Epicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view. Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
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episode 491: Tim Galebach: Uqbar – Smart Contracts on Urbit
Building a truly decentralised, peer-to-peer network, based on a built-in identity system, limits the ecosystem’s interoperability with the outside world. Onboarding developers and users to Urbit was only the first hurdle. On-ramping crypto was a whole different & daunting task. Uqbar set out to build an execution layer on top of Urbit, enabling smart contracts, which would ultimately settle, via a ZK rollup, on Starknet.
We were joined by Tim Galebach, founder of Uqbar, to discuss the different design choices involved, from Hoon programming DevEx to a hybrid ZK-optimistic rollup.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Tim’s background
- Urbit explained
- How Uqbar took shape
- Integrating crypto in the Urbit stack
- Hoon’s usability and DevEx
- AI-enabled Uqbar
- Uqbar interoperability
- Rollup vs. L1 approach for Uqbar
- Hybrid ZK-optimistic rollup
- Getting from programming in Hoon to ZK proofs
- Use cases for Uqbar & Urbit
Episode links:
- Tim Galebach on Twitter
- Uqbar on Twitter
- Urbit on Twitter
- Uqbar
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/491