gm, welcome back to interop/acc
On today’s episode, we’re joined by Christopher Goes, the co-founder of Anoma.
Anoma has been this strange, half-understood thing in crypto for me. I first noticed it around the time UniswapX launched in 2023 and everyone was talking about intents. Anoma’s pitch was simple but bold: everything is an intent, and chains are just infrastructure to settle them. That stuck with me because they had some bold takes, and their arguments actually made sense.
But then time passed. I lost track. Until recently, when I stumbled on Chris’s podcast and heard him say that Anoma’s vision had shifted over the years. That got my attention again. As they’re gearing up for mainnet launch, I wanted to know: what is Anoma now?
So this episode is all about that. It’ll give you a clearer understanding of Anoma’s vision and how they see the crypto ecosystem. It explains their approach, and why they’re not interested in just building another chain to serve as application infrastructure. That’s too limiting. What they want is to build the infrastructure that can unlock crypto superapps, and with them, the kinds of applications beyond speculation and degeneracy that we’ve been waiting for ever since Ethereum’s ICO.
Two takeaways from this episode:
We’ve stopped building moonshot projects in crypto!
The industry is maturing. Crypto has finally earned a seat at the table in global finance. That’s good. But in the process, we’ve lost some of the delusion that made the early days fun. Back then, people were promising impossible things — brilliant on paper, but honestly ridiculous when you thought about it in a practical way. But, that willingness to dream big is what produced the breakthroughs. We need that energy back.
Reframing privacy as a freedom to reveal information.
When people hear “privacy” in crypto, they think of Tornado Cash, or worse, illicit activity. That’s the wrong frame and we need to re-do the narrative around privacy. Privacy is really about control and choosing what to reveal and to whom. It’s less about concealing everything, more about the right to share information selectively.
Key timestamps if you’d like to jump around.
00:00 Anoma's Vision: Building a Distributed Operating System
08:12 The Need for Anoma and Why It’s Unique
14:23 Why No One’s Building Moonshot Projects in Crypto Anymore
20:54 Building the Tech for Superapps
23:50 Anoma’s Definition of Intents
28:05 Ethereum's Position in Crypto Today
38:52 If Chris Were Ethereum's Dictator
42:59 Anoma's Future and Upcoming Features
44:44 Rethinking Privacy as Freedom to Reveal Information
49:42 What Do People Misunderstand About Anoma
Hope you enjoy the episode!
- Arjun
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