The BIGGEST Crypto Breakthrough in Years! | Michal Pospieszalski Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Meow. Before I met you, a lot of people said to  me, "You have to meet this guy, Meow." And he's building something mind-blowing. And he's  claimed to solve two of the most important problems in crypto. It's like private PayPal for  all of crypto. Okay. No addresses, no. Forget about. You don't even need to understand what  addresses are. And no one knows how much money I received.

00:18 You've taken away this thing of Ran's  wallet on. Like, you've taken away this. Like, there is no such thing anymore with this.  There's no such thing. Like, you can be like, "Manuela may have $10 million in it. It may  have two." No one will ever know. We are the only system in the world that got this working  for all chains and tokens. It works on Solana.

00:31 It works on Cardano. It's not even. This is not even  on your own chain. This is. There is no. There is no American Fortress for this chain. Forgive  me, but I just want to make sure that I actually understand this. Okay, gotcha. So, it literally is  PayPal, but it's private. Correct. Like, honestly, guys, you know me. I don't get excited about  new things, but I think this is really exciting.

00:56 Meow. Before I met you, a lot of people said to  me, "You have to meet this guy, Meow, and he's building something mind-blowing." And he's claimed  to solve two of the most important problems in crypto. That was the introduction before I met  you. Okay. And now we met and you're explaining to me what you've actually solved. And maybe for  the audience who don't know American Fortress, what have you solved?

01:16 What have you guys  built? Okay. So, the biggest fundamental problem with crypto everybody that's ever used  crypto is immediately aware of, right? Like, you give somebody an address and some money  shows up and how do you know they really sent it? Was it address poisoning? Most of the time  it's probably them, but you don't actually know, right? Like, money came from an address.

01:37 And then  this gets worse when somebody asks you like, "Hey, I'm an exchange or I'm an auditor. I'm the IRS  or whatever. Like, where did you get the money?" You're like, "Yeah, yeah, it came from this  address and I, you know, I think it's this guy because we had a chat, right?" And this is really  odd because in crypto, everybody's super used to this.

01:53 They're like, "Oh, this is just normal.  It's just how it works." Right? But every other financial system, we don't have this magical  property of not knowing who gave us the money, right? So, that's the core thing that we solved,  which then once you solve that, then you could solve all sorts of other amazing problems. Like,  I can talk to my counterparty.

02:08 I can get the ID of my counterparty. I can prove to other people  who my counterparty was. I can make sure that in DeFi there's no money laundering. It's once you  solve that problem, which is actually a really hard problem to solve from a technical point of  view, but once you solve it, it's like private PayPal for all our crypto. So, that's what we  built.

02:25 So, I would say one is who sent the money. Let's. It's a primitive that lets us do all sorts  of other things. And then the second thing we did is now that you have that, you can build compliant  Zcash for all our crypto, right? So, when you say private PayPal for all of crypto, just break that  down for you. What is the actual like? Okay. So, for example, you can have a username, right?

02:47 Like  Ran. You're Ran. In fact, we will give you Ran. So, Jakob, make that happen. So, you'll be the  Ran in our system and I'm the Meow in our system, right? And say you want to send me any asset. So,  I publish my Fortress name. I just stick it on, you know, Instagram or whatever and I say this is  my Fortress name. And now you can use any Fortress name compatible wallet to just send me crypto.

03:06 All you do is you type in the name. Okay? No addresses. No. Forget about. You don't even need  to understand what addresses are. What magically happens under the hood is our wallet will in a  decentralized way compute a special address for me that only you and I know. No one else knows it.  And I just receive the money when my wallet wakes up and that's it.

03:24 And no one knows how much money  I received. And we call that public names, private transactions because anybody can send me all sorts  of money, but no one knows how much money I have, right? So, like if you know this fellow sends me  money, it'll be a different address space again. New address space. It's a new address on chain.  No one knows it's me and this guy, right?

03:41 So, no one knows how much money I have. Right. Slow  down. So, Ran has money. Yeah. Ran wants to send Meow money. Yes. I send Meow money to an address.  I don't even use an address. You just type in. You type in Meow. That's my username. And I send  the money, but surely I can see that the money lands in your wallet and then I can see all your  balances and I can see.

04:02 No, no, you can't because it's a new address. So, normally if I give you  an address, right, I'm giving that address out to everybody else. So, in that case, you're right.  Yes. Right. Everybody can see what I'm doing. That's the problem, one of the problems that  we're solving, right? So, now every two users, it's like they have their own special address  space.

04:22 They don't need to worry about it at all. It just works. So, you're saying that if I have  a third user, if Jakob wants to send you money, he gets a different address for me for you. And  so, Jakob and I never know that we're actually, you're interacting with me. There's it's a  different address space. And in fact, not only do you not know each other's address space with  me, but the system doesn't know it either.

04:40 Like, there is no master list. It's we do it via one  way non-interactive crypto. You've taken away this thing of Ran's wallet on. Like, you've taken away  this. Like, there is no such thing anymore. Like, with this, there's no such thing. Like, you can be  like, "Ran's wallet may have $10 million in it. It may have two." No one will ever know. No one will  actually know the wallet because there are stealth addresses that are created between each two users.

05:04 Correct. Even though the end user's the same. Yes. Exactly. Okay. And so, and here's what I point  out what's really cool about this. We are the only system in the world that got this working for all  chains and tokens. It works on Solana. It works on Cardano. Not even on. This is not even on your own  chain. This is actually. There is no. There is no American Fortress for this chain.

05:25 This is. So, I  can. Forgive me, but I just want to make sure that I actually understand this. Okay, got you. If  I want, Ran wants to send Meow money on ETH. No problem. I send. I go at Meow. Here's $100. I send  it from Ran's wallet. It lands up in your wallet on ETH. On ETH, but no one knows that's your  wallet. Correct. And Jakob sends it to a different wallet which eventually also lands up in your  wallet on ETH, but no one knows it's my wallet.

05:55 And you can do the same thing on Tron, Solana,  Arbitrum, Zerog, Litecoin, LIT, VM, BCH, eCash, Dash. Okay, but now, Meow, how do you get it from  the stealth wallet into your to be able so that Meow can actually spend it? Well, it's literally  my address. There's no. It's as if I. The best manual way to explain it is as if you want to send  me money and magically I just know that you do and magical fairies show up and they just send you my  address and I magically have a spreadsheet that's got a unique address on

06:29 every chain for all of  my counterparties forever and they just magically receive the address. When you spend the money  that I sent you. So, if I send, if Ran sends $100 to your address and you want to go and send it to  Adrian, then Adrian now knows your stealth address too. No, he will know the source of funds address  and this is the other problem that we solve, right?

06:52 Okay. So, you just pointed out the. Because  what we've solved so far is we're protecting the recipient and giving them a lot of privacy and  ease of use on public transactions. But before we go into the private thing, there's another  thing I want to talk about that's really special, which is, okay, now we understand how you send me  money. But so, so you have a cryptographic proof the way it works that you know you sent to my  address and you know that only I can spend it.

07:12 So, you know for sure Ran sent Meow money 100%. Like,  I'm watching your wallet now and the $100 that I sent you is still in it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well,  the way the math works, the address you compute, I only can spend and you know that. Yes. Like,  if you just trust our software, you know that it's correct and therefore I can only spend it.  So, you have a proof that you sent me money.

07:32 But based on what I just described, is that true in  reverse? The answer is the short answer is no. Not yet. There has to be something else, right?  Because you computed this address, but what if you have like this evil money laundering wallet over  here and you send money from that to this address or what if it's address poisoning, right? So,  we want a way to be able to distinguish to have this utopia of I always know my counterparty,  at least I know their username.

07:56 We want to know that you sent me the money. So, there's another  thing that we do that's very unique. It's called a zero knowledge proof of provenance. It's a ZK  proof that that address that you sent money from is actually yours. Okay. So, now for the. I'm  not revealing the address. No, no, no. Well, to me you. I'm revealing the address and we'll  get to that how we solve that problem because the problem with me knowing your address is I know how  much money you have.

08:20 Exactly. Right. Right. So, we don't want that. There's a third feature called  safe send that solves that. But, we're just going like layer by layer here. So, first of all, you  can send me money and when you do, you'll send me this zero knowledge proof that it's actually  your money. Yes. Which is incredibly valuable. More than you can imagine. Yeah.

08:36 So, for example,  just for the lay user, right? Why did Binance get sued over and over? Well, you guys didn't do  enough, you know, AML KYC anti-money laundering against these evil terrorist guys. But actually,  if you read the lawsuit, they were doing Satoshi tests on everybody, right? And so, for those  of you that don't know what a Satoshi test is, it's basically like if I'm an exchange, I want  to know that the address we're about to interact with and send like real money, say over 10,000  USD, you actually

08:59 possess, right? So, what the exchange will do is say, "All right, Meow, you  want to receive Ethereum at this address?" So, tell me what the address is or we're going to give  you an address that you're going to send money. Sorry, tell me what your address is, and you're  going to prove that you control this address, right? And so, what happens is, you know,  they say, "Okay, send like one, two, three satoshis or whatever, right?

09:22 Whatever unique  the number is." And then you go and you send it and now they assume it's you. But obviously, like  if you have your evil money laundering wallet over here, you can just call your buddy and be like,  "Hey, send one, two, three satoshis, you know, to Coinbase." And now what Coinbase doesn't know  is that you don't actually control these funds and they're actually depositing and sending money  receiving money from and sending money to another party.

09:45 Right. Yes. Our system, if that's not  possible, if you don't, because this guy can't make up that zero knowledge proof. Yes. So, if you  try to do this to me with our system, it comes in as unverified. These are unverified funds. Okay.  And you don't know and then you don't know whether those where those funds came from or you're not.  Then we don't know at all.

10:01 If it's unverified, it could be address poison. It could be anything, but  we know for sure it's not clean, right? So, what our system does, but every transaction is like  this. So, I always know who the counterparty is and I have a 100% guarantee that I received money  from my counterparty, which is what's important because it lets you distinguish the money you  think you got from the money that may be dirty.

10:27 Like if a business is receiving subscriptions  from 10,000 customers, it knows in real time which customers have paid subscriptions all day. No  Satoshi test, right? So, the problem with Satoshi test, you have to keep doing it over and over. You  have to redo it again for every single platform, right? To username, it's just username. Now  there's. Okay, so there's two more kind of holes that we haven't discussed about the next  one.

10:45 Okay, so I'll go back to the next hole. So, fine. So, Ran sends money to Meow and I can show  this to you. I mean, hold on. Let me just let you know. Adrian, Adrian's our producer. Adrian,  just come and let's just film this. Guys can see it. Yeah. So, okay. So, first of all, you see  there's a ton of assets in here. We got Arbitrum, Tron, Ethereum, you know, and BTC, LTC, right?

11:06 So,  it's like a lot of your favorites. And our plan is to actually deploy this to the top 50 chains. So,  we the chains don't have to do anything. We just deploy. Okay. And it just works. And it's an SDK.  So, like MetaMask is one of the things that we're deploying to as a snap. So, we're in the process  of doing that. But the SDK can be added to custody systems, other wallets, whatever, you know.

11:28 So,  ideally, everybody will have this feature set, but we also have this wallet ourselves, right? So,  first of all, you go in here and you see something you've never seen before in crypto, which is  everything is two from. It's two from a name, right? So, you know, if I want to send some money  to Jakob, I just. I'm not going to do this right now just for sake of time, but I just type in, you  know, his name and I just hit send and that's it.

11:48 Come on, send Jakob some. Okay. Okay. So, hold on.  Hold on. I see Jakob standing behind us. Okay. So, he wants my. He loves some more test net. Okay.  So, hold on a second. We'll do this in a. I'm just going to type his name and then go back to.  Okay. So, what I've done is I said one Tron. Autocomputed the fee, of course, because, you  know, we do that.

12:04 We're cool. One Tron, bro. 30 cents. You got one Tron. And now you just hit. Now  you just hit next. You know, I enter my PIN, which in this case is top secret one one one. Okay.  I. And this screen will actually disappear and then because it's essentially for troubleshooting  and I just sent the money. It's that simple. So, it literally is PayPal, but it's private.

12:25 Correct. Now, let's talk about that privacy thing, right? Because these are TTOT transactions. These  are what's called transparent to transparent. So, there's one issue with them, which I'm going  to show you, right? So, I go in here and I and I view and explore. I just want to look at  this transaction on chain. Let's see how fast Tron scan comes up.

12:41 Yeah, we're on hotel Wi-Fi  here, guys. In Singapore, so you get it. So, this is the address, right? And now that address  is now a specific address that has been generated between you and Jakob. Yeah. Correct. So, all if  I look at this address, this is actually a lot of transactions in here because it's all the demos  I keep doing with Jakob. But if Jakob got other money, it's another address.

13:07 I don't know what the  system does. They have $34, bro. He's got quite a bit. So, but the problem is he can see my source  of funds, which is exactly what you were talking about, right? Like you ask me the question, okay,  so we do want to solve this problem because, you know, some people if you want to solve that's  a blockchain problem that needs to be solved.

13:26 Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean if I got 100 Tron and  I'm spending 10 bucks, I'm probably not going to invest in extra privacy for that particular  transaction. But if I got a wallet with, you know, millions of dollars and I'm institutional, then  I have to invest in privacy. So, show me how you solve that. So, the way we solve that is something  called safe send, which I'll send you a slide on it.

13:42 But what safe send does is. Okay, but well,  before we move on, let me just just just to prove to you that this is really cool. It's the same  thing on every chain, right? So, here's Tron. I mean, and then let's go to say Litecoin, which  is completely different and it's still all sent to name, right? Like so, it's all like the  same thing for all any chain, any one app, any chain.

14:04 Correct. Well, any chain we support,  which is, as I said, going to be all of them. Like that's our mission. So, the last problem is  privacy. Why do people want to use privacy? It's to hide their balance. That's the chief legitimate  use to hide their historical transactions and their balance. Yeah. Yeah. So, like what they did  in the past, how the money got to them.

14:18 And then obviously also there is, you know, a bunch of  people that like privacy for, you know, money laundering and all these nefarious uses. So, what  we wanted to do is make something where the clean money can easily self-identify. Yes. Because if  you can do that, now there's no reason to not use privacy. Now the institution can take and rake in  millions and there's no more tracking, you know.

14:39 So, the way we do that is we just add one extra  step. It's called safe send. And what safe send does is it works the same way as that transparent  to transparent transaction except now the money goes through a shielded pool. So, imagine like a  pool like Zcash. So, is in Zcash the money goes from Ran to a shielded pool then back to Meow then  back to Meow from the shielded pool.

14:54 Correct. But but here. Yes. Correct. That's amazing. Yes. But  there's something even more amazing about that. It preserves that zero knowledge proof of seed  provenance. So, even though it went through the shielded pool, I get a cryptographic proof that it  was you without any viewing. So, you can prove as the person who sent it, you can prove who you sent  it to because correct via also via zero knowledge.

15:22 You've intercepted the money send instead of  going Ran Meow. It goes Ran shielded pool to Meow. ZK proof to Meow. Yeah. Meow says, "Hey, is  this from Ran?" ZK proof says, "Yes, it is." Don't worry what. Well, and in fact, so you almost have  it completely right. The one thing we do, if that zero knowledge proof, if you didn't send it to me,  yeah, the machine knows it and won't deshield.

15:39 So, you can't commit money laundering. Okay. I mean,  unless you send to yourself a bunch of times, but the whole point of this is that even when  you're using safe send, it's the exact same UI. The UI is identical. The tool is never a honeypot  because money never stays in it. It's just a. It's just a quick stop on the way to. Well, you can  shield all the funds.

16:01 In fact, we encourage people to because it's also post-quantum. So, on Solana,  you have this thing like there's a the vault, the Winter Nits vault, which is like basically  a thing where you stick your money into and then to deshield it, you have to post-quantum sign.  We happen to do that, too, because we're also a wizard at post-quantum. So, okay.

16:19 Okay. Now, let  me get this to check. Yeah. Yeah. Is this thing live? Because you're doing live transactions,  right? So, this is live on test net. You can get it right now on the beta and then it'll be  live in November, late November, early December. It'll be in production. You'll be able to use the  whole thing for mainnet. Okay. Now, is there. So, this is an app.

16:37 This is. Is this going to be an  app that you download from the app store? So, App Store and desktop and Windows. It'll be called  American Fortress, correct? Yeah. Okay. Now, is there a token with this app? Yeah. Yeah. American  Fortress token. Yeah. Is it live? It's TGEing in a month. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. And are you raising  money for American Fortress?

16:50 Have you raised money for American? We raised $10 million already. Okay.  But, but okay, but I'll put this in perspective. Like, imagine, you know, if you were a privacy  developer before, you were like, you know, Roman Storm and the feds were chasing you and then  they arrested you and then Trump came into office and now you're kind of like out on bail.

17:08 You  know, Alexi, his business partner, same thing in the Netherlands. The third guy that wrote Tornado  Cash, can't find him. He's a fugitive from justice for writing DeFi. Right now, why did that happen  with? Well, they were deliberately profiting off of laundering money and mixing funds, right? Our  thing does mathematically is not possible to mix funds.

17:28 It's also not possible to send money  without the recipient knowing who sent it, right? So, we're in a different. We're in a  different space and in America we have a reprieve for now for at least the next two years where, you  know, hopefully this will happen, right? So, like I started this project like four years ago, right?  And I was just like really passionate about, okay, we have to make.

17:46 We have to solve this problem,  but it was so esoteric and weird that like, is there a chat function in this project? In this,  like, can I, if Ran wants to chat to me before I send you money, can I chat inside? Yeah. Yeah.  So, once you have that primitive, you can do that, right? And the other thing we have, which is  the last thing I haven't talked about, is the integration with the KYC, right?

18:03 So, there is a  huge KYC platform. We're going to announce this on October 12th that everybody uses. Like, everybody  in crypto has been checked by these guys. You have. You have done the check, you know, a million  times, right? Like, you got your face, your liveness, right? They're like, "Show your driver's  license," whatever, whatever the check is, right?

18:22 And so, the problem with that was he had to keep  repeating that and you still. There's no way to tie it to your crypto transactions, right? But  with this, now that they know Ran sent Meow money, Ran can go out, obtain his KYC check. What we  do in our tech, we turn that into a post-quantum cryptographic proof that now you possess, you  solely possess.

18:34 We delete all the data on our end. We have no list of users or what is ZK proof.  It's. Well, this is not actually doesn't require ZK. There's some things that you don't use ZK for.  But in this case, it's just post-quantum straight, you know, say I would say old old quantum  cryptography with with old, sorry, old quantum old school cryptography with post-quantum signing.

18:57 It just makes it extra secure and now you get to choose which counterparty you want to share this  with. So, like if you want to prove and you can do various levels. Like, you can say, "Hey, I'm  Ran and I'm over 18 and I live in, you know, Dubai," or that's my official residence and you  have that, you know, stamp from the government of Dubai or whatever, right?

19:12 So, that's one check or  you could send me a copy of your passport if the transaction requires it, right? So, essentially  the recipient of the funds can be like, "Well, for me to do something with this, I need you to  prove to me who you are." And that's what this allows. So, now you always know not only what  user sent the money, but who the user really is IRL.

19:31 And unbelievable. And okay, so the app goes  live when? Late November, early December. I don't want to give like the exact date, but at the end  of this year. The token goes live early November at the current schedule with maybe plus or minus  a week or something. Yeah, I said at the beginning of the interview, everyone said like, "You have  to see what this guy's built."

19:47 Honestly, guys, you know me, I don't get excited about new  things, but I think this is really exciting, brother. Good to meet you. Great to meet you.  So, yeah, really incredible. And obviously, we'll whenever we can, let us know so we can let  our audience test this thing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can test it now. You can download the  beta. You know, 266L just came out.

20:04 Great. So, guys, there's going to be a link at the bottom in  the description. There'll be a link for you guys to test the beta. Yeah, and you can pre-register  your name and pre-register. You can pre-register your name. Ran and Cryptomanran belong to me. We  got you on that. But you can produce other names and we'll even give you some codes so people get  a little discount.

20:27 All right. So, guys, there's a link below. Use the link below. Everything's  there for you guys. Meow, thank you very much, my friend. Yeah, great to meet you. Great to be  here and talk about the tech. Super appreciate.