In this long-form conversation, Abdel sits down with Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of Zcash and StarkWare and co-creator of STARK proofs, to explore how privacy, Bitcoin, ZK-STARKs, and post-quantum security all converge into one vision: a scalable, private, and future-proof hard money economy. The discussion starts with how the past months have felt like an inflection point: the world is waking up to topics that StarkWare has been obsessing over for years – privacy, post-quantum security, validity proofs, and building from first principles instead of chasing short-term narratives.
Eli explains the original StarkWare vision and why the team chose to be trailblazing rather than EVM-copycat, even when it made ecosystem bootstrapping harder at the beginning. That same long-term mindset led to the development of Cairo, a lean, safe, ZK-native VM that Eli and Abdel describe as effectively the future of Ethereum.
From there, they dive deep into Bitcoin and privacy. Eli explains why today’s Bitcoin privacy is effectively broken for normal users, and why a real Bitcoin economy needs a layer where people can put their BTC to work, generate yield, and still keep self-custody without relying on centralized exchanges. This is where BTCFi and Starknet come in: Starknet as a decentralized compute and settlement layer for “programmable encrypted Bitcoin” or “programmable hard money,” enabling scalable, programmable, privacy-preserving use of BTC.
The conversation then moves to Zcash, NEAR and what Abdel calls the “Holy Trinity”: Zcash for strong privacy guarantees, Starknet as the scalable verifiable compute layer, and NEAR as UX and intent-centric glue. They talk about proposals like “Darknet” (Starknet settling on Zcash), the appetite of the Zcash community to embrace STARK-based scaling, and why Eli believes that every serious blockchain that survives the next 10-20 years will need STARKs baked in for scaling and post-quantum security.
Abdel and Eli also look at the hard numbers and the current momentum on Starknet: growing TVL, strong net inflows, rapidly increasing DeFi and stablecoin usage, STRK staking crossing 20% of circulating supply in under a year, and real consumer apps like Focus Tree onboarding hundreds of thousands of users who don’t even realize Starknet is under the hood.
This leads into a discussion of Starknet as “invisible infrastructure” for large-scale consumer apps, powered by account abstraction and UX that feels web2-native while preserving web3 sovereignty. They close by reflecting on fundamentals versus memes, why this return to real tech and values feels different, and what they hope to see in the next phase: Starknet as a core engine for the Bitcoin economy, a home for privacy-preserving applications, and a pillar of what Eli calls the “Integrity Web” – a world where more and more computation is verifiable, private where needed, and not controlled by opaque institutions.
If you care about Bitcoin, privacy, ZK proofs, post-quantum security, hard money, or building serious applications on Starknet, this episode is a dense, honest, and highly opinionated roadmap for where things are going.
