The Chopping Block: Is Canton a Real Blockchain? Ethereum’s Cypherpunk Dilemma, AI Security Chaos

**Evgeny Gaevoy** (0:00)
But I guess my most contrarian view on this is Ethereum Foundation, for the first time in its life, is being ahead of the curve currently, because it basically reads the room, and it understands, okay, all those people who were into cypherpunk values in the past, they have nowhere to turn anymore.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:19)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:20)
It's a tale of two quants.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:21)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:24)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:27)
I'm into trading firms who are very involved.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:29)
But I like that ethos is the ultimate problem.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:32)
DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry inside of perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So, quick intro. It's Rosigarh Tom, the DeFi Maven and master of memes.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:45)
Hello, everyone.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:46)
Next, we've got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Gran Puba at Gauntlet. And joining us again, we've got Evgeny, high-frequency hustler and head honcho at Wintermute.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:56)
Hello.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:57)
And I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're here to invest in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopping Block.xyz for more disclosures. So there's been an increasing debate that's continued on since we had our previous show where we talked about the EF about this kind of, you know, core crypto, cypherpunk values versus the new normal of what is increasingly focused on adoption enterprises and, you know, the sort of, quote, unquote, grown up version of crypto. And a lot of this has really fixated on this debate waging between ZKSync and Canton. So we are, first caveat that we're investors in ZKSync. They wrote a long thread, basically targeting some of the claims that the Canton team has been making. Those of you who don't know what Canton is, Canton is their, they had another name before, I think, before they were Canton. But basically, they're an enterprise-focused blockchain that is not, they're primarily focusing on banks and financial institutions. And they allow you to deploy these somewhat private blockchains that they have. I'm going to butcher some of this, but basically they're primarily focused on institutions. If you want to become a validator on Canton, so they have this one big Canton chain, and become a validator, you submit a business proposal to existing validators, and you get a two-thirds vote. They have individual Canton instances, I guess, that are kind of permissioned enterprise databases. I don't actually... I might be butchering this. Does anyone correct me to know a lot more detail about Canton? No.
None of us are Canton experts.

**Tarun Chitra** (2:30)
Well, the only thing I will say is the company that sort of later developed Canton has been around probably much longer than Ethereum, digital asset or whatever. That's like 2013

**Haseeb Qureshi** (2:41)
That's right. That's right. So they've been in this space for a long time, targeting enterprise adoption. And Canton is clearly onboarded a lot of enterprises and financial institutions. But there's now a lot of debate about, does Canton even count as a permissionless blockchain? So Canton has claimed that they are a permissionless blockchain. I think the understanding is that they're not permissionless in the sense that you would normally think of in that anybody can validate the chain, anybody can become a validator for the chain. And in some cases, not even everybody can use the chain. So they're... And of course, like the issuers of all the assets, they have complete control. There's no sense in which, like USDC, anybody can hold USDC. That's not true for a Canton issued asset or assets that are issued on Canton by default. And so there's been a lot of back and forth from a lot of crypto OGs like Mert, like Eli Ben-Sasson from Starknet, claiming that these things are not, they're not decentralized, they're not verifiable, they're not publicly verifiable, and therefore they don't really qualify as blockchains. Mert kind of making the same rough argument. And other people saying like, hey, well, this is really about pragmatism.
This is a different mechanism and or a different modality of blockchains that are really gonna fit more for financial institutions that don't want to change the core ways in which they operate. And that's how they're gonna be brought on to the blockchain revolution as opposed to, you know, maybe some of the more radical changes that you have to make in order to launch a product on Ethereum or on Solana. Now, Evgeny, you have been a very vocal critic of where you feel like the industry has gone wrong. And maybe Canton is even embodiment of that counter revolution. And your claim is that no, this is the core cypherpunk values of crypto and of the original Ethereum whitepaper are the core value proposition of crypto. And why don't you elaborate on how you view this whole Canton drama that's been taking place over the last couple of weeks?