Harnessing ZK and Existing Infrastructure for Ethereum’s Mass Adoption

Transcript

awesome so great thank you for the time and uh excited so uh today I think that everybody of us wants for a theme to scale and wants to reach its goal of mass adoption however my thesis is that we won't be able to do that unless we change the ways we interact with ethereum so we want ethereum to be scalable private but also secure and how I think about this is that private keys and the ways we do it right now doesn't cut it my thesis where I will develop here is that there are many other ways that we can unlock and we will do that by getting into the intersection of account abstraction it's your knowledge and what we call like

existing digital infrastructure which is basically everything that we use day to day all right so let's get on it uh how do we eat very basic how do we interact with ethereum today simply we create like a public private key and my public key is the way you recognize that I control an address and whenever I make a transaction I make a signature now we're gonna get a bit technical here uh the way we make these signatures is a very specific way called ecdsa and a very specific elliptic curve which is called sec p256k1 this is awesome right this is just like nerdy words the thing is this is the way that ethereum works and we have encoded

some of this from Bitcoin however this is not how the rest of the world works and this in itself we have some problems and we have heard them across the last days in terms of like wallets I can abstraction I'm going to mention them briefly and then we're going to jump and into some of the projects try and Achieve these and what I've seen a direction from the ecosystem to grow so what are the problems of private keys or externally own accounts this is a single point of failure that means you can hacked you get stolen that private key and it's gone there's no way to recover it uh you forgot about it it's gone did you know that half no 20 or one-fifth of all the Bitcoins have been lost in private Keys that's not

what we want to do with uh ethereum we're gonna have a much much better user experience all right other problems it's very hard to remember so how many of us do we remember like all that like the digits of a private keys or even the seed phrase actually do we remember them do you trust it remember that 50 years from now and another problem that is usually not mentioned is that it's a limited scope so usually these ways to interact with ethereum we don't use the same private key to interact with the rest of the world and that means that we sometimes forget to take care of this we forget where it is ETC this is not the way that we're going to scale ethereum and get Mass adoption

in summary this is a terrible terrible user experience Barry was mentioning that but also tied to what vitalik mentioned yesterday this is a bad bad user security because users are not able to hold control their funds or their access to ethereum in a long process so what if there is a better way to interact with ethereum in ways that we are already used to do with the rest of the digital world and this is the direction that I think we should be going as an ecosystem there are so many ways of uh interacting with the digital world with different digital signature schemes different protocols different curves that are not natively uh supported on ethereum I

think we should we should do that so if you were to take one idea from this presentation is this I think we need more people working in the intersection between account abstraction and wallets an intersection within uh serial knowledge space and just looking outwards into what I called external digital signatures which basically is all the digital signatures that exist outside of ethereum or the digital infrastructure that exists on our web 2 world all right so right now we say I mostly approve my transactions with my private key but what if we grow this into an infinite ways to approve transactions

and we're already seeing the ecosystem going that way especially with account abstraction so yeah what if I could approve my transactions with my phone with a tapping with my Biometrics what if I can do just text message what if I could do my juice passport or my government ID that I carry with me or what if I could have a sticker that I just put some RFID there and that allows me to approve transactions or scratch pads or emails or laptops iPads Etc like there's just a plethora like a huge amount of data or digital signatures that exist on web 2 that we could use them basically to interact with ethereum and the advantage of these is that people are already already interacting

with the digital world daily with this so we don't need to teach them a new way to interact um with ethereum or with three we just need to onboard these signatures towards ethereum so why is this cool because I believe that they solve the two fundamental adoption problems for ethereum one is the user experience as I was saying um people already familiarized with these other onboarding tools with other ways to interact with web2 so we should go towards the the users not have them teach all this uh crypto jargon and all this uh new ways in which we uh suggest to interact with uh it's very familiar it's a simple language and already billions of users are using this daily

and the other problem is like again user security there'll be no people for getting their private key there will be no people uh needing maybe in some of these interactions you won't even need to install a wallet or an app to interact with ethereum all right so why this hasn't been done before or why is this possible now well actually I think there are three reasons there are three friends that have converged together into unlocking these Innovations one is a kind of abstraction I know I know it's been years I've been talking about this and maybe with different names and now we have EAP 4357 a super needed but I feel like okay I think we're still in a more

interoperability but we're going towards the right direction we need to abstract away the complexity uh with different implementations different ways uh to handle verifications on ethereum the other is uh layer twos so layer twos have basically make possible to do a lot of like expensive computation a lot cheaper on ethereum and we do that because of the properties for layer twos and that makes something that before we could only do with solidity costing millions of gas so basically a transaction that costs hundreds of dollars now uh with layer twos makes a lot cheaper now does that cut it I think that's enough for many of the interactions but I think the next

generation of interactions are actually going to need CK so CK what allows you is to make a lot of these proofs and all of these ways we interact with ethereum a lot cheaper a lot cheaper and even a lot private so the convergence of these Innovations I feel is what's going to unlock uh the next the next generation of waste and track with ethereum so now in this second part I'm just going to mention a few projects and how I think or see this project has been used uh as a way to approve transactions or interact with ethereum one uh column or group of projects let's say are gonna come from the government IDs surprisingly without their need they're going to help us another is going to be biometrics and another one is going to be email

uh and the last one I just call the existing systems and uh if you were in Berry stock actually we're going to leverage some of the same examples as we're working on the same PSE group but hopefully I dive into some details that he didn't mentioned or just uh rephrase some of the things uh if they weren't clear the first time so government IDs um many countries around the world use a digital ID that you can prove certain facts about yourself sometimes they do have a physical form and sometimes they also have a digital form so one program that is super interesting is in India the ad card program it actually that is the biggest digital ID program in the world with 1.2 billion people use it and

they use it every day they use it to get loan agreements they use uh to use uh to do house applications they use it to interact and sign stuff online so people are already using these daily what if we could use the digital the ad cards as a way to approve transaction on ethereum or to prove any specific thing so on PSE we have a project called Anon adcar which allows you to do local generation of Serial knowledge proofs for a wide range of data on your at Heart Card what this allows you to do is to prove that you're an Indian Citizen and eventually what we want to do is like you prove that you are an Indian citizen that controls this account without saying Who You Are

so right now what type of usage should we get with this well you can it's a very simple anticiple mechanism and very strong um it's a privacy preservative it allows you to air job directly to Indian citizens it allows you to host uh quadratic voting or quadratic funding it allows you to do kyc etc etc um now what's the road ahead for this project the version one is what we currently have which is something very experimental building a language called circum and a proof system that is very good but uh it's not as performance so right now on a laptop it takes you 10 minutes that's not what we want in version two what we want to is focus on performance which means that you can do

this bruise very easily on your laptop or even eventually on your phone and very cheaply now the future of this ecosystem of government IDs is leveraging all the government IDs in the world again to interact with ethereum so the other next targets could be Indonesia China Mexico Bangladesh and many more it's basically the same digital construction and what Barry was saying with RSA signatures many countries have a very similar construction now I even heard the government of Palau has uh already an on-chain identity and even heard that there are some teams looking into that Europe European Union uh digital programs so maybe I don't know this year we will see some other projects like that

if you want to try it feel free to do it the second pillar that is mentioned is Biometrics so what's something that you carry on with you every day and you won't forget about it well your face your face your fingerprints so there are already 6.8 billion smartphones in the world it's estimated that 80 of them support Biometrics so quick math uh there's 5.4 potential uh 5.4 billion potential Hardware wallets that are usable just with biometrics we as a society have got used to just unlocking our phone with our Touch ID with our face ID what if we came to the users without needing to install

anything and just like approved transactions for them with this uh for this there's a growing landscape and configurations of projects on how to approach this there are pure solidity path their pure CK path there are elements that use um like Apple's secure Enclave or Androids uh keychain or many other web auth like abstraction layers to synchronize them but I think the the the goal of this or the gist of is is again we want to make it easy for users that are already used to authenticate with their Biometrics and approve transactions with this these are some teams that uh have been building this so a quick shout out and I

think there are again more uh teams in the ecosystem that we want to push towards approaching this this problem the third way in which we're gonna interact with ethereum in the future is with emails and there's a growing ecosystem as well on the on the email front there are 348 billion emails sent daily what if we could capture some of those what if we could use some of those emails as a way to send and receive money even my grandma who is like over 70 uh years old like uses email on a week to week basis and we could have onboard her um to crypto by enabling interactions in this platform in this UI so some projects that I'm excited that

are around the PSC 0x bar CK ecosystem is like proof of email allows you to uh take an email and make a proof about this content so one demo that they have built is a proof that you own or control a Twitter account um and and this is the basis really to build more and more complex applications by the way all what I've talked this on this uh talk it's like open source open and we just want to have more people building applications on top of this um a really cool new one as well that is starting uh very referred to this a few hours ago is email wallet what if uh I just send an email to you saying I'm

transferring one if to you and you don't have to do anything you don't have to know crypto you don't have to download a wallet you don't have to set up a private key it just gets to you and how do you spend it you might ask well you just send another email to somebody else and how does this work well basically emails are signed everything that has a private and public key could be potentially onboarded to ethereum as a way to interact with ethereum emails are no different and this project is super excited again it's an experimental growing development phase but I think it will be really really cool primitive for the rest of the ecosystem to experiment with and lastly the ckp2p trustless on and off ramp we're saying that uh Barry again like a

few hours ago um you can make a proof that you transact some money over Ben mode to somebody Ben will send you an email and with that you can unlock the fonts on chain this is a very simple idea but very powerful way to avoid what we call like choke points on crypto this is key because right now on-ramps and off-ramps are one of the main choke points for crypto and the other one is like Apple Store Google store but with this there's actually no need to install anything there is no need for benmo or PayPal or MoneyGram or any other payment processor to do any change we're just leveraging the emails that they sent and

we're making proofs about them and that allows us to use it trustlessly as an on-ramp and off-ramp how cool is that and the last idea which again really crazy uh bear mentioned it is the GitHub wallet so very simply whenever you interact on GitHub you could sign a commit and that's that signature basically could be leveraged as a way to approve transactions so what if I say I want to onboard I don't know like this group of developers on this uh repository because they're super awesome I want to abort them to ethereum well I would just send them money through GitHub wallet how do I send them money just tag the GitHub wall but

and that will send uh 0.1 if from your smart contract wallet to Bob now how does the GitHub wallet uh knows that it's actually you is because your commit or your pull request is signed by your uh signature and we can verify it and your smart contract wallet could be configured to only operate or transact when you sign this cool so making a summary getting to the end of the presentation why is this important because we're solving two of the major uh problems for ethereum which is user experience and user security and we're doing that by hijacking or more leveraging or harnessing all the digital infrastructure that exists in the world

why is this possible it's possible because there's right now a convergence and I don't think there's many people there but I think we're getting into account abstractions to your knowledge and just looking into the ecosystem and the ways that people are used to interact with the digital world what's the next step here in this area I think let's expand our sources I mentioned four ideas four pillars and I think there's a lot more to get to be discovered Let's uh expand the composibility what if I could uh say Sena one thousand dollars transaction but I would need to approve it on GitHub and on email and with Biometrics okay let's try to compose those proofs very easily and make it developers and let's build apps

so that it's very easy and inter operatable uh to use across the ecosystem and lastly let's explore novel flows this is a call to all application developers uh to start thinking about these Primitives and how uh after they get to a production level you can start building uh cool interesting Innovative flows awesome thank you very much [Applause]