Winklevoss twins launch Cypherpunk Technologies with $50M Zcash bet on financial privacy

long time and I think that's one of the differences is that other DATs have you know had faster money and people that are moving in and out of it um and that's why we didn't fill the pipe up. Um, we took, you know, the vast majority of it. I think put a $52 million check in.

Um, so the vast majority of equity will not be trading out of this out of this, um, out of the shares. That makes sense. Uh, well, thank you for the update. Uh, sorry about the Wi-Fi connection. We have some technical problems.

Would love to have you back on the show and talk more about what's going on in your world because, uh, there's so many interesting projects that you're working on.

Uh but really appreciate you taking the time to give us a quick update on Cippher Punk Technologies and congratulations on the on the pipe closing the rebranding every all the progress. Uh so have a great rest of your day. Yeah, thanks for joining guys. Goodbye. Cheers. Uh let me tell you about Google AI Studio.

Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need to you need and automatically wires them up the right models and APIs for you. Get started. AI. studio. He was building AI agents to to make the Wi-Fi work. That would be cool. It would be cool if we could deploy an AI agent.

I mean, I guess that's like an an uh the next generation of the reream waiting room. Like the reream waiting room, somebody talks to them in the in a different waiting room and and checks the uh the Wi-Fi. Uh that will be something. Maybe it's a 2026 project. Maybe it's a 2046 project. Who knows?

That could be the final. Hopefully our next guest is dialed into the reream waiting room. We have Max Hodak from Science. How you doing? Welcome to the show. Hi guys. Good to meet you. Great to have you. I believe we met like years ago at an Oenheimer screening potentially. I don't know. Very possible probably happened.

Yeah. Anyway, for those who don't know you, uh please uh kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and uh and maybe the company as well. Sure.

So I mean I've spent most of my life thinking about how to engineer the brain um build I mean I my origin story I think in this field started when I was in the fifth grade and I saw the matrix and I was like I have no idea if we're living in a simulation but we are definitely going to build one and I'd kind of broadly characterize my ambition is to eventually disappear into the simulation never to be found and I uh as an undergrad talked my way into um a lab that was doing neural recording in in primates and spent really that was where most of my education happened and then in 2016 I got I pulled into co-founding what what became Neuralink and I was there for 4 and a half years and in the spring of 2021 started this company Science we're now about 180 people um our main product is a retinal prostthesis like really the first retinal prostthesis that really works to restore vision it was in it's actually on the cover of time last week which is pretty crazy experience wow um so you like the Matrix do you like the 13th floor have you seen that movie I have not seen the 13th floor oh the 13th floor.

It It's like one of those movies that got terrible reviews, but it goes a little I feel like it goes a little bit farther than The Matrix in terms of simulation theory and simulation hypothesis. It's a lot of fun. Um, but anyway, [laughter] we can get back to the actual uh story.

So, um, how how far are you in building this business? Give us a give us a general update on like the shape of the business. It seems like you're in the office right now. How big is the company? What's the progress overall? Yeah, so we're the So, we we have a couple different elements of our pipeline.

So the the retinal prosthesis we think like that is first like just an end in itself like if you can restore vision of the blind it is like it is a quest that humans have been on for thousands of years that is an unsolved problem. Um and [clears throat] I think like we've made there's like real progress on that.

There's we got two programs. One is a retinal chip called Prima, which is this little uh it's a little chip implanted in the back of the eye under the retina that has all these light sensitive cells.

Works in conjunction with a laser the laser projection glasses worn by the patient that finished a major clinical trial last summer that was published just recently in the New England Journal of