups"

00:12:27 – Ethereum quietly abandons the L2 roadmap

00:13:33 – What ZK is actually for: a thin L1 & separation of layers

00:15:05 – Kaspa follows Bitcoin's UTXO design principles

00:16:04 – Ephemeral logic: generalized atomic swaps

00:17:25 – Camera gymnastics & an Aston Martin

00:19:28 – What covenants won't give you: the DeFi Lego box

00:20:05 – One-time logic vs contract deployment

00:23:18 – The use case question & crypto's crisis of utility

00:26:17 – Bitcoin the turtle & the DAGKnight progress report

00:28:17 – DAGKnight: 49% Byzantine resilience, no latency parameter

00:29:50 – Why 100 BPS on GHOSTDAG would 8x confirmation times

00:30:21 – Sponsors: Cake Wallet, LayerTwo Labs, Braiins, Orange Rock & SideShift

00:34:33 – Zcash made a comeback

00:35:19 – The mental map: where Kaspa is unique

00:38:49 – Real-time decentralization: sampling the honest majority

00:39:47 – Solana & Hyperliquid: fast, but led by one

00:42:46 – Only proof of work bundles proposing & content

00:44:35 – A bear market in usage, not just price

00:45:53 – Old-world use case: bridges & oracles

00:47:22 – Tourism break: Bușteni, mascots & ski resorts

00:49:38 – Hit-and-run agents & the agentic economy

00:51:06 – Having your cake and eating it too

00:54:32 – Vlad on Ecash, miner fees & Satoshi's biggest bet

00:56:37 – Sinaia & the royal train station

00:57:38 – "Bitcoin is dead boring to me at this stage"

00:59:50 – Ironwood, verifiable supply & Tachyon

01:00:39 – Driving like six confirmations

01:01:59 – The tectonic shift nobody noticed: verifying the supply

01:03:43 – The bug & Zcash's unfixable history

01:06:04 – Kaspa's pruning vs historical correctness

01:08:12 – How Zcash's rise paves the way for Kaspa

01:09:17 – The Zooko sleeping-in-the-car story

01:10:32 – "Just launch": Zooko one day before the Sapling bug

01:12:05 – Downplaying the bug & the counterfeit scenario

01:14:34 – Peter Todd's demurrage & the Ironwood migration

01:17:25 – Would any other coin survive this?

01:18:55 – Ethereum's identity crisis

01:21:28 – Back to L1: too little, too late; Solana's cohesion

01:22:46 – Oxford Union & political ambitions

01:24:44 – Hayek: true vs false individualism

01:26:04 – The isolated individual: Lopp, Poelstra & early Bitcoiners

01:32:52 – The enthusiastic individualist

01:34:52 – Coordination markets & Project Stag Hunt

01:35:19 – Prisoner's dilemma vs stag hunt

01:36:24 – Moloch, the demon of defection

01:37:18 – Part 2: stag hunt as the optimistic game

01:42:43 – Intents & NEAR Intents

01:44:03 – Intents vs smart contracts

01:45:21 – Part 3: Rousseau's ape men

01:49:45 – Intendos: "if many sign this, consider mine signed"

01:51:44 – Example: migrating a liquidity pool together

01:53:34 – Pack formation & threshold homomorphic encryption

01:55:42 – Actionable but not committed

01:57:18 – The Netflix example: voice for the scattered majority

02:01:36 – Who are the stags we need to hunt?

02:02:11 – Minarchist, anarchist or libertarian?

02:03:32 – Stag = shared utility; escaping Ethereum's L2 mess

02:06:28 – Composable Intendos

02:07:58 – Exiting network effects

02:09:11 – The Kaspa-Ethereum overlap: GHOST & Casper

02:11:55 – "I don't like DAGs": it's just a data structure

02:12:51 – Why DAGKnight survives a world war

02:15:22 – Michael Sutton & the Argent language

02:16:58 – Bypassing the impossibility theorem

02:18:06 – Ahead of his time or poor communicator?

02:19:31 – BPS vs TPS: the shift already happened

02:21:05 – Falling between the cracks

02:23:17 – The next narrative: coordination markets

02:24:26 – Brașov to Bucharest: documenting the trip

02:25:31 – Roles reversed: Yonatan interviews Vlad

02:27:06 – ACTA protests, internet freedom & political science

02:28:53 – Sztorc's party metaphor

02:29:57 – Zcash at $30 & the Coldcard hack

02:31:40 – What Kaspa actually needs: wallets, not exchanges

02:33:56 – Broadening cypherpunk: from protective to positive

02:37:16 – What have we really accomplished?

02:39:33 – Arriving at the Palace of Parliament

02:43:57 – The secret handshake & farewell