Aligned Apps vs Digital Serfdom: The rotki Perspective

Transcript

[Music] guys hear me well. Okay, good. Good. So, yeah, good morning. Um, yeah, I guess Rabbi was yesterday, so we're it's a bit early in the morning to have uh many people here. So uh I'm going to talk to you guys about um aligned apps uh versus digital cert seen from the perspective of uh an app that my team and I have been building called Rodkkey. First of all a bit about me for the new faces that maybe don't know me. My name is Leeris. I've been uh in Ethereum since the beginning. Worked for the foundation uh back in what was called the C++ client which no longer exists

and the solidity compiler. And then I created uh along with Christoph the DAO and helped with a hack afterwards. There is a movie screening today and tomorrow at two for a documentary about that. I worked in payments analyst with Ryden network and I've been the founder of Rodky since uh 2017. So um there's this word digital serum. What does it mean? Right. Um we have essentially exchanged the old uh feudal uh lords and lands for platforms and data. We have this kind of systems that essentially what they do is that they uh harvest every click, every uh scroll, every moment of our attention and they

package it into products for advertisers. Um you pay with with your attention and you do this annoyingly. Um it has kind of become um a a like a commonly accepted secret that this is um how uh the web works right now. Um this is digital serum. Basically we have given up our uh freedom uh for convenience. So um as we say you're the product not the customer right but in uh when we started you know in crypto when we started Ethereum when we wanted to build DeFi we were thinking okay maybe we we can do something different maybe we can create something that can um destroy the

fallible and corruptible systems of the old world and um create something that is aligned with you know values that are good for the user like uh sovereignty or decentralization or privacy. 10 years later, we've done many stuff like it's amazing how far the field has come, but we've failed in every single way as to destroying and creating a new system. Like we've basically recreated um in DeFi, right? What what is DeFi? Defi right now is almost all of it hosted on AWS. almost everything is uh closed source u and you're dealing with black boxes and what you have um managed to get is slower um it's the web two system

just slower UX and um sorry slower uh web two and worse UX but what can we do from here on like this is a trap you see the trap that uh we all may fall into what if we just refuse to fall into it what if we just try to build apps and use apps that um are working for us and not against us. This is uh how we break the chains basically by uh refusing to be data peasants so to say and um working with apps that are aligned with our interests and u how can we do that? What what is an aligned app? Aligned apps are apps

that are not just aligned with um so I have been asked by many people about this like what is an aligned app? Aligned with what? Like they all think oh privacy maybe or decentralization or sovereignty. No no no these are very vague. It's very difficult to to um define. An aligned app is an app that is aligned with you with the user aligned with your interests. Something that works for you not against you. So an app that would you know respect your data. an app that would um not track you, an app that would run locally and keep the data locally. Uh apps that don't die when their company behind them uh also um stops existing. So this is what is defined as an aligned application.

Uh such an aligned app is is a rod key like the the portfolio tracking, accounting and management tool that we've been working on with my team since uh 2017. It handles uh sensitive financial data. So it needs to uh prioritize privacy. It needs to have this data locally. It gives you agency. It make it empowers you to decide what to do with this data. Um most importantly, it's built for you. It's not built to uh return uh to make a return of investment of 100x to some random uh VC. Um what are road alignment credentials?

So as I mentioned before, local storage. This is important because when you have uh sensitive financial data, you do not want to store this in the cloud because this will leak um no matter how many privacy policies they may have, they will leak the data. They will somehow they get they will get hacked. We have seen it so many times that I don't think I need to say how possible a scenario this is. It needs to be open source. So an aligned uh app is is open source. It also has no hidden telemetry meaning that it doesn't send any data that you do not want to um back to a server. Um it can run offline. Uh for us it have this asterisk there because we need to work on this uh better because yeah if you try to run offline

some things break that probably shouldn't. Um and the idea of funding is that uh you fund rot key we want to fund rot key by the user. So the users should give us um like should pay us for the service that we're doing and not we get funding by exploiting our users data. Um going further into those points, open source is really really important for alignment for an aligned app. Um it gives uh open source gives transparency for the user. They know what the app does. They can see and they can also understand it. Maybe not everybody can read Python, JavaScript or whatever.

Then um you have the people who do and they can testify that uh an open source app does what the creator says it does. Moreover, open source is extensible because of an open source license. People will say ah okay so I can build on this I can take this and I can uh create more modules. So I will do that and it's also verifiable. So whatever I say it's not something that um you know like you have to trust me. People say that I I am trustworthy and all that but that's really really need to um have the ability to audit and criticize what I'm saying. So um aligned apps are also local first. What does local first mean? It means apps that can work offline. You know they are not um

just completely offline. They we live in an interconnected world. Uh just not every keystroke is a round trip through a server as it is uh with many apps today. Um an aligned app has to have security and privacy as a top priority. Uh and um uh sorry local first up and your your data should be stored um locally and that gives you um ownership of the data. Many people have asked me what does ownership mean? What does it mean to own your data? Well, it means that if um you want to take it, you can just export it and take it with you or if um roadk is to exist tomorrow, you can still access it. uh has happened to some accounting tools that uh they just

cease to exist. They have no export. They're it's gone. You just have to recreate years of of work of labeling of uh working with your accountant to fix stuff and then this is all gone. Uh another important part uh of what an aligned up is uh is privacy. When we think of privacy, we think of oh you need to hide something. It's it's um something criminal. But privacy is mainly about one thing. It's about deciding you deciding what you can do with your data. What uh the app does with the data. Also, privacy means minimizing uh exposure of data. So don't take data that you do not need. Uh

because uh the more the data that you store, the more the data that you store. If you have a cloud app, that's even worse. But even in a local app, that's the the bigger the the attack surface when something bad happens. The privacy also means no um telemetry, no hidden phone home functionality. So don't send data anywhere um without the user's consent and generally data stays in the device. Um whenever I contrast aligned apps versus unaligned apps, it's it's basically this kind of trap. the the trap of uh free applications.

The trend right now is not right now for decade plus everything is free because this is how stuff are. But what does that mean underneath? How how do you how do these apps make money? This is a cliche by now like when the product is free, you are the product, right? You've probably heard of it a thousand times, but it is absolutely true and essential and and why you have to ask how do they make money? They it can't be that they just give you this this free functionality and then it's it's totally like you don't have to pay anything. As we said in the beginning, this is the definition of digital serum.

every click, every score, like your attention, where you stop on the page. There are data analysis tools that basically create a profile of you. And this data is worth more than any subscription, more than any payment that you would ever do to an app like ROKI. Um, and exactly because you are not the customer, the advertisers are. Um, these apps are actually optimized for advertisers. You can see the the worst kind of these apps when you look at the Twitters or the Instagrams of the world where basically your very psyche has been altered to just scroll and scroll and scroll. Um they also lock you into their ecosystems. Basically they make it so

that you know it's free. So why why should they give you a way to export your data? I want you to stay inside my application inside my ecosystem. Uh the real business is basically surveillance as we said like all this data is harvested and sold to advertisers. Now contrast it with apps that are aligned with your interests, apps that respect you. There you're a customer. You're not the product. That means that your data is belongs to you. You can export it. You can take it with you. It's built for you. Advertisers have no nothing to do with it. um important that there is no lock in and generally the incentives are aligned with you but you have to pay in order to access such

an application and um for these applications to exist uh people need to be willing to pay for them otherwise because there is no other way for such an application to make money other than you know getting money from the users. If we don't uh pay for apps that work for us, then we will end up being digital peasants just using free apps and selling our data uh unknowingly or at this point I would say we know it but we just have accepted it and normalized it. So a really important part of this talk and a lot of conversations that I have had also on the internet over the past uh months is that if we as users we as ecosystem um and this is not only crypto but also web 2 like very very

much also web two are not willing to pay for applications then we are going to become the product and just end up with applications that are just harvesting our data. Um so this brings me to the alignment manifesto. So what makes an aligned app aligned? Number one, your data and your device. As we said, number two, it should be open source. Number three, privacy is the default. When you build an aligned, you should really think with privacy of the user in mind. Um, local first, cloud last. Yeah, of course, we use the internet, we use the network, but that's as I said, not every keystroke should be round trip through a server. Um, you build for your users and not for your investors.

And yes, you need to make money. Uh, but the business model that you use should be a sustainable business model, not one that exploits your users. Um, since this is the roti perspective on what an aligned app could look like, I will like show some uh screenshots of like what the app does. Um, it's a, as I said, the portfolio tracking, accounting, and management tool. Um this is the thing. Yeah. Okay. So you have your exchange balances. We connect to to centralized exchanges. Um various EVM chains. Then here you can have um substrate chains. You can have um uh bitcoin. Uh and also you can manually add balances like your bank or I don't know real estate if you have any or whatever. And then we have this

beautiful uh net worth graph of your history over time. This is what you see when you get into the app. Um the core of Rodkkey is the history view. We gather data from basically every single uh chain uh from every single exchange. You can import data from CSV. You can even manually input data if you want. Um and all these pass through our engine of um decoders that create this human readable events uh where you can see where you can see here like like this is a human readable event. Uh and you can filter this by address, by other filters such as protocol, um by asset, by time

range. And then you can export that filtered list. Let's say I don't know uh all the events that left. Did on a in the last week for an example. And then you export it into a CSV, share it with your accountant, pass it through any other tool, do whatever uh you want with it. uh by processing all the history events we also get um nice statistics such as uh per asset um view of uh value over time. This is for example for Kusama staking you can see and yeah you see the very very very usual uh graph of like amount increases value decreases. This is your typical staking uh coin. Um other statistics we have a lot like this

is just some like how is your u value your net worth distributed over location such as uh how much you have in Kraken, how much you have in Binance, in uh Ethereum mainet etc. And then how is your uh value distributed by asset? How much um you have in ETH, in Bitcoin, in euro, so on and so forth. Um and some also insights, not exactly statistics such as um how many trades you've done per exchange, how many transactions per chain, like other stuff like Nosis Pay, the biggest currency, uh the biggest payment that you've done per currency, and and more. It just don't fit in the screenshot. Um we have views per specific protocols such as of course um the Ethereum staking and where you

can see the consensus layer rewards, the execution layer rewards um and you can even see per um validator performance and more lately we've tried to move more towards active management of uh things from inside where you can actually send tokens, you can send ETH all without getting out of of the app. Um and we want to go more towards um the if you if anybody remembers mist so the that um decentralized explorer of um taps that started back in 2015 and just didn't catch on. So we want this kind of local explorer of um u of apps.

Yeah. So um this is basically a typical pitch deck that you will see on um a typical uh table that you will see on a pitch deck where you compare your product with uh the competition. I'm running out of time but what I wanted to do with this is so that if a VC sees this they will say this is uninvestable. Why? You know everything is local. Um u it's private that means that you can't track it. There is no ads, you have no user data, you have you have no mode. So a us VC sees this and says I can't invest in this. You you you can't make me money.

If you flip it on its head though, if a user sees this, this is what a user basically says, okay, this is what I want. So I'm trying to show with this um comparison table that you would see in a typical pitch deck that something that's aligned with a VC's interests is not aligned with your interests and then the other way around. So we are we have to be willing to um use and pay applications that basically are aligned with our interests. Um and this is how you make a successful app. We have had so many people uh use rod key and tell us how useful it has been for them over the years. Like my favorite is like this this anonymous guy

who uh told us that they uh just u managed to buy their uh apartment that they were living in thanks to years of so he's one of our first users thanks to years of financial planning um in a privacy preserving manner through ROKI. So it's this success that pushes us forward and um it's not just users but also developers that have been building ROKI. So we have over 180 contributors. Yeah, of course many of them are typos. There is probably some AI slop in there but there is also outside people that have made uh entire EVM chains, entire um uh exchange integrations and have really really u helped us build this

into the tool that it is today. So really really big thank you to everybody that has contributed into ROKI because they built what they need. You know they they they are not paid to do this but they use the app they want something extra in it and because it's open source um AGPL they they just come in and and build it. So since I'm running out of time um this is the call to action. It really is all up to you guys. Do we want applications that are working for us? Right? If we do then we have to start using them. Use aligned applications. There is many like this is my perspective. This is roadkiss. There is filever. There is signal. Like there is there is so many apps out there that are trying to do things the right way and they do rely on you to use them to

to pay for them to um advertise them um to you know evangelize, donate, um do anything in your power in order to help aligned apps. um generally question what apps are doing with your data because even unaligned apps if you push them if you tell them hey where is this sensitive data stored what are you doing with my data then maybe then maybe we will get um creators of aligned apps in order to uh to to stop uh harvesting your data and think a bit more about uh privacy uh stay vigilant uh yeah that's all uh stay aligned um we welcome open source contributors as I uh use Rodkkey daily um buy our premium

subscription if you are um someone who has accounting problems. We've been on this accounting crypto field for over seven years now and we've gathered a lot a lot of expertise. So we are offering a bespoke service of um we doing your accounting for you uh on a hourly paid basis of course um but we have had so many people actually ask us of this because they trust us and we we know how to do this and we have kind of automated and done it for many people. So we we thought why not make it official. So if you have accounting problems just tell us generally spread the word. That's all. Thanks a lot.