Controlling your own data with Disco: the off-chain personal data backpack

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] gmgm welcome web three doers it's the web 3 academy weekly doer spotlight i'm jay hamilton coming at you today from muskoka ontario and as always my co-host is with me what's up kai how's it going guys i'm just a couple hours from you in london ontario so finally back in canada and excited to be here well that's where that's where each of us is in the metaverse today or the real verse we'll talk about that

in a sec today on the podcast we have evan mcmullen with us evan is the founder of disco xyz and a core member community member at the boys club evan is working on the world of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers she's a devoted advocate of privacy and consent which are what she believes are the key ingredient to creating an off-chain decentralized identity system which preserves user sovereignty welcome evan gmgm so glad to be with you guys today so so excited to have you here and wow like so so much to discuss and dive into but before we do i know you were at

nftnyc last week which i was as well uh how are you feeling coming out of that it was a very inspiring week um the feedback that i took away was that we built it and they came but now we need something for everyone to do because throwing down drinks from an open bar standing next to jpegs is not the apex of what we came here to build i'm glad you said that [Laughter] it's very very well said yeah i think my my main takeaway is just how early we are we are so so early and it was amazing to see the diversity of knowledge of web3 knowledge that was there there was you know early

ogs building and there was a lot of people i was really surprised with how many people were there who are just getting into the space and uh just learning right at the begi right at the beginning of their journey it was really exciting to see that diversity but the other thing is it's amazing how friends is the most friendly conference i come from a corporate world you know a decade ago i was management consultant uh and conferences were dry and boring and the only fun part was the open bar at those conferences to be honest uh but this was web 3 is so collaborative so friendly everyone is so excited to meet each other it's uh it was really inspiring i think there is something to be said for

the substrate that all of us are standing on top of and why it is that the friendliness and collaboration of web3 is different than web 2 where a competitive mode is hoarding your knowledge so because we are building an open composable networks we necessarily need one another to complete a full stack um yeah you nailed it i think that that core layer is really what allows us to build in this different different way uh okay let's i want to start by asking you about your love for the jetsons because i've heard that you love the jetsons uh which i also loved the jetsons when i was younger um and and i i feel like that might lead

into you know your feelings about the metaverse and about this face uh so i i'm curious tell us about your love for the jetsons when did that start and how does that sort of show up for you today so when i was a kid i was not allowed to watch tv but as a special treat sometimes when i visited my grandmother we would be allowed to watch cartoons and so that is where i first discovered the jetsons and the flintstones but specifically the jetsons uh took hold of my imagination because they lived in a world where they could just show up in any environment and it would respond to them you know elroy would be riding to school with his parents and their spaceship and his little space pod would

just flop out of spaceship and you know fly over to the school and attach and so from a technical perspective the jetsons either live in an authoritarian society with a centralized entity controlling access between all these space pods and all of these individuals and identities or they live in a self-custody to open permissionless metaverse where everyone's identity can represent their privileges and allow them access so i like to think that the future they're building the future that they lived in was more of the latter than the former i love it okay so is that what you thought about when you watched the jetsons jay no definitely not no definitely not evan is way smarter

than i am i will say i will say the jetsons is on hbo so really really time that y'all are doing your laundry cleaning up the house around you know saturday or sunday morning put it on in the background because the number of um silly story lines and random characters that align with the ideas that we're pursuing in web 3 are pretty uncanny so for example there's an episode where the dog astro uh turns out he was adopted from a wealthy space leader um and and perhaps might not actually belong to the jetsons and so in this process they bring in the governator which or the the governortron or something like that it's just like a

machine that programmatically determines governance and and applies guidance to different situations so what does this feel like it feels like the governance system of a dow where we might programmatically determine outcomes based on inputs and the roles that different people have um so i know it sounds a little bit goofy but the jetsons really informed my understanding of what the metaverse could be so i'm sold i'm watching an episode yeah it was definitely speak speaking about the metaverse we we mentioned this quickly before we started recording so i want to get it on on the record uh you had a great definition for what the metaverse is what is that so at disco we believe that the

metaverse is your ability to show up in any digital or physical environment and receive a personalized experience as a result of the parts of yourself that you choose to share that is why we are called disco because we believe that you are the shining center of the party just as you are and you should reflect your data and your identity to the world however you choose beautiful definition yeah fantastic definition i like i like the idea that you are the center of it is is really uh it's not actually what i haven't heard that view in many metaverse definitions um one more definition just because you're so great at getting definitions evan

uh what's your definition for web three we always we always are trying to explain web3 and trying to explain it to um a both people currently in the space but also to you know our parents who have no idea what this space is about uh curious to to get your definition of web three so my definition of web three is the universe of fun that we can unlock when we have self-custody and global public consensus so these two superpowers the ability to own and control things with our own keys under our own consent and the ability to publish data for everyone on earth and in space with an

internet connection for all time to be able to access that these two capabilities unlock a pretty significant breadth of activities that we could not do before um that's very good it's so hard to get the definition of web3 into like a couple sentences like the elevator pitch we were trying to do it in our in our discord community and it was like everyone had some great ideas but it's still i was like ah we didn't nail just yet but that was pretty good thank you for that i really love the way that chris dixon has characterized read write own um but and and sort of ownership necessarily is predicated on global public consensus because if we don't agree how many things there are we can't know who has the things um but i think extending that definition to

uh read write own and agree is value interesting i still don't know like i had i'm back in london like i said in the beginning this uh at my parents place and seeing friends who are not at all involved in tech and especially not web3 and they were asking what the heck is web3 academy what am i doing and i was like oh my god i don't know how to explain this even the read write own they didn't understand they were like i don't get it you know there's still this like what is that what does that really mean uh so i still feel like we need to simplify even further we need to go even deeper but i'm going to keep keep trying to figure out how to do that i think you make a really excellent point here that there is only so much we

can do by explaining i can tell you how to bake a cake i can tell you every detail in excruciating precision i can read every single direction from one of the cookbooks that my laptop is sitting on top of right now but you won't know what it's like to make a cake until you smell that delicious baking um you know goodness come out of the oven you're not gonna know what it's like to bake a cake until you get frustrated trying to frost a cake that's too warm and the frosting gets caught you're not gonna know what it's like to to you know taste the deliciousness that you've made with your own hand until you stick your fork in a layer cake of your own creation and so we can tell people what it's like to own things all day but until they have the

sensation of taking custody of a digital asset that belongs to only them we're just going to be describing what it's like to bake a cake true that's a great point we need they just need to experience it which is so true even myself get into the space was like once i started using this stuff i was like oh there's the aha moments right um yeah that's a great point yes let them eat cake everybody everybody web food academy actually just bakes cakes uh so uh call us up we'll deliver you a cake in the metaverse uh and you can have self-custody of it forever uh okay let's let's start with how did you first experience web3 evan take us take us to sort of the beginning of your rabbit

hole journey so my rather whole journey started before i had i knew the word web3 i so when i was really young i first learned about the idea of digital ownership um through napster file sharing things like limewire and bear share my father's an intellectual property attorney who specializes in identity tools and digital media and so when i was a kid i had to make a presentation to my parents about the fair use statute and why my non-commercial educational music downloading constituted a legal use of this exception and would not violate the intellectual property protections of the artists whose music i wanted to listen to so that was you know my first thing

parents are the coolest they really are hi mom and dad they're really cool so um so that was my first encounter with black's law dictionary but then later on few years later i showed up in undergrad wandered into a computer science senior seminar that i had no business being in and had met the greatest professor of all time in the whole galaxy a woman named elizabeth stark who many of your listeners may know as the leader of lightning labs over in the bitcoin ecosystem uh bitcoin payments queen but at the time she was the coolest computer science teacher i'd ever met and she brought in her friends who are entrepreneurs to teach us what it was like to build a business and she invited us to read texts like john perry barlow's declaration of independence of

cyberspace and she introduced us to you know writers and and theorists like larry lessig and jonathan zitray zitrain clay shirky and tim wu and so this opened my eyes to the intersection of remix culture law and the technology that we were using to build these news new ideas um and and so it sort of through that lens that i learned about free and open source software that i learned about creative commons licenses the work that was being done at the berkman klein center at harvard the yale information society project and that is what led me um you know through through uh stark's tutelage uh to the universe of bitcoin um which was so fascinating and exciting to me i thought it was a technical representation of so many of these ideas

of true ownership that we were stumbling around trying to get at through legal rappers um and so that was what began my web three journey but it was really through the ensuing years of nights and weekends you know i was working first in film and content production then i was working in hardware engineering and design um but spent a lot of time lurking around on reddit showing up at hackathons tricking my girlfriend saying that we were going to parties with cool boys but actually pulling up to like weekend long hackathons at warehouses in bushwick sorry lexi but uh but that sort of fascination where i realized i was spending so much of my free time playing with this stuff i was on boarding folks at my you know

sort of well-known web 2 job uh at the water cooler to coinbase so that i could talk to them about crypto even though we were working in you know the halls of tradfy um and so it was that point that i realized like okay we got to go pro this is taking up way too much of my brain space it is the only thing that i can think about and it feels like the most important thing we could be working on together right now incredible i love it so let's let's dive into you're now solving uh one of the probably the biggest problems i think that's happening in the internet uh which is around data and privacy and identity uh and all that kind of stuff so before we get into what disco is and like what the solution is or what you guys believe the

solution is um can you just sort of walk us through like what's the current state in regards to identity in i guess the web 2 world and why is this a problem and just sort of give me like your your um overview of what's happening right now in the space and why you feel the need to build and try to solve something in this area so today you are not the expert on yourself some random dude who made an app that you use sometimes has better data about you than you do that's pretty weird right in the rest of your life the things that you create your work product your value your personhood your physical self those things belong to you right this hair on my head i grew it belongs to me and so

very strange that the data that i create when i ride my peloton bike does not belong to me um we are in an account and profile based ecosystem where we are a different person to every party that we interact with the evan that i am when i use my costco membership card is basically divorced from the evan that i am when i go to a dylan francis show than the oven that i am when i tune into a seed club demo day and so because the only data i can bring with me from one environment to another is data that i self-report it's not super trustworthy or useful so for example when i create a discord handle i could create the same handle i have on

twitter or i could not but if you see that same name on both platforms you might think it's actually me and this has landed a lot of people in a lot of hot water um speaking to uh you know counterfeit individuals on various platforms trying to get at their nfts um and so in web 2 our role in the app ecosystem is to labor to produce data that is then consumed by apps and sold to other parties without our consent and participation so we are generating the work product monetized by others that is not subject to our participation and our consent that's pretty weird yeah it leaves us uh

i mean it it leaves us in a position where as you said we are the product and i think there's there's pretty big consequences for privacy that we're not i mean we are discussing them and it's come out a lot more in the past decade but i don't think that most people even realize how much data there is about us and i think you're the way you put it of the you know we grew our own hair but for some reason we didn't we don't own our own data is it's it really brings into picture how much is out there that is not within our control and then what's what's happening with that data and how it's being used is for for

profit for these big web 2 companies and so we're missing out on a lot of opportunity i think of interoperability and data integrity that is not um yeah not currently in the ethos or the culture of the systems that we built in web 2. so jump in for for a quick second i think there are there are two things that you pointed out that are that are really salient here you know one is that um there are a number of you know of unexpected um ways that our data turns up and uh and influences us so if i have your phone number with about an 80 to 90 assurance i can pretty much figure out a

lot of other data about you where you live where you've been shopping what sites you've signed up for um if you've never spoken to a woman who's had to remove her data from google because of an abusive x it is an arduous process to learn about there are a number of ways where you know buying tickets online for an event ordering clothing from an instagram store can unexpectedly leak our location information about us and how we're interacting when that information is made available on a public market to people who wish us ill things can get really scary um and and perhaps more specifically here in the united states this week um roe versus wade which protects reproductive health rights for uh uterus

owning individuals in the united states was overturned so what this means is that in states where abortion is no longer legal people can be prosecuted for failing to deliver a healthy baby and the challenges that that face people like me in this position are that the data we create with our internet browsing our video watching our social interactions on social media our e-commerce and shopping even our location can all be used to prosecute us if we are pursuing our reproductive health in a way that is you know optimally safe for our bodies and so the data leakage that we experience in web 2 is becoming increasingly dangerous for

the safety of individuals so for all those who love self-custody for all those who are excited about a self-owned future in web 3 this is the moment where the rubber hits the road and this technology needs to protect our people because otherwise there are going to be very significant consequences yeah you brought up some various very significant examples there with roe vs wade yeah it's it's it's it's scary to think about what what could happen to you for just living your life the way you believe you should live your life and the yeah the consequences are are huge so let's let's talk about okay so why why why does web3 solve the identity

issue how is how does it how does it make it better and again sort of stay high level for for a bit here totally so as we discussed in web 2 we don't own the data that we generate that's why for every party that we went to at nftnyc this week we had to fill out a separate form yeah filling in our name our email address our phone number our organization of affiliation how who invited us to the party and so for every time we reproduce data that we've already created before we are doing duplicate work that takes more time it takes more effort and it creates an extra clear text copy of our data that is floating around in yet another repository and so in web 3 what we can enjoy is in

the same way that we own and control our money in a wallet we can own and control the rest of our self in a backpack so imagine in real life we carry around our backpacks and they contain an extra layer of clothing maybe our keys our um you know our chapstick other things that we need for our adventures through the physical world and in the metaverse we're going to need more than just financial data to show up in different environments and receive personalized experiences we're going to need the ability to collect our accomplishments to have proofs of the communities where we contribute to even you know have the ability to complete our address when we're receiving uh when we're ordering something online to receive it in the mail so that we don't have to type it in again but rather than google forms

version of this where google owns and controls all of that data instead we can be the ones owning and controlling our data so what this means for interoperability is that if i capture the data that i create in a form that just about every blockchain can read i'm not going to have to mess with a bridge when i want to move information from one context to another i'm not going to have to pay gas fees if i want to be able to interact with another party using that data and i'm not going to need to worry about whether it has relevance in the place where i'm bringing it because i know that it was captured in a universally legible form so digital ownership is is so important here for data and we talk about this all the time on the show to be honest we're

always talking about how we see the future of identity being something to do with web3 where it's in a wallet and we can have our credentials and we can have our data and it'll be interoperable and all this but you've really highlighted and i've watched a lot of your videos and i also was at permissions conference so i heard you speak there as well um you've highlighted some issues with web3 right like a lot of us think about these sort of like non-transferable or soul-bound nfts nfts and this is where we can you know have our credentials and have um you know our data and things like that inside of a wallet on chain but you've highlighted some issues with that um can you just sort of walk us through the issues you're seeing of kind of the the current solutions i guess you could

call it that are happening web 3 for for identity and then we can get into the solutions that um that you're creating over over with disco absolutely so to kind of bring us back to first principles basics um in web3 when we use public blockchains there is no consent layer for our wallets so what that means is that if i want to send you a token i can do so without your permission which is what makes this whole thing go round but it's also the reason that someone was able to airdrop billions of dollars of shiba token into vitalik's wallet and he was immediately responsible for the tax consequences whether he liked it or not and so without a consent layer of tokens incoming to be mapped to our public address the autonomy of our keys comes from our

ability to separate that which we do not want from our address so no permission incoming but we can send things away that we don't want and so that's why it's so important that we have private keys now if our ability to send a token away is diminished or indeed inhibited altogether it kind of undermines the point of having those private keys in the first place if other people can decide how my address presents and i no longer have autonomy over how to show up in the world then what's the point of me even having these keys to manage my own identifier if i'm not really in control anyway and so from a first principles perspective i struggle to understand how marrying data to a single network that is intended for use across hundreds

of networks is optimally efficient you know as long as ethereum is not the only api upon which humanity relies it will not make sense to me to place human reputational data there if that data is intended to inform experiences across chains and web too and when i last checked i'm still a human being who uses an email address and websites instagram in addition to playing around with blockchains like bitcoin solano polkadot and ethereum and so because my adventures take me from web 2 to web3 and across chains my data needs to be ready for that adventure too so the the key things here is that your your data needs to be one interoperable

and work across different blockchains but also just different applications right we're just because we're going into web3 doesn't mean we only use ethereum or we only use solana we we're still going to use a lot of what we've built in web 2 that doesn't go away so that's one big thing i think the other big point i think you point out is that like these non-transferable nfts which i think are great are also could be problematic as you said because we don't get to control like if someone just wants to throw a non-transferable you know nft in our wallet can't do anything with it right we can't we can't get rid of it and so all of a sudden i plug into openc or someone goes to my wallet and they can just see all these nfts i have that like maybe i did not choose to mint or i did not choose

to get and that becomes a problem because like one of the benefits of blockchain is it's public and transparent but that's also one of the problems of it in terms of data i think is what you're sort of getting at is that correct absolutely and i think it's always very exciting when someone proposes a conjecture for a new way of doing things gives us an opportunity to examine that idea to explore that idea um however i think one of the challenges that we run into when we think about modifying transferability is that that's only socially enforceable now what i mean by that is that if someone suggests a way to modify erc 721 tokens by removing the transfer function or modifying that transfer function this proposed new way of doing things

will only become the accepted methodology if we all just agree so you can't force people to make sure they secure consent before sending a non-transferable nft you can just ask them pretty please and part of the reason that our public transparent networks um are such a two-sided coin is that on the one hand they allow us to have global public immutability in perpetuity and a shared source of truth on the other hand it gives me a time stamp for every time someone consumes porn on spank chain and so part of the challenge is that there are a lot of private activities or activities that do not that are not appropriate for do not require the whole world to know at once

and so um to the extent that we do not need global public immutability for certain activities it feels like a little bit of an expensive overshare now because everybody can see our wallets um and you know can see how we are interacting on chain there are ways for us to unintentionally leak information about ourselves when we do engage in those interactions so for example if i am a student at bennett college a historically black college and university specifically catering toward female students you'll probably know that i'm a black woman now there's all kinds of bias in our existing ecosystem in our web 2 world when we invoke people's race and gender

socioeconomic class alongside their requests for things like under collateralized loans so i struggle to understand how we are creating a more equitable ecosystem if we are trying to transpose structures that we already know to be harmful and biased similarly in the 1700s here in the united states we stopped burning witches and assigning scarlet letters out we decided we would adopt due process of law with ample opportunity for appeal and that we would put the burden of proof on the accuser and not be accused and so in this future reputation system that we envision i invite us all to consider how we might improve upon the system that we already have rather than regressing to

principles that we already know to be harmful to human beings so go ahead okay no you go ahead okay so what i want to get into is your solution to a lot of this is to take it off chain i guess um and honestly i had to listen to you multiple times to really understand what's going on with disco uh it's it's very it's deep in the weeds but it's super exciting can you sort of give us the like high level review of what disco is what your solution is to all of this and then i want to dive into a lot of questions about disco because i have many so disco is your data backpack for the metaverse we are here to help you collect the data that you create when you make it and

keep a copy of it with uh keep a copy of it with you so that you can carry it with you from one app to another across chains from web 2 to web3 so what this means is that you'll have to fill out fewer forms you'll have to fill out fewer captchas wait in fewer lines and you'll be able to show up in a variety of digital and physical environments pull data out of your backpack that you want to share with the person you're interacting with and then be able to access unique experiences as a result so with disco we want you to be able to enjoy all of the self custody and super powers that you have from owning tokens but from owning the rest of your data and what sort of data could that be can you give some examples just walk us

through like what what that means really absolutely so you know you are more than the contents of your wallet right you're more than the contents of your bank account you're a whole person you have a favorite color a coffee order a yoga studio that you like to go to friends that you like to vibe with you know bands whose concerts you enjoy whose hours of music you've listened to pieces of merchandise you purchased you have a favorite order at your favorite restaurant maybe even a favorite seat on the plane and so all of these preferences these accomplishments proofs of non-financial work you've done recording this podcast writing newsletters getting friends into parties whatever those actions are that make you you you deserve to own them um

evan you're a great storyteller thank you so much well the the fun thing about all of this guys is that like we have all been experts in owning our identities since the day we were born right like no one knows more about being kyle and jay than kyle and jay and so for marxism and so it becomes easier to step into our power when we realize we're just vibing out to our fullest selves and you know trying to get in touch with everything that makes us us and when we break through that barrier of you know who owns these parts of myself just to think about who am i as a person that

exercise i think becomes a lot easier and we can zoom out to the kind of mindset that we had as kids when we were watching the jetsons okay so how do we do this how does disco propose to create this digital backpack for all of us so from a technical perspective we make it easy for you to use the keys you already have to control the data that is private to you so if you're a meta mask user if you're a coinbase wallet user any wallet connect to ethereum compatible wallet user soon you'll be able to visit discord.xyz connect your wallet will create that data backpack for you on the back end and then you can go off on your metaverse adventures collecting data

about yourself sharing data with your friends sending them uh invitations to birthday parties sending them a gm in the morning when you wake up kind of like a facebook style poke being able to interact with them in a manner that's controlled by your keys but doesn't involve a blockchain in between so how do we get this whole you know ecosystem started because this is really a three-sided cold start problem we need apps to issue this data into your backpack we need you to carry your data and your backpack around and we need other apps to read the data that you pull out of your backpack and give you some awesome experiences so we are starting off by helping out our friends in the dow ecosystem where we're running into a ceiling of utility and fun because the only coordination games we can play with each other are

really allocating treasuries together spending money together um and so in order to abstract the account layers that we need to build reputation we are at disco are excited to issue membership credentials attesting to membership in good standing to a handful of dows that we're really close to that we're really excited to work with um we're going to start off by enabling these dow members to use their credentials for a variety of different activities to be able to get into events access tickets merchandise online content discord channels so being able to self custody self own a digital proof that you're a member that you can use for multiple different purposes but unlike an nft you can't sell it so there's no

unfettered secondary market to buy your way into the squad so is is disco a is it an app or is it more like a foundational layer like a a um almost like a protocol i guess you could call it that integrates into all this stuff and it can you know take things that you're doing on the blockchain and then move it over here onto disco and then other apps can read it would you say it's a protocol is that kind of how how it works and then also if it's not on the chain it's not on the blockchain does it still follow the ethos of what we're trying to do in web 3 in terms of like digital ownership and self-sovereignty and like how does that still stay intact if it's not on the

blockchain like is it decentralized or can you just kind of explain that to me great questions so i'll tackle the second one first i actually think that disco's approach with data backpacks is more decentralized than putting data on a blockchain so um when you store data in your data backpack it is stored encrypted against your keys so only you can open it and it's stored in decentralized storage so there's no single point of failure for that data however if we publish data to a blockchain that data is very opinionated it's really only going to be accessible and relevant to those who are interacting in that specific singular blockchain ecosystem and it means that i'm going to have to create a local

cache off the chain to allow me to interact with this data so really i'll just be interacting with the centralized database anyway so if we want to optimize for decentralization and we want to hone in on self-custody ownership of the individual i think the best way to do that is in a chain and web agnostic form that can be read by email addresses and solana addresses alike under the ownership and control of the individual so it's it's connected to our private keys but where does it live then so i think it's really important when it comes to identity that you have the choice to decide which names you go by

which data you collect in your data backpack for every name and where that data lives so to start off disco is encrypting your data against your keys and storing it in ceramic which is an awesome decentralized storage solution that utilizes ipfs for pinning from our friends at three bucks labs we're also very excited to integrate privy kepler from spruce id as well as web5 from our homies over at black and so in order for you to have the maximum freedom and autonomy with your data you need to be able to choose where that data goes to sleep at night and you need to be able to move it if you want so unlike unstructured data the verifiable credentials the encrypted credentials that we put in your data

backpack can happily be moved from one location to the next without your need to worry that they're going to be interrupted or corrupted at some point in their journey i love that so i think there's a couple new words that you use that i think we should explain to to the audience you said verify verifiable credentials uh and then you've also uh we've talked about like a decentralized identity which is essentially what what uh disco is otherwise known as dids i believe we call it can you just uh can you just um kind of explain what those two are so that we're just everyone kind of understands the new terminology that we're using here as with other terms in our world like dank sharding i would put these in the

uh nerd vocabulary section so um you know bear with me for a minute i did not come up with these terms so verifiable credentials or credentials that can be independently verified by anyone are a specification like a recipe from the world wide web consortium the w3c these are like the high wizards of the internet right these are the folks who determined how our networks are going to work together how we're going to be able to use the internet so they are experts in connecting networks that don't talk to each other so for the last 17 plus more years they've been working on new ways for our various different networks to communicate um and most recently have come up with some awesome solutions that

let more than 100 blockchains and things like pgp keys websites and email addresses all talk together like you have a bitcoin address an email address and a pgp key in a group chat and you don't need a bridge you don't need to pay gas or anything like that so verifiable credentials are the shared language that all of these different kinds of keys can speak now the kind of message that can be passed from a bitcoin address to a salon address to an email address and everyone's going to be on the same page so a verifiable credential is just a signed blob of json it's just a file like a pdf um it's a statement written by one party about another party or about itself sometimes um and so kind of like a diploma once it's written about you it will always be

written about you so i could write a credential about jay saying we were on this call together you know jay could give that credential to kyle but it would still be written about j um and so then it wouldn't it wouldn't validate in the same way unlike an nft which is public immutable on-chain and transferable our credentials are going to be off-chain so they're private by default so you can decide how much you want to share them do you want to share them with no one do you want to share them with everyone but it's under your consent to decide what happens there um they are revocable or can be set to expire so verifiable credentials are much more appropriate to describe the evolving changing organic traits that we have as human beings that are not fixed and public um and so in

this way they can provide a lot more flexibility than data on chain can they are also they're also because you know they do not specify a signature scheme they can be signed by many different kinds of keys and as i mentioned earlier can be read by many different kinds of keys now the accompanying element for verifiable credentials now that we've got our common language that everybody can speak are decentralized identifiers or dids so these dids dids decentralized identifiers are also a spec from our high wizards of the internet w3c and um they are like aliases for our existing addresses that allow all of our addresses to talk to each other so my bitcoin address i can create a did out of it create an alias for it and it can

talk to the alias for your ethereum address and they're passing verifiable credentials in between them and so would we have one did or can we have many dids you can have as many dids as you would like and one thing that's really special about dids unlike pgp keys where you can't rotate the keys we're using public key cryptography but we can't rotate um with a decentralized identifier you can roll the keys so if your keys become compromised if you lose your keys you can generate a new set um so this allows us for perhaps a bit greater flexibility than we have in other contexts other kinds of experiences um but overall the premise of a decentralized identifier is account

abstraction how do we add more capabilities more functions more metadata more privileges and linkages to a set of keys that we get from a blockchain that's really only built to do one thing so i like to think of a decentralized identifier kind of like um kind of like an extension for the keys to your car so you have you know you've got a car you've got some car keys but suddenly you wake up one morning and those car keys open a private jet that's also yours and you can go doing all kinds of other awesome stuff totally off off of the planet where you were building before where you were adventuring before but it's the same keys and the same privileges and so that's why one thing i really want to highlight here that's

super cool is that last fall ethereum improvement proposal 712 upgraded our keys so that now we can use the same keys we have from our wallet to sign off chain data as well as on chain data kind of like you know if you could imagine your car keys can now allow you to fly off the planet as well as drive on the planet um and so what this update means is that we only need to use one wallet to get started adventuring in web web3 on and off the chain it used to be back in the day that you would need a separate native mobile application or a separate browser extension to be able to enjoy all this off-chain goodness but now one set of keys one data backpack one wallet all one experience

um i love this how does this work with okay so you know the promise of web of web 3 i guess is you have this one account typically people say it's your one wallet and you can then go and interact with the rest of the world the internet the digital world with it but now we have things like ens which is like your new domain or your new name and then now we have lens protocol with your lens handle which is your new domain as well but this is your social domain and now we have our disco don't like i know our did i don't know if it has a name or something like that as well but will will basically i'll be able to tie my ens and my lens handle all into my disco handle essentially or how does how do they all work together

exactly so think of disco as the super set the backpack in which inside of which you carry all your stuff because you like a disco ball are a multi-faceted human being you present a different version of yourself you may want to act a little bit differently you may want to have different traits share different parts of yourself in different contexts so it is unreasonable to demand that you show up with the exact same version of yourself at you know at sunday dinner with your grandparents and at 4 a.m at a rave in ibiza now if you have that kind of continuity we stand a consistent king but for the rest of us who perhaps have different parts of ourselves that come to the foreign different situations we

need the flexibility and autonomy to decide how we want to show up in fact if we look to data about gen z and how you know younger people are using the internet there is an outsized demand for anonymity and for the ability to create multiple pseudonymous personas so you can show up as different parts of yourself in different contexts um so with disco we empower you to choose how you want to show up and to decide in what context you want to share what parts of yourself so i think defaulting to public is a very powerful tool but at the same time web 2 and the social ecosystem in which we find ourselves is exhausting the performance of a curated self 24 7 on the internet not only trains you know

bots to serve you up data that's not actually relevant to who you really are just your performed self but it also really messes with the boundaries of how close we think we are to people because of the intimacy with which we share our lives and so platforms like be real that invite perhaps a greater layer of authenticity a little bit less curation are popping off and demand for showing up how you want to show up as opposed to how an app would prefer for you to be defined is gaining traction this is all coming together it makes so much more sense now to me uh so i absolutely love this jay i don't know if you have any more questions on like how

it actually works like we're going to but i really want to get into like i want to understand how we actually use this thing and like what it looks like in the future once it's fully built out i want you to help us bake the cake i guess to go back to what we talked about the beginning but like when disco is fully live and we can talk about when that is um in a second but like is this all how do we control our data is it like in our wallet there's gonna be like a settings like kind of like you know on my facebook i can choose my settings like my notifications and things like is that where we're going to control all this data or like how do you imagine i don't know if that's fully built yeah but like how do

you imagine that working for the user when it's fully built out and you're like disco is everything you've ever wanted to be how are we going to actually use it this is an outstanding question because i think it is the part of the movie that we sometimes skip over in web3 the whole container for our adventures happens between the screen and our eyeballs people eat with their eyes first and so if we don't provide design and experiences that meet users where they are in their journey instead of demanding that they come to step zero of our user journey regardless of where they are then we're gonna have a bad time um and so with cisco we care very deeply about integrating into user journeys and adventures that people are

already going on as opposed to trying to deviate them significantly into a new pattern that doesn't feel good so you can think about disco like a wallet for your wallet uh for all your wallets in fact all your wallets all of your accounts all of your identities and so um a few weeks ago when we started our private beta rollout i invited about 100 of my friends who are not very web3 native at all many of them djs music managers folks from festivals um not necessarily embedded in our decentralized ecosystem they downloaded their very first web3 wallets at home they visited disco.xyz connected their wallets created data backpacks filled out a brief profile of self-attested credentials credentials they've written about themselves that they can reuse in

other apps um upon completing this little onboarding adventure i sent them a disconnect credential attesting to their official status they sent me a gm like a facebook style poke i could send one back to them so now we have a way to flirt and web 3 for anyone keeping track at home my friends were able to show up in person in santa monica at a live event the diplo crashed hi wes and um they were able to pull up their data backpacks pull out their disconnect credentials present them to us we were able to validate the cryptography with our own mobile devices from the disco team we gave everybody disco balls and as far as those friends are concerned you don't need to fund a wallet you don't need to put money in or perform kyc in order to use your metamask keys

to take custody of a digital rectangle that you own about yourself and to show up at a party to use it to redeem for some awesome rewards and so the experience of disco is supposed to illustrate all of the magic that we can enjoy with our private keys before we have to mess with the financial elements of it so i think we need web 2.1 before we need web 3.0 and non-financial onboarding with non-financial network effects the ability for us to build reputation and bring our experiences from web 2 to web web3 in person i think that's a pretty sweet way to go about it so do i need a wallet for this like to to use my um the id like i need a wallet or can you start without a wallet

so right now the way that we've built disco is just to uh to inform our understanding of non-financial network effects in the ethereum ecosystem so first we're starting off with users who have ethereum keys then we will roll in users who have other kinds of keys as a base layer and then we're really excited to pursue a variety of different custodial solutions and key sharded solutions that allow you to show up without a wallet but to still enjoy all of the portability of self-custody that's super cool i love that it sounds like a super fun party this is amazing uh i feel like everybody wants to come to this party and be part of this um so they're actually that's that's a i think a really salient point here is that everybody needs account abstraction

whether you come from the bitcoin world or the polkadot world or the solana world or the ethereum world everyone is hitting a ceiling on how much fun we can have when the only thing we can do is push money back and forth at each other and so you know i've gone to bitcoin maximalist to ethereum maximalist to cardano enthusiasts i had to go to texas to find some of those and propose the same approach to all of them what if we create data backpacks self-custody information that we can carry with us from one context to another that we can build around our public addresses and all of them told me you know what this is the most important idea that i think my community could be working on right now

so my takeaway from that is that if we focus on adopting and embracing these specs in the communities where they make the most sense we have common ground ahead however if we turn inward to ourselves if we focus on our own networks alone and we ignore the fact that there is a thriving community of others outside who we could ally with then we will lose out on the opportunity to unite the many tribes of web 3 and build a you know a more logical interoperable shared permissionless network i i'm kind of just as you speak i'm just imagining disco as this sort of like spider web that's just going around and connecting all of the different layers and different chains and like parts of

web3 all into like one sort of one sort of layer i guess is that is a fair uh scenario or way to explain it i like that but let's invert let's invert the vision a little bit disco is one giant dance floor and we are welcoming everybody onto the dance floor together no matter where you come from the level of technical familiarity you have how much money you have how long you've been in this ecosystem it does not matter because there is room for everyone to express their fullest selves at the disco i think sometimes in web 3 we talk about the permissionless and accessibility of our networks but we forget that token distribution is not as equal as access to protocols and so the

power distribution that we have in web 3 is not actually as decentralized as we like to say so if we can invite a new plane where everyone has equal footing where everyone has an equal chance to capture the non-financial value they bring to the table i think this is the opportunity when we can start talking about things like banking the unbanked we can start talking about solving human coordination problems with an emphasis on the human part so let's let's just break down then what do people do next like how do we get involved with this uh and you mentioned before that there was sort of three groups that we need to create this this vision

um so maybe maybe you want to go through each of those groups um but i think that you know everybody listening and i myself as well i'm excited to support this vision of a universal standard of identity like i think that's what you've talked about this whole time that's what we need it's going to allow us all to come onto the dance floor which is what we all want we all want and and it gives us all control in a way that we can can share what we want to share when we want to share it but but how do we get there like what are the next steps and i don't mean necessarily disco's next steps like what are our next steps what do you need the community to do what do you need the users to do what do you need the delvers

to do um yeah well this is exciting all right showtime guys so in terms of you know the next few months a really exciting opportunity that we all have right now is to get ready and get aware so while disco is swiftly working on our initial testing getting our user experience flow honed with our friends at boys club and chief i and a few other dows um i think this is a unique opportunity for us to pause and think what else do we want why are we here i think often in web 3 we get really excited about the possibilities of what we could do with the technology when we discover it when we get familiar with it when we iterate upon it but we don't often start at the end of the story and

say what is the outcome that we would like to create and how do we work backwards from that outcome into the tools that are going to be best suited to bringing it into being and so this is an opportunity for a mind mindset change for our ecosystem up to this point we have not yet had ethical frameworks that we play inside of we don't have rules in web3 around where we build and what we design to minimize harm to human beings we are just experimenting on the frontier but it's time for us to grow up so in the next few months i think there's a unique opportunity for us to all contemplate what is the future that we are actually trying to build here because the consequences of our experimentation are becoming very real when we start to play with the lives of human beings and their

data as we discussed earlier with women in roe v wade in the united states and so because our choices are becoming more consequential we have a responsibility to design in a manner that is going to be you know optimal for our users and minimize the harm that they befall as a result of interacting with our systems so beyond that if you're excited about what we're building and you're ready to contemplate your responsibility in this space i invite you to follow us on twitter at discoxy i'm at proven authority you can drop us a line at disco.xyz please tell me your dreams for the metaverse i actually read them all i would love to understand the kinds of things that you would like to build with your data backpacks and for those who are excited about joining us on the

dance floor getting your very own data backpacks um you'll be able to visit us at a few conferences later this fall um and we'll also be rolling out as i mentioned with a handful of our communities probably at some live events so we want to be very careful about the way that we introduce these tools to the world because it is important for us that we meet the needs of our users before we ask them to deviate from their everyday so i promise that we will only bring you a backpack when it is well suited to your needs and if you're interested in helping us test data backpacks and provide your feedback we would love to know that too in uh in dropping us a line on twitter or on our website this um so by the way we will put the links to all that in the show notes

everyone make sure you go you go follow uh evan on on twitter and reached out to her uh hopefully everyone here is disco pilled i think that's the term you guys use uh i'm definitely disco pill jay are you disco-filled for sure um i i gotta ask and i know i feel like you kind of just said it but does do you guys have like a road map like is there a phased approach on where this is going and maybe you can't talk about that and um you kind of want to keep that hidden and that's fine if that's the case but i'm just curious is like do you guys have sort of a plan of how this is all going to unfold over the coming years or what are you guys thinking there at disco alpha league alert so here's the vibe um first we are starting off by

exploring non-financial network effects in the ethereum ecosystem so how can we enjoy network effects from apps where human beings are the physical transport layer for their data from app to app then we roll in other base chain ecosystems and we demonstrate cross-chain interoperability without bridges then we integrate web 2 capabilities where you are going to be able to package your data from web 2 for use in web 3 your credit score your uber rating your maybe you don't want your tinder rating or whatever but uh being able to package data from your life in web 2 for use in web3 so that you can prove that you're not a bot so you don't have to fill out captions so you can prove that you are

an adequate passenger so your buddy will let you tag along for the road trip whatever these activities are it's important for you to take the data that you had before you showed up to web3 because you were a person before then um and you have a lot of value that can you can bring with you into the metaverse now beyond that uh we are thinking of first of course serving the communities in our web3 ecosystem um where we would like to give them an unfair advantage so for teams like boys club and shify that don't have their own engineering squads but still contribute an immaculate amount of vibes education and inclusiveness to our community we think that it is awesome to give them an unfair advantage as we start out and we start exploring these capabilities we

want to make sure that the diversity of users we serve is reflected not only in the makeup of our team but the makeup of the folks who we test with and so to ensure that we are not over representing the groups that are already in power in crypto we're being very careful about the partners that we choose as we roll up how big is disco how many people are working on so right now we have 16 disco knots but if you know any technical product managers have them slide into my dms let's see what we can see what we can do we've got a palette talent collective i'll see if there's any uh what was it a technical product manager that's what you need absolutely yes okay see we can do well listeners if you're a technical product manager you get in there you get in and

working with disco disco not i love that yes and i feel like a big a big part of this is is education you know you're talking a lot about the need for us to slow down to think about what we're doing what is our intention why are we doing this uh how are you guys tackling that i mean obviously coming on the podcast today but i feel like you need to educate so many different layers of the ecosystem and so many different players stakeholders within the ecosystem is how is that going is is there a plan to do that um yeah i'm just curious it's it's a it's a big task a big task that's for

sure your spirit you're taking on everywhere all the time the most important layer of education for us to get started is educating ourselves i think too often when we start to build and develop products we build them for things that we want as individuals that we wish existed that we would like to use but self-centered design is not a recognized design practice in most of the world and so at disco we practice user-centered design so our amazing full-time ux researcher carmen leads the charge making sure that we interact with users on a regular indeed weekly basis making sure we validate our assumptions everything from the wording to the color to the font choice to how things are presented in

sequence um our amazing design practice led by my colleague newey ensures that you know not a single one of our features and and recommendations make it into the backlog to be built unless we can justify it against the needs of our users and validate it with an actual conversation or further data so at disco we make sure that um as i mentioned you know the diversity of folks who are conducting research who are filling out our to-do list who are writing our code who are testing it who are marketing and who are onboarding reflect the diversity of users we hope to serve so the diversity of our team is not just a nice benefit because we are woman-led it is a design hedge to optimize for the best product outcome so similarly we see an opportunity to

have that broader conversation in circles in web3 as well as throughout web2 which is why our um you know our universe of of companions and collaborators span the galaxy from folks on other chains folks in the regulatory and legal and political environment folks in the fashion and connected hardware and autonomous vehicles and video game environments so what we try to do is be a sponge to hear about the friction and agony that folks experience in their everyday lives when it comes to redundant data or personal data so i know it seems like a lot of these different disciplines are very very different but at their core it's the same thing over and over again one party makes a statement another party has to

rely upon it and someone is sitting in the middle who that statement is written about well kudos to the 17 disco knots that are tackling this massive issue and building building a universal identity standard for all of us thank you thank you okay i'm going to jump into a bit of a speed round uh just some fun questions for you evan um let's start with uh what's one nft that you'll never sell so my good friend carson woods carson daly as she is known online did an amazing collection with a couple other friends who are artists chad knight and parrot

um the collection is called nft affirmations and i sweep the floor every chance that i get but i love the nft operations because they remind me of early memes um their statements like you know i am blockchain baby mama uh people pay me to talk about the blockchain like silly things like that but um you know on on top of really incredible beautiful art from some of my favorite artists before we were homies they were you know heroes of mine um and so i am i especially love that collection because positive affirmations i think are very powerful in our lives we don't see a lot of them in the web 3 space but i especially love gifting these affirmations to my friends who are new to web3 so that they can have a

statement that resonates with them that makes them feel powerful as they stride into this new space cool that's the floor though i might have to pick me one up oh you absolutely should well and everything's on sale this week anyway [Laughter] uh going back uh to nftnyc what was your favorite favorite event or talk at that at an ftm mwc my favorite event was hands down the crypto dick bud ball so for those who may be unfamiliar with a future global reserve currency crypto diplomats uh were invented last summer and have developed quite the cult following among a number of my friends

and so the high priestess of the crypto dick butts also known as the chief strategy officer um over at coin i believe coin shares melton dumaris who's you know one of the great icons of web3 um had a beautiful event where we wore gowns and capes and masks the men were in black tie there was a choreographed dance uh um depicting the lore and origin story and um and uh ritual of the crypto dick butts performed by a variety of ballerinas and orchestrated by a choreographer um so that would definitely be my favorite the crypto dick butts were minted on spank chain right is that correct hilarious no crypto dick butts are there one ethereum because they are

mission critical but i'm sure i'm sure amin solomony creators bank chain probably owns [Laughter] oh there's just so much fun being had right now yeah incredible gotta have fun uh okay um two more questions one thing you've bought recently for under 100. that has had an impact on you and it does not have to be web 3 related um something i bought for oh oh my gosh um i don't i don't have them on me love to send you guys a link or something but i found some really silly sunglasses that i wore to the coachella music festival or like big round red sunglasses and i got so many compliments that i thought

these should be disco swag and so i ordered them for everybody on my team and we've been using them okay last question um if you had a billboard to get one message out to a billion people the whole world what would you put on that billboard it's a great question key rotation is the new hydration self-custody is self-care a key rotation is the new hydration self-custody is self-care explain explain what you mean by key rotation

so changing your passwords changing out the address you have associated with your ens regularly rotating the security keys that you use to interact with your life so actually i was chatting with some friends over at goop which is gwyneth paltrow's mega brand um and we were talking about digital wellness being a new category we all know our physical wellness spiritual wellness sexual wellness nutritional wellness but do we know digital wellness so in the same way that we have a 27-step skin care routine we should also be thinking about you know what are the routines for our opsec that help us feel safe and secure and good about ourselves wow so important yeah we talked about

that a lot too that's how girls have good optics oh my god i love it i love it okay any any final words to share evan anything else you want to any show you want to make anything you want to share with our audience that they can do to support you absolutely so in addition to following us and dropping us your metaverse dreams i also want to invite all female and non-binary listeners to come hang out with me at the boys club we are a global community of female and non-binary people in web3 we've got a sweet discord channel awesome events all over the world regular town halls a no stupid questions channel for all of those

inquiries you don't feel comfortable bringing to crypto twitter so i want to make sure that all of your listeners know that if there are people in their lives who are interested in exploring web3 but don't really know where to start we would love to welcome them at boysclub.vip and i can just say i went to a boys club event at the permissionless conference and it was awesome and i met uh many from the boys club and just such a cool group of people and um the event was awesome so uh yeah i love boys club vibes approved yeah exactly well evan thank you so much this was an incredible conversation i've been so excited to explore uh what you're building and what you're doing for a while now so it was uh just super excited to get you on here and to to

pick your brain because you have just so much knowledge going on in there and it was awesome to be able to just like be able to pull some of that out of your brain and be able to learn from it so uh thank you so much for joining us today this was awesome this has been super fun can't wait to see you guys in the dance floor for sure and so and sorry to whoever you're late for your next meeting i know we went a bit over so thanks for hanging around you know we measure time and block height here guys [Laughter] have a great day evan thanks so much thanks friends see you in the metaverse thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss

the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one