Ankur Banerjee

Senior Product Director @zama. Co-founder @cheqd_io. Co-chair of Technical SteerCo @DecentralizedID. Ex @FinTechLabLDN, @inside_r3, @Accenture

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

Things I wish I could do with AI (that is still surprisingly hard) 🧵

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

It’s not a bad move if they want it to be more widely adopted as a private/public permissioned corpochain (which I think is one of the stated goals).

Many enterprise blockchain stacks like Fabric (from IBM), Besu (from Consensys), Iroha, Palladin (from Kaleido) etc are put under the governance umbrella of LFDT, it’s still open source, and generally has one or a handful of companies remain primary contributors (like Cosmos Labs wants to do).

The benefit of being an LFDT project is:
- For enterprises like banks (Wells Fargo, etc), LFDT has covenants for IP use and patent/trademark protections, which these corporate chains want and highly desire. (Random open source does not have the same guarantees.)
- Technical due diligence from the LFDT Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) adds more assurance that the tech stack is reliable
- Governance is run under LFDT, which is seen as more reassuring and neutral than a random non-profit/foundation, which many open source projects are (like IBC Protocol) if they are not under a neutral venue like LFDT.

I can totally see why enterprise chains need an interop/messaging protocol and I'm sure it will be super successful there, as IBC is a lot more flexible than the other mechanism.

However, this usage of IBC Protocol also more likely means it will be used in permissioned/private networks rather than necessarily being connected to public networks or accruing value to ATOM because it's all being routed through the Hub.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

This is totally fine for most visas including Schengen. They don’t necessarily need booked and paid for tickets, they need an itinerary. A “held” ticket like this is very common, as it gives a rough idea of that flight and route a traveller would take. Held tickets like this used to be more common in the days of travel agents and became less common with instant online booking. Embassies are explicitly not checking with airlines if a ticket is paid for and confirmed, they assess on other factors.

Same applies to hotels. Fully refundable rates, deposit only rates, and zero deposit “held” bookings are all valid since the documentary requirement is to describe the itinerary. Embassies are aware that there’s a risk with spending money on confirmed bookings if a visa does not get approved, hence why they allow this.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@huvoliveira @onchainlisbon @zama Oh wow! that'd be a cool change indeed, especially as the protocol roadmap might need to accelerate a lot with AI-surfaced issues.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

great fin-tech investment

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

Cool use case but perhaps giving AI the precedent of stabbing things in the brain is not the best idea? 🙊

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever

this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer

it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique

dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish

here's how it works:

> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat

> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture

> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that

> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews

> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck

> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are

> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds

> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out

> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved

example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@alexanderlee314 You don’t need to KYC when buying a kebab sure, but there’s a very big difference when making meaningfully large payments between people or businesses where KYC/KYT rules do apply. (And a good reason that many large payments are not done in cash.)

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@eniwhere_ The Pragmatic Engineer?

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

They’re aiming for a bank account / fintech experience, with features like on/off ramping from bank accounts, a guarantee against funds loss, ability to recover account using selfie/biometrics. And it’s a smart account with sponsored gas, so a user doesn’t have to figure out how to get gas tokens on the chains they support. I just deposit stablecoin or fiat, and Aave then figures out how to get it to a vault etc. It’s still a segregated smart wallet account, not an omnibus like exchange accounts are.

A user doesn’t really pick vaults or markets either so I suppose the idea is self-custody uses can keep using Aave via the traditional web app with all the customisability. The Aave app is a super simple experience regardless of how a user knows to manage keys safely and securely.

I think it has a great, dead simple UX that I’d happily show to friends and family who might find managing a crypto wallet intimidating and does a good job at offering opinionated simplicity.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@kaanuzdogan @DuckDegen Ah yes I typo’d it. Try this https://t.co/uCIYGtNIm9 and filter by 5g

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@kaanuzdogan @DuckDegen Depends on your eSIM provider. Seems like Ubigi’s agreement only allows up to LTE/4G. My eSIM thankfully lets me choose between 3 providers and up to 5G. https://t.co/PuDNFEMpc4 will let you filter by network type if you want to get a different one!

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

I like the Michelin Guide comparison for the new ETHBeat interface, as it's an opinionated take outside of just soundness/security.

Fun thought experiment with @donnoh_eth today: Michelin has the concept of a "Bib Gourmand" for a simple/good cooking, which is not "fancy". So if we're extending the Michelin analogy, what's the blockchain equivalent of that?

[kaereste.gwei 💗🦇🔊 @kaereste]

ETHBEAT Michelin guide to projects serving you best CROPS in town

https://t.co/JD8qgjR4YP

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

“Encrypted, not anonymous”, a workshop by @OpenZeppelin today on how to build confidential contracts using @zama FHE, and common types of gotchas to look out for to build secure contracts.

Also got to meet companies wanting to use confidential contracts in @lfdecentralized blockchain stacks!

[👇🏼 @danielabarbosa]

Great to see the crew at Devcon and supporting @lfdecentralized booth. How time flies. In 2019 Consensys contributed 🙏 Pantheon, renamed to Besu and now it's one of them most used instituional protocols. 👀 Institutional Adoption report for more details https://t.co/fWVdxDXs6A

[Kyle DH | pryvit.eth @PryvitKyle]

Imagine the end game here is that DPRK just holds the ETH and waits for stablecoins to come back + EEZ and then they rug the network by starting to censor the network via becoming the largest ETH validator network and conduct a sustained 51% attack

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@arik_g Surprisingly little discussion publicly about what happens to the stolen ETH at DevCon (might be happening in the background).

A lot of the link privacy tools/projects updates announced though will likely make these funds even easier to launder.

[Arik Galansky @arik_g]

This is a great meme, but it's really not a joke.

This is creating a real risk for Ethereum.
If DPRK hacks continue in the same trajectory - DRPK can be a meaningful shareholder in Ethereum.

How does that play with TradFi? 🧵

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

Echoes of this in the talk today from @Elliot0x: we need a lot more timelocks to fix / undo hacks, as exploits become more common.

At least as a choice, if not a default.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

This takes me back to when I was working for banks on core banking related systems. The security process they had in place were extremely defensive and we need more of that thinking in the crypto industry:

- No engineers, ever, had long-lived elevated or write permissions. Elevated permissions would only be given for very short windows using TACACS/RADIUS etc. Modern DevOps layers many layers of independent MFA but fundamentally trusts the person. Bank policies would not assume that trust by default.
- Little to no automation, and then each granular change step checked four-eyes. This slowness/speed annoyed me a lot (“why can’t we one-shot this in minutes with automation!”) but the goal I understand now was to deliberately slow everything down so that no change was rushed.
- Everything would be scheduled to happen within a change window of a few hours max., with half the time or more dedicated for backing out the change if it didn’t succeed.
- Insane levels of circuit breakers and cutover redundancy in the infrastructure to fail over fast to working/non-compromised systems.
- “Defense in depth” of logging, auditing, and monitoring tools, where there would be multiple tools from independent software vendors monitoring and auditing the same layer. Modern DevOps shuns a lot of this (not unusual to have a single monitoring/auditing system at a layer, e.g., “just whatever AWS has”)
- A *lot* more focus on “human factors” like is the change at a time when people are at peak focus (or get enough rest before), too many engineers on holiday (as backup if things escalate). Everything had a Plan B, C, D, E.

We were always asked to think of the headlines in the newspapers the next day if a new feature/rollout went wrong: “if this rollout goes wrong, this is how much the UK GDP would tank by tomorrow”.

Many of these “slow down” policies frustrated me at the time when fintechs/neobanks were shipping faster and lapping traditional banks.

But there are lessons and practices in there which will become increasingly relevant for crypto.

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

What's the hottest-running local LLM that can be used to dry a spill on a t-shirt? Asking for a friend 🙊

[Ankur Banerjee @ankurb]

@BTChip But this doesn’t even make sense! They moved 100s of millions of dollar from a bank account to an exchange and nobody noticed?! 🤯