Bitcoin Las Vegas: Insights from Industry Leaders on the Future of Crypto and Regulation

From Bitcoin Las Vegas, host Richard Carthon welcomes two game-changing innovators redefining the intersection of Web3, DeFi, and crypto utility. Sheldon Hunt, founder of Sundial Protocol, reveals how Sundial is emerging as the first Layer‑2 for Cardano, bridging Bitcoin's liquidity into Cardano’s robust smart contract ecosystem. By leveraging UTXO architecture and BitVM partnerships, Sundial promises blazing speeds, ultra-low fees, and institutional-grade security. Next, Ben Kurland, CEO of DYOR Labs, introduces DYOR.com—an all-in-one, free-to-use crypto research platform empowering traders and token creators with real-time analytics, dashboard control, and anti-rugbot detection. Together, these episodes spotlight how Bitcoin interoperability and accessible tooling are unlocking mainstream adoption and builder momentum. Web3 enthusiasts, NFT creators, and crypto strategists—this is your front-row seat to where Bitcoin meets scalability and research meets empowerment.

Key Topics Covered

• Sundial's Bridge Architecture & L2 Innovation – Sheldon explains how Sundial, as Cardano’s first L2, fuses UTXO design with institutional strength to bring Bitcoin yield utility into Cardano via Bitlayer’s BitVM trailblazer. Binance+9Bitcoin News+9YouTube+9Project Catalyst+1
  
  
• UTXO Legacy Meets Future DeFi – The protocol leverages Cardano’s battle-tested UTXO model and taps into Bitcoin as king by offering safe yield strategies and plug-and-play compatibility with major UTXO chains. Medium
  
  
• DYOR: Democratizing Crypto Research – Ben outlines DYOR’s platform as a free, modular dashboard for token developers and traders, embedding feeds, analytics, and visibility without cost barriers. CryptoSlate+4Starter Story+4dyor.com+4
  
  
• Trading Tools & Bot Integration – DYOR’s Telegram bot and semi-custodial trading engine (DSX) deliver one-click trades and encrypted wallets—simplifying decentralized trading for mass users.
  
  
• Conference Energy & Regulation Momentum – Both guests reflect on Bitcoin Vegas’s institutional conversations and growing regulatory clarity, signaling widening mainstream adoption.
  
  

Episode Highlights

“Our L2 will bridge these ecosystems, making transactions faster, more scalable, and more efficient.” — Sheldon Hunt Binance+5Bitcoin News+5pods.media+5

“This is yet another transformative Bitcoin collaboration we are incredibly proud of. The era of UTXO dominance is beginning.” — Sheldon Hunt X (formerly Twitter)+7Medium+7X (formerly Twitter)+7

“DYOR helps crypto investors avoid scams and make smarter decisions by providing real-time analytics and tools.” — Ben Kurland X (formerly Twitter)+6Starter Story+6blockchainreporter+6

“BY virtue of the fact that there is a dashboard in which they can control the entirety of what is seen by the end user.” — Ben Kurland blockchainreporterCryptoSlate

“We're here in this gigantic space and it's just wall to wall Bitcoin, wall to wall passion.” — Sheldon Hunt

People and Resources Mentioned

• Sheldon Hunt – Founder, Sundial Protocol
  
  
• Sundial Protocol – Bitcoin-Cardano L2 solution
  
  
• Bitlayer BitVM – Partner in trust-minimized bridge
  
  
• Ben Kurland – CEO, DYOR Labs
  
  
• DYOR.com – Crypto research & token discovery platform
  
  

About Our Guests

Sheldon Hunt is the Founder of Sundial Protocol, building the pioneering Layer-2 bridging Bitcoin liquidity into Cardano. With a rich background in Cardano ecosystem governance and DeFi infrastructure, Sheldon champions secure, scalable, UTXO-based innovation. Under his leadership, Sundial has partnered with Bitlayer BitVM and BitcoinOS to deliver trust-minimized cross-chain interoperability.
Guest Contacts:

• LinkedIn: (not publicly found)
  
  
• Website: https://www.sundialprotocol.com/
  
  
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/_mrhunt_
  
  

Ben Kurland is CEO of DYOR Labs, the force behind DYOR.com, a modular, user-first crypto research and analytics platform. A former Hollywood actor-turned-blockchain strategist, Ben drives accessibility, transparency, and anti-rug protections in DeFi. Under his leadership, DYOR has grown into a trusted hub for traders and token developers seeking live data and autonomy.

Guest Contacts:

• LinkedIn: https://x.com/BKEighty (found on CryptoSlate)
  
  
• Website: https://dyor.com/
  
  
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/dyordotcom

Transcript:

Disclaimer/Outro: Welcome to The Edge of Show, your gateway to the Web3 revolution. We explore the cutting edge of blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, ordinals, DeFi, gaming and entertainment, plus how AI is reshaping our digital future. Join us as we bring you visionaries and disruptors pushing boundaries in this digital renaissance. This show is for the dreamers, disruptors, and doers that are pumped about where innovation meets culture. This is where the future begins.

Richard Carthon: What's up, everybody? Richard Carthon here, live at Bitcoin Las Vegas, and I have another amazing guest. We have Sheldon Hunt, who is doing some amazing stuff over at Sundial. Now, when I first met Sheldon, he was heavy into the Cardano game, but has found a way to bridge Cardano over onto the Bitcoin life and is doing that through Sundial. So Sheldon, I'm excited to learn more about this. This has been a long time coming. I'm glad we were able to meet finally in person. Finally! So many years. So yeah, first, tell us about you know who you are a little bit of background and then we'll dive into Sundial.

Sheldon Hunt: Well dude well thank you so much for like bringing me on the show and taking the time it's awesome but yeah finally meet as you're saying because yeah it's been a long time coming but yeah well so for everybody watching from home or kind of tuning in have no idea who I am or what Sundial is yeah I basically I summarized I mentioned before it's basically the best of Cardano synthesize into a new Layer 2 to serve the best interests of Bitcoin. And yeah, so as of right now, Sundial is going to be basically the first Layer 2 for Cardano. But the origin story and all this and how we kind of go back is, previously, I was the head of the Cardano ecosystem, putting together all of the governance features of Cardano. And I'm now taking a pretty well-trodden path. There's a lot of other really cool Cardano guys who are coming over to build amazing stuff on the Bitcoin side. So as you know, Maestro, Marvin and those guys. There's a Tokyo wallet doing awesome stuff, fluid tokens. So there's some really, really cool Bitcoin projects. But their origin story actually comes from the Cardano side of things, because they've now had seven years of designing DeFi and backend tech, also on a UTXO chain. And so what we're doing on the Sundial, it's like a natural coming together again. It's like a return to UTXO principles that we think is actually going to make a splash around the world.

Richard Carthon: That's really exciting, man. Like, I've known the Maestro guys for quite some time. They're at Austin. So I've been talking with them, had a really good conversation with them yesterday. And then to hear that y'all are now working together and like that synergy has been great. I feel like there's been so much synergy that's happened over the last year of different chains coming together to like find ways to bridge stuff together and to make it work seamlessly. So for people who are learning about Sundial, and of course, you're bridging over Cardano into Bitcoin, what are some of the other use cases that Sundial is going to be able to bring?

Sheldon Hunt: yeah man well so on like the highest level right being like the first layer two four just car down just like taking that as like a side as look at the benefits there so massive like lowering of costs related to transactions speeds go up like crazy so yeah I don't want to get into like the exact numbers right now, but it's looking like ridiculous. But the Mian's just kind of the L2 functionality and speeds and all of that. A big focus for Sundial, and we got two kind of like focuses here, but one is actually looking to write institutional support for those who want to come over from the corporate side to get some exposure to Bitcoin, Bitcoin yield generation. So we now have this like another big benefit of the Cardano side of things, UTXO, babies. having been operational for seven years, no hacks, no downtime, no slippage, no major issues at all on the Cardano side. So it's battle-tested. And so starting from that position of strength, it actually means a lot to institutions, to banks. We want to actually know that they're working with some tech that is battle-tested. And then now to also say that, all right, we can provide safe yield generation strategies that exposure to it in a sustainable way, that means a lot. But then, as you were saying, Marvin, all the synergies, essentially, all of the Cardano, I'm sure there's going to be some Cardano people watching this now. Cardano people are all Bitcoin people. And I don't know if everybody gets that, but it's so true that I would dare say now, probably most of the crypto space, they all kind of come around to Bitcoin is king. You got to appreciate it. Get back to servicing the furthering of interest for Bitcoin. And in doing so, you serve our whole industry. And it's been really great to see now we're in a spot, and this is a big thing for what we're doing with Sundial, is being essentially that big abstraction utility layer that will plug into all of these other chains. Because it's now possible. It's now possible. Yes. You do like bridgeless transfers. I know like Charlie and the guys at BitLayer really well. We're working with all of these different bridge guys, these different like ZK tech. It's amazing. And so now we're going to position Sundial as the smart contract layer to plug into not just Bitcoin, but Litecoin, Dogecoin, all of the other UTXO chains that don't have smart contracts. Wow. Huge communities. Amazing. stores of value, but they haven't got all of the functionality yet for a DeFi and all that. We're going to do that on Sundock.

Richard Carthon: That's awesome. That's a really good roadmap. I know that's going to have a lot of people's ears perked up in finding ways to partner. You kind of mentioned some of the partnerships that you have lined up, but I know that's been a really big focus for you guys. What are some of the other ones that you are continuing to try to nourish?

Sheldon Hunt: Obviously, like me previously being the head of the Cardano ecosystem, partnerships were like my bread and butter. It was like the whole thing. It's all about kind of connecting projects, connecting teams, and basically rolling out the red carpet for other institutions that want to come in. So we've been working with some pretty big, pretty interesting institutions. One I can name drop now that is, I think, really awesome is the guys over at Checkpoint. So they are a huge Israeli security company. They provide the back end tech and security for basically all of the Fortune 500 companies, all the banks use these guys. And they are a key partner in what we're doing with Sundial to kind of really shore up what we imagine to be like the future of finance, right? With Bitcoin and to have them as like a security partner for this is enormous. And so that goes a really long way. Besides that, there's also You know, a fun component to what we're doing. And you know, like Michael Yagi, right? And some of like the gaming side of things. So with the speeds and like the low cost that we have now on the Layer 2 plugin in, we want to do a Bitcoin game in. Yeah. And like, have some of the best game developers and game studios come over and build on Sundial with the intention of, yeah, servicing.

Richard Carthon: One of the things I think is really exciting about that, just this piece of the gaming piece, is that there wasn't a lot of infrastructure in place that was going to make it to where it could be scalable, cheap, and functional, really. And now a lot of that has come into the gambit, which is exciting.

Sheldon Hunt: It's exciting. It's exciting between, as we mentioned, the technology is maturing. We actually now have seamless interactions between chains and bridges, and it's all really great. But then on the gaming side, because you needed to have, as you were saying, the speed, the finality, the cost needed to make sense. and it's now happening. It's been a long time coming and I could not be more excited. So yeah, like we'll see some incredible AAA games coming out the next one, two, three years that it will kind of blow the socks off people and it will change the narrative. I think certainly like for the public perception, there's a lot of gamers who have been like opposed to crypto and to NFTs in their games. I think a lot of that resistance is going to go away when they see what we can do here. And it's not intrusive. It's not invasive. It's not predatory. It's in their best interest to own their assets. And we can do it in such a way now that, like, it's going to be hard to kind of protest against it.

Richard Carthon: That's really exciting, man. And like, you know, I really admire being able to bring in and use all of this tech that is continuing to move the industry forward and be able to build on Bitcoin. But, you know, we're live here at Bitcoin Las Vegas. Lots of energy, lots of people here. There's so many different booths, a lot of different talks going on, a lot of different stages, etc. And, you know, I've been going to this for multiple years now. And like, how would you describe the feeling of being here and like the maturity of conversations that you're having compared to previous years?

Sheldon Hunt: So that's a really, really good question, because we've, as an industry, moved forward in such enormous steps over these last couple of years. It's really remarkable. Of course, price action goes a long way. No doubt. Helps when the all-time highs was on pizza day just a week ago. Just a week ago. So it's kind of fresh in people's minds. There's a bit of a spring in everyone's step, right? So there's that optimism that really lends itself quite well to being here in person with everybody. But I think the winds are in our sails as an industry, certainly for Bitcoin in particular. We're seeing not just the United States, but other governments around the world take notice that, all right, there is something real here that is not just a flash in the pan. There's something real substantial that will be, most likely, the future foundation for finance around the world, global trade, stores of value. And so to have governments talking about having national reserves of Bitcoin, Yeah. Like even just like nine months ago. Right now, that's it's a pie in the sky dream. But like that's coming real. Yes. We'll see like major companies start to add Bitcoin to the balance sheets. The whole idea of like Treasury strategies. It's just enormous. So. Just that speed in those last couple of months is huge. The price action is great. The developers like the building. So we're here in this gigantic space and it's just wall to wall Bitcoin, wall to wall passion. And I'm sure like next year is even going to be bigger. Yeah. Like the momentum is still massive. And a lot of people will think like, oh, you know. Bitcoin, it's going to maybe taper out of this. The momentum will slow. I'm convinced that we're still early days, actually. We're talking about governments and corporations, pension funds, gaming, everything.

Richard Carthon: This is still like, oh, super early days. Just to speak to that, I've had so many like institutional types of conversations of people who have been doing a lot of traditional finance things that are now here because of the regulation that's now becoming more freed up because of policy that's now beginning to change the clear standards. The tide is definitely shifting and I think it's shifting a lot more positively and I think you said that very eloquently so I appreciate that. So for people who want to learn more about what Sundial is doing and potentially want to connect with you, are they able to do that?

Sheldon Hunt: Oh yeah, so I am always like a doors-open guy, so you can shoot me a message on Twitter, it's probably the best spot because you know, crypto happens on X. So yeah, you can follow me, I'm like underscore Mr. Hunt underscore on X. You can also just look up Sundial Protocol on X and shoot a message there, DM, and Be happy to kind of entertain any ideas, suggestions, partnership opportunities, because yeah, we're at an amazing spot and we're open to everybody. So yeah, see what we can do together. Amazing. Well, Sheldon, thanks for stopping by, talking with us, man. I really enjoyed it. A pleasure. Honor to be here, dude. It's great to finally sit down and chat. So. Absolutely, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody who's watching.

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Richard Carthon: Hey everybody, Richard Carthon live at Bitcoin Las Vegas. This is another episode of the Edge Of show and I have awesome guests. We met actually a few weeks back in Dubai and was actually talking about a lot of different things, but also eliminating into what is now Bitcoin Las Vegas. So glad we were able to connect, getting to learn more about DYOR. And dude, you have such an interesting background, right? You came from Hollywood and that is now translated into what you're now doing in crypto. So just give us a little backstory into that.

Ben Kurland: Yeah, it's a bit of a left turn in life, but I was in the entertainment industry for a long time. I was a former actor. I was in a five-time Academy Award-winning film called The Artist. And some years down the line, after being in the industry for a long time, I wanted to kind of make a transition into something that was a little bit more impactful and saw some opportunities in the Web3 space. There was this kind of weird, interesting, synchronicity, synergy, whatever you want to call it, between Hollywood and crypto, especially in the early days, you had a lot of developers out there and they weren't too skilled at, you know, things like comms and, you know, just navigating the general landscape of how to tell a story, you know, which is the most important part of any company, of any blockchain, of any project is, you know, what is the story behind it? So I was able to team up with an organization, it was like one of the first, it was like an OG token from 2014. It was a fork of Litecoin back when you didn't have tokens that you could build on top of other blockchains. Every token had to be its own blockchain. And so this was a token for scientific research. really cool interesting project, but you know just a bunch of developers and I was able to kind of get out there and tell the story and ended up being one of the the Largest by market cap tokens in the it leading at that point in history in the 2017 bull run It had the the second largest gain of any token in the world so it's really cool being a part of that and And then kind of segued from there. I just got, you know, I was hooked after that. Yeah. I met him. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's a, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of similarities between Hollywood and crypto, but really it boils down to like telling a really good story.

Richard Carthon: I agree with that, man. And like, I think bringing all that experience propelled you to be ready for that moment. And then, of course, now going through a few cycles, have you ready for the moment to bring D.Y.R. out? So for those who don't know, please explain what D.Y.R. is. And of course, what you're doing with D.S.X.

Ben Kurland: Yeah, that's our new exciting baby that's coming out. So, DYOR.com, we acquired the rights to DYOR.com. That was a really exciting thing for us as well. But, DYOR stands for Do Your Own Research. It's one of the most common phrases in the space. and it really is encapsulates exactly what we've built. We as builders were very frustrated with a lot of these legacy platforms out there that were charging an arm and a leg for builders to get their information out there to people. You know whether it's something like on coin market cap just getting your token and that information out in front of people. And we felt that this wasn't fair or reasonable for you to be building something especially if it's a grassroots or small effort. to be paying these egregious amounts of money just to have any kind of visibility. It's not really giving these smaller projects a real chance to succeed. So we created a platform that is entirely free to use, that gives the power and control back to the projects themselves and those developers. by virtue of the fact that there is a dashboard in which they can control the entirety of what is seen by the end user. So that's everything from being able to add a live feed of their Telegram and Twitter, where they're the first to do that and the only to do that. Everything from that to just listing your white paper or showing the audits. You know, linking to your website, all of those types of things are available and under the control of the developers, which should be the case, right? And we have some safeguards in place to ensure that it is in fact the developers that are controlling these things. They have to verify that it is in fact them and there's a multi-step way of doing that. But it's really to the point is that this should be about free flowing information, right? Open source is the nature of crypto and the whole culture is about this. And so we wanted to present that. And of course, we do make money. We are a for profit company, but we make it through advertisement. And that, simply put, is what Deore is. It's a charting and analytics platform where you can find out information on every single crypto in the space. And it's meant to be a one-stop shop, so you don't have to hop over to Telegram for more information. You can get it right there on the website. You don't have to hop over to Twitter. There's live feed of the Twitter for the projects that have onboarded themselves. So a really, really cool project, and we're really

Richard Carthon: It's an all-encompassing platform that's really helping you do your own research. So yeah, from a training standpoint, from a research, from learning more on the depths of what's going on. And there's a lot that goes into that. And one of the other parts of this, we got to talk about bots. You have the ability to have built some pretty amazing ones. And one of them being what you've been able to integrate into Telegram. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Ben Kurland: Yeah, so the bot thing is really interesting. So much volume goes through these bots, and it's really all just about speed and efficiency, right? You want to be able to set something up, be able to snipe the latest meme token, all these kinds of things. You want to be able to very quickly access that. So Telegram bots have become increasingly popular. The volume, the sheer volume that is done on them is massive. It's unimaginably high for people that don't know the actual figures. I mean, it's, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars traded daily through these bots. And so we wanted to throw our hat in the ring. We're building out a Telegram bot that's gonna allow you to do all these quick trades, but it's being built into a much larger ecosystem and it's called DSX. And what DSX is, is not only the bot, but it's also what we call semi-custodial trading, which is a little misleading because it's not that we have custody. It's that you will have the ability to spin up a new wallet. The keys are privately encrypted through AWS secrets. but we don't have access to them. All we have access to, it's sort of like a multi-signature, so all we have access to is permission to release those private keys to the end user if it's proven that it's actually the end user requesting, right? Because that's the important part. That's the real important part. But what this allows you to do is it allows you to set up automatic permissions for things, because right now the process on a decentralized exchange kind of feels like you need a PhD to trade on some of these things, right? It's very complicated. There's multiple steps involved, you know, four or five steps in some cases. This really allows you to have that sort of fast experience both on the bot itself and on our desktop version of this. And that's also going to be built in. There's an instance of this built into the research platform. So like I said, true all in one, you can trade on it as well. And it has all these abilities for one click trading. And it's really just going to transform the way that people, you know, have this experience of trading in Web3.

Richard Carthon: I think being able to make things faster, more efficient, and easier to do while also still being safe is something that's very important to people. And I think that also having this all be in one platform, there's a lot of practicality to that as well. So obviously a ton of work has been going to make all of this happen. And I believe you just underwent a really big undergoing of your infrastructure to make sure that it could support and do all these things. Can you tell us a little bit more?

Ben Kurland: Yeah, this is a big one. Most of the data is coming from a handful of third-party companies that are supplying that data. The data in Web3, especially when it comes to historical pricing and real-time pricing, is very complex. And it is very expensive to maintain and to manage. And it requires just a ton of hardware and infrastructure in order to maintain uptime and all the rest of it. So the vast, vast majority of the data providers are leveraging a handful of companies that are providing this data. And as a result, there are a lot of issues, especially when it comes to latency. So sometimes you're getting that information four or five seconds, maybe even up to 20 or 30 seconds late. And I mean, that is a lifetime when it comes to trading. So much can happen in a matter of seconds in crypto because it moves so fast. So we're bringing all of this data infrastructure in-house. We're building it all internally, which gives us the ability to remove any restrictors. A lot of our competitors, for example, are token gating or just in general gating access to the faster speed. So you would need to pay extra money or buy their token or do XYZ to get that full fast experience. You don't have to do that with us. We're just going to provide best in class. speed and efficiency of that information. So it's gonna be real time, it's gonna be fully accurate. We have had some, a little bit of inconsistencies, admittedly, you know, working with some of those third parties. So being able to bring this- It's a hard hurdle, man. It's very, very challenging, right? So to be able to bring that in-house allows us to be a best in class service and to do it for free, you know, because that's the whole point is to just have that information readily available to even the playing field for everybody.

Richard Carthon: Absolutely, man. Well, all of that is extremely exciting and a massive challenge. There's a reason that, you know, you're having to put so much effort into figuring this out because a lot of people haven't been able to figure this out. Obviously, we're now at Bitcoin Las Vegas. There's a lot going on here. How has your experience been so far? And, you know, if you had to describe for someone who isn't physically here on like what's been valuable to you, like how would you describe that?

Ben Kurland: Yeah. I mean we go to a lot of conferences and Bitcoin is one of my favorites. Went to the one in Nashville last year. And you know it's truly a great crowd a great energy. There's so much enthusiasm around. Bitcoin and just the sheer adoption that's going on. And it's really exciting to be with the decision makers as well. I mean we've had the vice president who spoke this morning. You have members of Congress. You've got senators you know governors all kinds of people that have all come here for this event to talk about the future of not just Bitcoin, but really the future of cryptocurrency, compliance, regulation, how we create this path forward. One of the things that the vice president had said earlier today was that the big fear here is that $3 trillion industry is going to go overseas if they don't move quickly on stablecoin initiatives and regulatory bills and all the rest of that. I agree, I think this is a really pivotal, that's a hard word to say, pivotal moment in the history of all of this and it's something that we're all really looking forward to is getting to this point where you have proper guidelines. And so that's really exciting. But the real takeaway and the thing that I love most about these conferences is just the fact that it is a kind of an excuse for all of us in the industry to be in one place at the same time. I get to reconnect with folks that are really close and important to us, whether that's infrastructure partners or investors or KOLs, all the people who have helped to support us and want to see us succeed. And that's really great and exciting.

Richard Carthon: It's cool to see the industry continue to push forward the seriousness that the U.S. is taking towards making the acceptance of crypto a real life thing by putting in policy, laws, and other resources to continue to move this industry forward. It's been a great experience for me so far. I hope it has been for you as well. But for those who want to learn more about DYOR and use the platform or check it out or even connect with you, how are they able to do that?

Ben Kurland: Yeah, so the website is dyor.com, right? So you can go there. That'd be the first place. Second thing you can do is you can check us out on Telegram. Our channel is all spelled out, dyor.com. So that's D-Y-O-R, D-O-T-C-O-M. And same handle on Twitter. And just follow along. Come into the chat. Strike up a conversation with us. Tell us, give us some feedback on the site. We're constantly improving it. We want to hear from you guys, the community of traders, to tell us what you like, what you don't like. It's almost more important for you to tell us what you don't like so we can actually go and make those improvements and continue to make this truly the best trading experience in Web3.

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. Well, everyone make sure to go check that out. And thanks for coming on the show, man. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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Richard Carthon: Hey, everybody, Richard Carthon with the Evdose show live here at Bitcoin Las Vegas. This is day three. This is the final day. We've been going through a lot of amazing things this week. But right now I have a really special guest. We have Ekrem Balus, the chief scientific officer at Chainway Labs and the mastermind behind Citrus Zero Knowledge Architecture. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. So like you're an Olympian trained level programming that you're building on like the most ambitious scalability solutions. And it's crazy impressive what you've been able to accomplish. What is it that Citry is aiming to set out and create?

Ekrem Bal: So yes, we are creating the first ZK roll up on Bitcoin. The wallet itself has the same security level as Bitcoin, so it inherits all the security assumptions of Bitcoin. And we're building a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge with BitVM. It will enable Bitcoin inside a programmable environment, and I think this is huge. While enabling that, it also scales it because we compress transactions. So it increases the TPS as well.

Richard Carthon: So I want to stick on that just for a second. So two things, BitVM, which I'll get back to because I know there's a lot of other awesome people like Bittler that I believe you all do some work with and others that are building on that architecture. But the compression part. That's really tough.

Ekrem Bal: How have you been able to fix that, basically? So yeah, it was possible with compressing the transactions with zkproofs. So think of it like this, every transaction has like a sender, receiver, and a signature. But if you have like a million transactions, each having signatures, that That's a big data, but like not big data, but like it consumes space. What you can do instead is like you can prove the validity of those signatures and you can get rid of them so that you're basically like compressing all the transactions. With this, we can scale more than 10x. Because we can do also like, oh, Alice sends Bob's money, Bob sends Eve money. So Bob's balance hasn't changed. So we don't need to show everyone that, oh, Bob did this transfer. If they prove that this transfer has happened and Bob's balance unchanged, we'll get less data written to Bitcoin, still having all the data and the guarantees that Bitcoin offers.

Richard Carthon: So being able to pull all that data is really awesome. And I think what's one of the other cool pieces about this is how you're able to go and fix a lot of the challenges that is the UTXO problem. So how are you guys specifically going after that specific challenge?

Ekrem Bal: So yeah. The thing is, since we can have a new environment in our rollup, we can stick with account model as well, as long as we can build a bridge between Bitcoin and Citra. And yes, we can with BitVM. So yeah, now we can just basically bridge your Bitcoin to Citra and then now you can use an account model. You can have smart contracts, all these applications, Babs, Yeah.

Richard Carthon: So a lot of that makes sense. The other part of this that, you know, you're really passionate about ZK Rollups and one of the parts of that is the security that goes with it. So why do you think that this is the solution that is going to continue to help scale Bitcoin into the future and why more people need to look at what you guys are utilizing?

Ekrem Bal: So you're asking why Zcaralab is the best solution to scale bit scoring? So I would say one major thing is that it enables programmability. All the other scaling solutions are mostly for payments. But using ZK rollups, we can now have a programmable environment. And also, ZK gives us like infinite scale, not infinite scale, but compression, like good compression rates that we can not do on some other scalable sources.

Richard Carthon: I think it's a really good solution. There's a reason that it brought a lot of viability to the EVM chain, and it makes a lot of sense why it'll come over to the BVM chain to do similar. This has been a really good week for you guys. Obviously, you've had a lot of traffic that's come through. Why come to Bitcoin Las Vegas and be a part of this experience?

Ekrem Bal: Personally, I'm on the bridge side. I'm developing within VRC in the bridge. And we had some really good engineers here as well, like researchers, having to talk with them face-to-face. Just in this conference, I found two big improvements to our bridge as well. Also, it's good to see people that you see online develop together. Awesome.

Richard Carthon: So, for people who are listening to this, there's a lot that's still going on in the rest of 2025. What are some things on the roadmap that has you excited?

Ekrem Bal: Oh, first of all, Mainnet. I'm really excited for it. And then, you know, I see this Mainnet is just a kind of, remember iPhone launched. It was like a clunky phone, but it was big at that time. Right. Something like this. So it's the iPhone launch. It's huge. It's like historic moment for Bitcoin because now we have the first ever trust minimized bridge, first ever ZK Rollup on Bitcoin. But it will improve it more and more by the time. So I'm excited for our future improvements as well.

Richard Carthon: I'm looking forward to it as well. You have a lot of good partnerships for a reason, and there's more and more people that are looking to build with you. So for people who are listening to this and want to learn more about what you have going on, how can they do that?

Ekrem Bal: Follow our Twitter account. It's citraya__xyz. Excellent. Hey, well, appreciate you spending some time with us today. Thank you. All right.

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