DappCon 2023: Programmable IP - Stefan Adolf

Transcript

so welcome everybody uh to a talk that's called programmable IP to mitigate human suffering my name is Stefan ad I'm working for a company that's called a molecule we actually not a DA that was written a little bit wrong on that slide but never mind um we are powering Dows and DOW ecosystems for biotech um funded by web 3 so the the topic of um programmable IP starts with main primitive of the molecule ecosystem and that is the so-called ipft I don't know if somebody of you attended the talk that um was taking place on this stage around an hour before by Athena this is one of our bods and they were actually

meting an ipft to capture intellectual property but to answer the question what's an ipft um there are several aspects to it um in a nutal technically an IP nft is nothing else than just a plane erc721 uh nft as you would imagine that but on the other hand what adds value to it is um a combination of legal and smart contracts right so there are smart contracts behind the nft and there are legal documents um and contracts attached to it on the other hand um what is an ipft actually doing so IP stands for intellectual property obviously um it represents the future rights of that intellectual property while it's under under development so there are actually

research projects in our case that say I want to capture intellectual property on chain and sell that to other people or do do things with it we're going to see that in a second um what ipn FS are doing they're binding legal agreements and ownership assignments to a transferable asset that means you can prove on chain that you are the actual owner of the electric property bound to the nft now the really cool thing about them is you can use them as building blocks um for other prodoc calls right so you can actually in the simplest case you could try to sell them on open C which nobody's usually doing because they're quite valuable but this is something you could do you can fractionalize them you can do whatever you want with them actually and most importantly why are we

building that IP nfts are used as in uh investment vehicles um to found those or to fundraise for biotech research project projects and U you see a little selection of dows that that um already are considering or even have already minted ipn FTS one of the most prominent ones being Vita da I don't know if anybody of you heard about them but this is actually the largest St we currently supporting with an incubator program called bio XYZ so this is um more more or less Power by us as molecule but we are mostly building the assets for that kind of stuff so one thing about this talk it is rather technical because I'm the lead developer of the mole core developer team and um it's maybe not as um philosophical as Benji would have

presented that who was actually talking this talk slot in the first place so bear with me if you see some code or some Json files during uh the upcoming 10 minutes what we wanted to show you is how the ipft minting process itself looks under the hood now if you're not a developer but if you're interested in uh figuring out how this kind of stuff works you don't have to understand anything you can just go to our interface at test net. min. molecule. and minted on your own we spent hours and hours and hours in making this foolproof I guess everybody should more or less be able to to use that interface to M an ipft so the first thing you do when you want to M an ipft is you need to get the number

of the ipft you want to Mint and this is a very special reason all the legal documents you're going to uh attach to it will refer to the ID you're going to create in the first step and this is a process that has been permissioned before and it's now completely permissionless so you can just go to our smart contract call The Reserve method which absolutely public and create a new ipft ID and use that one um uh to refer to to the intellectual property later on now each ipf comes with a certain uh structure of metadata attached to it this is what I was talking before on the very right hand side um you're going to you you see a sample of how this metadata looks like under the hood but

um the preview here in the middle is actually how it looks like on screen and I attached lots of little pills explaining what's what's going on there or what you're going to have to put onto it right maybe one of some of the most important things are definitely who is researching on that who's the lead researcher of the project which institution maybe in University um has uh enabled that research in the first place and um a list of attachments that are going to be attached um on that ipft in in in the background now after you got your um ipft ID reservation you can start crafting legal documents around that if you go to our website and use our official minting front end you are able

um to to to do this on the website itself so we have some templates for you where you can create those research those those legal agreements um automatically but if you are a researcher and you know a little bit what you're doing you will craft them on your own so the first kind of agreement you're going to attach to an ipft is the so-called research agreement and there are different flavors of them actually the most currently prominent one is the sponsored research agreement but we crafted something that's very unique to ipns called the saip this is what our legal um Department was actually crafting and those actually talk about what's going on in the research project itself and this might not be to be disclosed to the public this is usually um confidential information this is why you actually

want to encrypt it later on I'm going to show you that in a second but the second agreement you're going to prepare is a so-called assignment agreement and this template is also absolutely open source you can just use the stuff we are um have prepared there the assignment agreement is assigning the real um intellectual property to the current owner of the ipft with the ID that you have reserved you can actually if you do this on a technical level not on our frontend at the moment you can attach whatever you want so if there are more um legal documents that you want to attach to it this is the place um to collect them now first thing you want to do technically is and this is what you don't see on the front obviously you want to check some all those documents because they're

going to be referred to on chain if if somebody's downloading them in the in later on they want to prove that all those documents were the ones that have been attached while the APFT has been minted this is more or less how it looks like under the hood you can if you want you can use any kind of check some algorithm we're using sha 2 or it's not not really cat Jack but it's the Sha 2 algorithm that is um also that's delivered by ipfs so this is code we prepared we have sample repos on it are going to link to point to them in the very end of the slide dech uh you can download them you can try them out you can try this on your own now once you have check some them you want to as I said encrypt certain documents because they

potentially carry information that's not supposed to be disclosed to the public particularly the research agreement and there's a protocol and I'm pre pre pre aware that that many of you might know that already it's called lit which is allowing you to encrypt things in or to to store encrypted values in a dentalized way and this is exactly what we're using to encrypt that part of the ipft so you as a developer if you one you can use um the procedure that we also have on our sample repos and encrypt the um the research agreement with a key that's then also encrypted and the um the the um the clear text key is only going to be reassembled on client side that means only people who

are supposed to read the data will be able to reassemble that encrypted key on their machine it's a peer-to-peer protocol I don't want to give a talk about lit protocol but it seems kind of safe they're going they're on a on a on a clear path of decentralization many people's using that and uh this is what we're also using for IP nfts now once you went through the process and uh encrypted that research agreement and got that uh encrypted um symmetric key you're going to put that down for the for for the minute and uh also keep the encrypted file somewhere and you keep something that's called Access Control conditions this is actually defining which on under which um condition somebody May decrypt the uh ipft attached data later on we're going to

see uh I guess a sample of that in a second this is more or less how it looks like the encrypted symmetric key that comes out of the lip protocol is actually just a binary string somehow you can just put it in the metadata of the ipft and the access control conditions is something that L protocol provides as a structure this is I said just explaining um or it's it's defining which kind of chain condition has to be there so the caller of um of of the lit protocol API may receive the key shards that will enable the um reassembling the the encryption key on their machine to finally decrypt the data and if this is a little bit too much for you you can imagine it like if you hold the apnf t ID you can ask lit protocol to please

provide the symmetric key to decrypt the attachments and they will do so because you hold it if you don't hold it they will not give you the uh the the the shards of that of that private key which is pretty interesting method um method now one of the final steps is now you have to you have to store that kind of stuff somewhere right so what we are doing and I mean everybody else is doing this St as well you upload the data to some decentralized file system I don't know what we prefer is ipfs and particularly web free storage they by ref friend of protocol apps which is an awesome service to just well fire and forget you can upload things they are they are they're actually pinning them automatically they even queuing them to to file coin storage so this is this is

rather decent service to to to store data and we are storing the images the encrypted metadata the metadata and the final metadata using that method it all ends up with um data that's stored on ipfs and uh what you're supposed to do you can you can actually add those links that come out of that service in your ipft metadata one of the last steps here is we want to be legally compliant and that means that when you mint the IP nft you actually agree to the term terms behind that those are the terms conditions you can find on our website you can copy paste them to your service if you want to write it on your own but this is not a sample this is exactly the string that's supposed to be signed and if you

look closely the attachments of the IP nft are mentioned here so those Agreements are to be signed by the party that's minting the apnf at the bottom this is something you very likely might know this is like a binary signature um that was derived by um the the signing party that was uh supposed to Mint the ipft and you take that one down now you add the Met This this term signature to the metadata and now you upload this final metadata structure to some final location and now here comes the final step if you want to build a meaningful protocol in rep 3 and the data itself is actually the value you want to ensure that the data follows a certain

structure otherwise nobody else might be able to read that how do you overcome that so ceramic has some answers to that there are lots of other protocols that might solve that but how do you do that how do you enforce that on chain it's not that simple and what we are doing we actually added um a permission step in the very end we are signing off your metadata so if you want to main an ipft there is a little unfortunate step in the end where we are checking if your metadata is actually compliant to the ipft metadata standard which is just a Json a Json schema so this is what our service is doing it's also checking whether you really have accepted the terms the that I was shown the slide before and uh it's also checking something about the images but I won't

disclose what is actually checking there so we are making sure more or less that the stuff you're minting is more or less really looking like an ipft once we are pretty sure that the this this is a good uh data structure we are signing off a message for you that we are sending you this is what you see on the right hand side at the bottom and now finally you can call the mint reservation function on our smart contract that finally will mint the ipft and if you look closely at those parameters the last one's called authorization this is what's actually what came out of the step before so this is the authorization we gave you to Mint that IP our contract this is to be made to avoid spam and

it's made to ensure that the metadata structure is correct one little side note you also have to bring 0.001 ether which is our so-called symbolic minting fee AKA um spam protection so you cannot just mint as many ipfs as you want you always have to pay a little fee so we can be pretty sure you're not putting lots of useless stuff on that you can actually but you pay for it this is what you will end up with this is how it looks like when you look at an ipft on our website but this is just how we are displaying that everybody could just use them displaying any way they want and utilize them however they want there is actually um a pounds value written on this one this is actually valid DA's first ipnc that they Meed some weeks ago this dollar this pound

value over there is not the price on chain this is the initial amount that has been funded by a DA that was buying that ipft when it was minted this is not automatical this is actually only metadata somebody put that value on and said okay I was granted like 228,000 to to to start my research on that in lecture property and now now you have an ipft so what you have a rep presentation of electric property on chain what could you do with that one very obvious thing is you can fractionalize that and I was told I shouldn't mention the term fractionalization because it applies certain things this is why we call it tokenize so what we're doing we're

tokenizing a token we're tokenizing the ipft to a fungible token contract which we are creating as a minimal proxy on chain you as an ipft holder can just call that method you can also use our very beautiful interface here to mint I don't know a million you come up with a number 10 million um um IPS of that ipft that will represent uh membership and governance rights over the development of the intellectual of the underlying intellectual property so if you are Distributing that IP token to your I don't know Community to all the people interested in that um kind of research they can participate actively in the development of that research project this is the whole

idea and many people like actually very much ready to pay money to gain access to those IP tokens because they might come with lots of little benefits if you're interested in the research project right so if you say I want to support that valid out people and the researcher behind it I'm ready to pay I don't know £10,000 just to have access to the Token which might entitle me to gain more access on data that comes out of the project so nobody has to really own the ipft itself this is just the base asset that might be sold one day to a huge farmer company but the IP is already entitling you to actually um get access to certain kinds of data that's attached to the ipf that's out of of molecule scope at the moment we don't

really care what how they're utilizing that we're just enabling the web 3 assets or the web web3 asset classes for projects to utilize it um this is a sample how it looks like when you actually selling off those IPS to your community we built a crowd sale contract in the middle of of 2023 extremely successfully we built that so it's super generic you can use that CR contract for any kind of your community I don't know if somebody of you maybe even have followed that up so um vow was fractionalizing or synthesizing or tokenizing the ipft um from Victor Kolchak which was dealing with um a research topic that I cannot explain because I'm a I'm a

mathematician I don't know anything about chemistry but um this is awesome research actually and they were selling off tiny amount like 25 sorry 25,000 25,000 tokens for a certain um um funding goal so this was um a public crowd sell everybody could could um take part in it there were some little tweaks on it but uh what we figured out in the end it was like oversold by 1700% so people were actually really after that one why did they do that because now the owners of those IP tokens are members of the snapshot voting of the snapshot community that you see on the right hand side it and they actually start interacting with the research project directly so they have some impact on what Victor corak and his

team is going to develop in the future um some other things you can do with uh ipfs you can actually token gate other other services you can check whether somebody holds an IP and uh disclose data for them um there is actually a feature that that we are providing which is called a public data room so you can attach just public data you can I don't know add lots of findings that you have as researcher or stuff that interesting for your investors um and upload that and if you want you can just token gate it in a way that only certain people maybe IP holders with a certain amount of ipts on their wallet may see the data in in natural IP ipfs this is what you already guessed are able um to build an to to to to build onchain

intellectual property portfolios for those biod Dows that we are supporting by the means and this is just a screenshot of what what V da is presenting on their website so there actually and I don't have the numbers in my mind this is maybe what Vinson comes up with in in some minutes they are um collecting int electric property or they're adding this to their portfolio thereby growing the amount of of um of um investment volume that they have bound into their B into their Dow ecosystem thereby raising the value of the overall EX system that they are building and V da is is actually if you don't know them taking care of longevity research in general some other things without screenshots what you can do is this is really interesting stuff actually you

can nobody really knows if if if if if a newly existing research project is really that valuable as they claim because you don't know the output they are still researching right so how do you know if this is valuable one thing that might tell you if something's valuable is if you expose it to the market you say well you can buy shares of that not really shares but you can buy actually you can put money into it if nobody puts money into it it very likely isn't that valuable right but if people are putting money into it well it's an indicator that this is really valuable and this is something you can do with ipts you can figure out a little bit if people are ready to pay money for it then it might have more value than other projects and as I said governance plays

a major role here you can have other shareholders or stakeholders of the um longevity um ecosystem for example have a saying in what happens next what research area somebody should focus on if you wouldn't if if you should raise more funds for the research projects and so on so it's actually more or less a governance membership thing that's everything that I have on my slides I put quite a lot of uh no Three Links at the bottom that might be valuable for for you so the documentation area the minting um front end that I was mentioning and showing and of course our website which we remade two weeks ago by our very awesome website team and you're going to find me anywhere on web 3 also on a service called X and uh don't forget to buy my friends token thank you very

much thank you Stefan for a great talk we have a few minutes for some questions otherwise I can also answer my own questions right absolutely it's always useful absolutely if the audience isn't that great isn't that large I happily ask my own questions but feel free so if somebody of you has anything that comes up to your mind ask ask me anything if not uh you can find stuff on here uh at the conference and uh we'll have a five minute break all right thank you very so much Stefan thank you