Episode 264: On-Chain Reputation & Identity Building with Sismo

Transcript

foreign [Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week I catch up with Adrian charlay from sismo we chat about his early experiences building in defy and how this led him to build cismo a decentralized identity product with privacy preserving properties we covered the ZK badge concept how they're minted

what is happening under the hood and then explore some interesting emerging use cases for these now before we kick off I just want to let you know about the upcoming ZK Summit 9 event happening on April 4th in Lisbon join us once again for our ninth edition of The Summit with all the latest research and most cutting-edge implementations in the ZK space you can find out more at zksummit.com and I hope to see you there now to the builders and hackers among you I also want to highlight another event called zika hack Lisbon which will be happening just a few days before the ZK Summit also in Lisbon so this is happening on March 31st through April 2nd it's our first IRL hackathon focused on cool use cases in ZK the application

is open to potential hackers I'm also adding this to our show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor anoma's first fractal instance namata is launching soon namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset agnostic privacy nomada natively interoperates with fast finality chains via IBC and with ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge for privacy namata deploys an upgraded version of a multi-acid shielded pool circuit otherwise known as masp that allows all assets fungible and non-fungible to share a shielded set the masp circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set a novel feature that funds privacy as a

public good visit nemata.net for more information and join the community on Discord at discord.gg forward slash nomada so thanks again onoma and now here's our episode [Music] so today I want to welcome Adrian Chalet the founder of sismo welcome to the show Adrian hey thanks thanks for inviting me I am very excited to dig into the topic for today which is sismo so it's actually come up a couple times on the show but before we dive into sismo let's learn a little bit about yourself what's your background what were you doing before you jumped into this project yeah so actually I I was interested into blockchains when I read about the

Bitcoin white paper pretty early on in my studies and I was looking for a reason to be an entrepreneur having passionate about startups and things like that since I was very young and so that that was it I'm from an engineering background was working for a long-term uh big changing industry and when I read about the Bitcoin white paper and this fact that we are able to transact without any intermed jury that was fascinating to me and I was thinking okay why don't we do more than just money and and then I I went to meetups and I didn't like that much the you know the taxi theft uh taxes theft yeah yeah yeah yeah at that

time that was it like it was I guess in 2014 or something yeah early okay and then I I was very lucky that uh pretty early on somebody told me about you know Bitcoin made of hey this this thing the the ethereum you might like it because you're more into like entrepreneurship part of it like a bit more pragmatic let's say instead of super not dogmatic but like ideologist so he told me about the ethereum white paper that was just being released and and then I I dig into the vitalik hole at that time I think it was very articulating he was able to to gather cool people so that's when I went all in I was one of the first employees of consensus oh wow um and then I built stablecoin projects there that was

called variable so D5 but timing was a bit too early wow I didn't actually know there were stable coin projects back then what was that like like what kind of stable coin was it yeah so I think that we were all pretty convinced that if we if we wanted to do real world applications we needed stable coins because otherwise like real users couldn't like the the volatility of the the assets is is definitely a blocker for any real world applications so when I started the project I think it was the early days also of maker and so my project was close to make actually all civil projects that are algorithmic um behave the same there are people that

want volatility the Traders there are others that don't watch it the stable can hold us and you find a way in the system to resell the volatility to Traders so make sure you're doing this when you issue die you are taking a bet depending if you sell them or not but there are traders that take leverage on the price of the collateral and others that sell this when you exchange against that anyway so we're thinking about these things so it was called variable it was a derivative Exchange close shorter to angle protocol that is a French product that is basically the revamp of variable in a way better way and and smarter and something like that very happy to see them doing it a French

team that is doing the Euros they become so anyway so this d5p early on within consensus then there was the Ico manual and the incentives were all around like the way for me to keep on building this project was to do a big Ico yeah and that's I didn't feel comfortable doing this I didn't like that much this period I think it was you know I studied like super ideologists I want to build stuff like with crazy cool people like Ethan didn't exist there was no price involved everybody was like crazy passionate and smart and then it was my first time that I encountered like the euphoria and so I didn't like that much what it did to the

community so anyway uh I left the project to consensus uh and that's when I thought okay now it's time to do the things that I've never done like the real cryptography and that's when I uh I thought that easy cash at the time the zikash committee was an amazing Community yeah I think we met at zikon one very likely or zikon zero was it in Montreal I think no it was the one in splits okay okay like that was the end of my maybe I spent four four months doing all the cryptography from zero to wow appearing yeah it was great to do in our pairings of course now I've lost it but like one week ago actually I was doing I was moving stuff in my apartment

and I found my my pile of sheets with like the demonstrations of math but I don't understand anything oh no so anyway I had like I felt I needed to to see what's the crypto behind all of what we do and yeah Z cash was great uh I think the community during the bear market around your get some insta to study to organize your podcast the zikon the zcash even the zika snacks applied to ethereum all these things like you know at some point we wanted to do a bridge between ethereum and easy cash I think that was the most interesting interesting part of of that time and to be honest I was lesser enthusiastic about the ethereum community that was at this it is money

meme and that that's not my stuff anyway but even the the era you're talking about was 2019 had you not felt like that had been cleared out yet by 2019 it's like like the z-con you talk about that's 2019 yeah May or so May June so yeah like 2019 was like the depths of the bear Market I I felt like icos were long gone by then yeah actually yeah maybe I was not here so I saw I didn't like it of course yeah yeah but the aftermath of the Ico went was all so bad it was also really bad because yeah it's the first time that I saw the ethereum community in a defensive mindset you know we were like oh Bitcoin they are defensive they are a maximalist and so that and we started to feel the same way

about ethereum and I was thinking no this community is not about this it's not about like being defensive and saying it is money and easy is better and stuck ether during the bear Market I didn't like that so that's when where I left I kind of left and in retrospect I think that we were missing the community was still there but we were meeting a substrate something to think about instead of the price yeah and that's D5 like defy when it happened then it went crazy like we like like a lot of innovation and also great and so I had to get back there and that's what the thing that I was building with variable like the kind of Define like that's what my thesis there was that we can do so much cool Financial stuff elaborate on anything so

so I joined Ave as a smart contractor for a year and that was great like right after the D5 summer spent a year there and then we have all we had all the nft ens even a lot of those a lot of things a lot of divers that are that are starting to be gathered on chain for instance myself as a as a long time ethereum Builder and have a contributor I had a wallet where I get my payments so that's my professional wallet I had my private wallet where I do my weird things bad trading and all these things we all have that yeah our shame our shame wallets yeah same with it exactly maybe I have another account I have also my have I interacted with your Anon I

don't know I don't know I don't know maybe maybe everybody needs to be kind with me because you don't know I don't have a really cancer okay but yeah and then I think almost everyone has like this public wallet that you put on Twitter where you you signal stuff like I'm using the engine that is to Signal the product that I like and it's really like my resume my own chain resume so we realized that oh actually now stay because it's fixed like we have some Financial infrastructure that is being built the second big theme since the beginning of ethereum was identity how can I use these wallets to store more than just money but to store identity and so I think for the first time in 2021 2020

we had some diverse data and we had issues okay now that I have data it's mine it's not in a web 2 server how can I leverage them well in D5 well it's great that all applications talk the same language so let me precise that but whether it's your unit's weapon are they or on curve all these things you cannot use your private wallet your financial wallet so there's no privacy constraints behind the fact that uni swap knows that I'm using curve I'm using Ave it's still the same identity we are now I think that since we have several identities at some point we want to aggregate them like let's say that I'm I will pay the employee

with my private wallet where I do trades I vote on the other governors on my vanity address I maybe vote on The Forum like on Twitter I participate so I have three wallets that I and I want no link between them yeah but the aggregated social capital within the other community is very good yeah there's no way today to prove stuff about yourself apart from the fact I give you my address yeah but I don't want to give you my private wallet I don't want to give you the one I was paid in the oven so I can only give you my one interest and so that's the the rise of cismo is the fact that okay what happens with financial assets and financial Capital within D5 it will happen on the web 3 social and on the social capital but for

this we need to be able to to unlock all the possibilities like let's say create a credit score that takes in your culture professional reputation maybe your Uber reputation as a good driver and many things now that the data is ours we can actually do things with them but we need privacy yeah or you need ways to to not link it right like you need a way that it's not all linked together all the time this is so I mean I like I really like how you're telling the story because you can see like the problems that you're trying to solve with ismo emerging very organically like you yourself are experiencing them you're seeing your peers experiencing them there you do also have the case of like they're assuming they have like

multiple users when there is actually one it might actually be really interesting to know that there's like who are the real power users and yeah without revealing how they're connected do you think actually like was the airdrop farming also a bit of a thing here where you see people kind of just like they're doing actions on chain to get an airdrop and you see like that's where that reputation or identity like towards identity they're trying to do like the most basic thing with the bot that you have to do to get an airdrop but it's very because the airdrop issuer doesn't really have that many other ideas to show what engagement looks like they're just sort of using this very simple metric but here you could actually maybe show that like yeah you

know we're doing I'm doing actions with multiple accounts across and it actually sums up to something more human than these like stupid Bots that all do the same action across a number of of wallets you know I talked about the stable coins and the fact that to have sound financially instruct infrastructure we need to stable coins and then D5 was about the fact that everything was super liquid thanks to the erc20 standard the token stand up you can stake your token in a protocol then you get a receipt as tokens 2 that you can reuse or elsewhere and that's the liquidity and the stability thanks to table console that's why I think that's my opinion of why D5 is great and why it was unlocked during device summer

because first stable coins and second you had this standard to communicate between financial assistance and similarly I think like for the Wave 3 threshold there's this big thing in CV resistance that's something that we need to solve to think about sound airdrops I think you need first to make sure that each claimer is a human is a unique human meaning that yeah one human can only claim once so that's the Civil resistance that's things that we don't like we follow closely like World coin like proof of humanity and there are other things that are working on it these teams are working on very very important problem and system is working more on to understand that how to make your

reputation your Social Capital liquid and so for instance with this move you could have okay prove that I'm a human a unique human using worldcon for instance or any other civilization tool first prove me that's a human so you can only can once and then from all your accounts you will aggregate let's say your volume on my exchange and then you get a job proportional to that and that way I think our jobs will be way more sound basically we don't have enough tool yet to be smart about reputation about what it means engagement the CB resistance I think is one of the core thing that will be that will unlock so much more in understanding this concept of like on-chain identity as forged through

actions to sort of create the story of a human I really liked that idea that it was like it was very it seems very Merit based right it's like what you've done not who you are I really like that but I think what we've also seen are just people who write scripts that just do that on multiple addresses so it just looks like it looks like you know slightly human activity but it's just kind of completely automated and they can like just farm that like you mentioned worldcoin has this way of proving your Humanity they scan your iris with an orb and I have some friends that work there but I've always found that the orb scanning part makes me uncomfortable I I just can't believe that there's not something more creative in trying to just determine that somebody is human

that we have to kind of resort to the iris um and yeah I just wonder like if you thought if there aren't better ways to do this yeah totally agree like that's actually like yeah I told you about like stable coins and civilian sense and how it can relate uh in my opinion worldcoin or proof of humanity or kyc solutions that did CS or no it's basically the the centralized stable kind like it's it's okay you go outside of crypto and then you get a stamp so I won't judge the solutions but it's perfect like in the sense it's like the usdc the trust assumption is really on the the central party here is the same with what county which proof of humanity with kyc they are in charge of

it and then they are the algorithmic CB resistance and of course I I I think Bitcoin passport is a great trial like this I think that there are also teams that are working on on your graph let's say that if you prove that you have a social graph you don't have a human on earth is connected under which there is like seven levels I mean six degrees of separation or something like that yeah you just have a chat about that and so apparently in crypto it's probably far fewer Degrees of Separation but anyway exactly but if somehow you can measure the closeness of an account like basically the real attention it gets like the closest it is to real humans and that humans are incentivized to to

create that that could be a way the other ways I think is is the attention like instead of just saying like having an account or not you you can see whether it gets attention or not it's it's very likely that bugs don't get attention actually we don't know with chargeability maybe it will change yeah that's actually as we're talking about it I'm realizing that too but yeah so what you're saying is like a reputation score of some sort like so because they're being followed like they're doing some actions that people are recognizing is interesting and then they're being tracked or they're being followed they're being starred or something like that by a community which suggests it's real and yeah I actually as as we were talking through this whole thing definitely the AI component comes in where you're like like that that idea of these scripts and these Bots doing

things that seem kind of like human enough to get an airdrop like who's to say that there isn't scripts or Bots or like AI Bots that actually start to look kind of human hopefully like they can be ways to think about it where okay I really like it's just a way to so that you have a unique account but it doesn't mean that you have a unique identity like that's what system is trying to do like so small basically it allows from all the accounts that you have and why one might be your world current account you can do stuff from all your data we can see it as a tool I I didn't spend enough time to think about like all the philosophical consequences but it's it's not because you do something like welcome you can just be one more tool for your identity

sometimes you need to prove it something like that but of course a lot of dystopian stuff can yeah definitely one of the feeling it gives I think now let's talk more about what sizmo is doing because I think what we've just said is like a few of the problem spaces or things that it's trying to solve how does sisma work what is it yeah so sismo Works basically there's two sides within tismo like ZK people will know that they are approvals and verifiers that's one of the main things in CK and the UK Proverbs well it's great that they are privacy preserving meaning that they just prove a specific fact that is targeted you build the circuits to below someone or something to prove one

specific fact without giving the core data that you are so okay once you have verifiers and provers that's easy case it's using ZK scaling everything that is proved is public and you use that just to say it's legit and you have no place to resume so it's that's interesting the way we use it DK is for privacy and our our concerns like okay users have data on their wallets and they want to prove stuff from them or even from their web to identity by the way we support Twitter and guitar for instance but users have accounts and they want to prove stuff to third parties without revealing their addresses or their accounts so sismo allows you to I have a wallet with like a 10 000 transactions

but I just want to prove that I have this nft or that I a big user of ethereum I will be able to do that I will be able to generate a ZK proof Within cismo and this Decay proof can either be sent to a third party that verifies it this is a model long-term approach but currently what we do is like this ZK proof is used to generate a ZK batch so we send this UK proof to what we call a zika tester it's a smart contract that has two roles it's three roles actually first is verify that the proof is valid then install the nullifier like tornado cache or semaphore it makes sure that I cannot choose the same Source twice and third it's issued the ZK badge that is

and there's SVT soluble token uh basically it's a non-transport token and we think as ziki badges as tokenized access stations basically they are tests for something so very concrete example during DK hack3 Workshop people that sold the puzzles were offered a CK barge and what it means is that we created this group of eligible users so we have the list of all people that sold the puzzles and within cismo they were able to generate the ZK proof that they are part of this group that's the real proof that is generated I'm part of this group and then this UK proof is sent with the character and he created okay I'm a successful submitter of uh UK act 3 the

workshop so that that's it that are the core example then what you tell us to do now you can do airdrops to these people for them they don't have to reveal who they are they exactly are that's interesting you can do like privacy preserving votes if you want to learn get feedback on ZK hack3 Workshop you can do a vote and now you know that you won't be able to say hey guys why did you say that that's interesting just to clarify that when you talk about this sort of creation of the badge what I had not realized when I first kind of was seen the product was that it gets created anywhere you want so it's that separation like especially if you're trying to track like on-chain activity or a Twitter account or

anything like that the attestation badge can be kind of minted in a very different place an address that's not connected at all right yeah thanks a lot for precising that but yeah that's a good point we have sourced destinations that allows you to prove stuff about your your repetition your data your history and then you can mint the badge on any destination a bit like sometimes people refer girls are as Tony Lucas for that time meaning that you have data on an account and you can transfer it to another without revealing and it's granular meaning that you can reveal any part of it and as for app developers like when you guys created the SDK badge you went through the factory you just have to copy past your white list or use some data providers like okay I want to

create a batch for all my photos or lens so invite you to take a look at factory.io it's anyone can create with the key badges permission from us that's the first step you have the key badge now we have to find utilities since it's a token it's already integrated in great tools like kill like snapshot all these things so actually I want to spend time talking about sort of the use cases and the different ways that you're seeing teams use it but before we do that I want to sort of look a little bit under the hood at what it is so you're built on ethereum so you would mention factory.sismo.ios yeah maybe just explain like what is actual where is sismo what is it and maybe is there anything off chain happening Yes actually I wouldn't say that it's ethereum based I mean it is so we have

circumcockets that allows people to prove they are part of groups the way it works that basically we create a group so let's say that I take all my lens followers like uh all addresses that what you learn specific now have this group of let's say 100 addresses what will happen is that we turn that into a miracle tree and in the proving scheme what you will prove is that first you own a source account that is part of the tree and secondly that your own also the destination account the one that would receive the patch or the one that will be the destination of the educator so the proving part is of chain it's in small front end that's the main difference that we have with the ZK scaling team is that our constraint is

that all GK proofs are generated in the front end because what you want is that only the users has access to that yeah so that's one constraint ah do you mean like so all the proof generation is happening in the browser of the of the user exactly okay so we have the approving scheme you prove you're part of a group then it gets verified Unchained and we you get SDK patch now cismore has an infrastructure that creates all these groups so when you create a group in the factory you will actually create a PR like the factory what it does is just a no code UI on top of one of the repo that is open source that is the system Hub that turns any request so I can get my followers it turns that into a market tree and the

market tree is pushed Unchained so that then the zika source can verify the ZK approves interesting so now just a small Nuance okay for now we have verified the GK proof on chain you need to choose the Decay back but dck proves could very well be verified into a back end of any service so in that way we are using ethereum as a source of Truth for Our Roots the Roots of our groups and everything is transparent meaning that we are the central entity that updates these routes but all these open source so you can very well see if we if we cheat basically so we are trusting but we are auditable entirely so anyway so we have this routine then we write

the attestations as GK badge on chain but we could very well use this zika proof outside of the blockchain world and I think this is a big part of cismo 2 is that later I don't know I'm I'm a music shop I don't know I want to let's say like the ZK hack people I want to let them buy a hats I don't need them to have a badge I just need like that my server checks that they were part of GK hack so with this model will prove that they are eligible to this off-chain service interesting and you have change service can verify that option so that's a small Nuance that we have is that I think sbts are the best standard and we'll go for this for a long time like that will be our main focus the ZK badges but it doesn't

stop here of course and it's it's like the ZK is more than blockchain it's close like and so what you're saying here is it's like it's not tied to ethereum but you're using a property of ethereum because a lot of the use cases that you're dealing with are also blockchain use cases but you could use a very similar architecture setup maybe even a lot of what you've already built off chain without a blockchain or on any other blockchain I guess you just have to recreate the verifier smart contract package there yeah yeah exactly I'm kind of curious what proving system you're using and like if you ever had to do a trusted setup if you're saying proof generation happens in a browser I'm assuming it's like quite a quick proving time but yeah what what is what is the actual ZK snark there yeah so

currently we are still on growth 16 using circum so we have one Jersey setup but for all the groups so as I told you before like the zq scheme for us is prove that you are part of a group and we managed to make the circuits where the size of the group can move like can update them basically as variables you get the roots so that's why in the factory it's always the same like in the factory if you want to create your ziki patch you basically select a group of editable users but then logical schemes is always the same so we use one ZK scheme it's called the hydrox1 liquid scheme The Trusted setup was done with several people it's not like entirely like Community Driven because we're still in Alpha and I think we don't want to hide the fact that we we've done everything we can but we

didn't go into like the ICS the whole almost yeah yeah and that's actually that's sort of what I what I realized too is it feels like it's in experimental phase and yet I know that there are people who like want these badges as though it's a finished product but it's an iteration right it's like you wanted to sort of get something out to show it and this is what's really cool is like you know I've been hearing about use cases kind of through other teams where like somebody had created one of these sismo badges for action on a D5 product or like action over here and it's like it wasn't from you guys it's like some other team thought oh this would be really cool to do

you do you get compared to poapps a lot yeah so perhaps are good friends of ours okay and I think that they are aiming at the mainstream we are building infrastructure and I think we can add the Privacy later for them I think we need these kind of teams that are more towards mainstream I think they're an amazing job yeah I don't have a definite answer for this I think that there are some similarities but ours is really centered around the infrastructure part of not tokenizing your events your life or stuff like that I think is more Co-op but it's more about bringing liquidity to the data you already have so for instance like Co-op audition score all these people that are tokenizing

reputation tokenizing facts real life we want to tell them hey guys we are a tool for you to make your prep more usable because with small for instance you could create okay I take all the orders of this webs by the way you can do it today in the factory no code you just choose swap you choose the ID of the pub and it creates a ZK badge and then you can use this to do like private airdrops like zika drop.io also something that we received anyway so yeah like all people that create data we want to help them all people that tokenize work through our real world data want to help them to have a good infra to make the best out of it like as a just to kind of Riff a little bit on the poet idea though like

could you do something where you want to invite everyone who had been to an event that received a pull-up in-person events before let's say 2020. so say like someone had created a ZK badge that just said if you've been to any of these events we want to give you a new special badge you could just submit like yeah this address like I have this poab on this address I can submit it and then I can put I can point the badge to like a brand new account something where it's completely detached from the account that had actually received that pull up so many years ago it's an account I don't use anymore I'm super embarrassed by all the terrible D5 trades I made on there but like you could still get the benefit you could have that sort of

newer token that signifies that you've actually done this thing and that would be actually very interesting if people wanted to like tap into like the early Community who was there a couple years ago and how to reward them just just an idea there to throw it out into the world for anyone who might want to do that I'm sorry to tell you buddy it it already exists oh damn okay what's it called since we are permissionless anybody can feel the badge and so some specific bugs are created by the governance so by the community by the Dao it's a proto-do it's not a real Dow and they don't have power but they help us if we control them on things okay so one of the created badges today is like the proof of identity kebab and basically we

pulled all the cool events that we thought about like all the defcons the HCC the dub Berlin like all these things uh maybe some GK events I don't know I never did a co-op sadly okay yeah and so yeah and that was for us a badge that is CB resistance meaning you know we talked about like we don't like that like the welcome the kyc all this thing is centralized and this pull up is is for us it was a triolet making something resistant if you are part of one of these events before the eye drops existed and I heard you were trying to get parts on I think it means that you are somehow a human or and as you said you can send it to a virgin address and so then you can prove that you are an

energy without retributing anything yeah I think have there been any use cases that kind of surprised you things that like you actually had not predicted and were quite shocked when people were trying to to build something with it so I guess there are maybe three things we have this mask Red I don't know if you know about it but it's a privacy pre-reserving party that we do it's here HCC oh cool yeah you told me about that I haven't been to it yet so we have the mask and stuff in like venison Vibes it was great next one we will be even greater I think but so we didn't know really how to give tickets to these people because it was limited so we said okay let's create a ZK badge for people that follow my squad

on lens and so that was great like many people did this and then they had to apply with the form and give feedback helpers basically and so we were able to like create the community because we have limited places but what I think we didn't expect that then it created sort of a trend like with many people creating these decades like hey follow me on your lens like you know the close to Farmer but not fun okay it's it's fun because some that's not the best use case for us like if it is interesting it's yeah a way to attract followers is to hey guys follow me on lens and you'll get my personality badge and then you I'll give you access with to some stuff with it I think it's it might seem like family stuff or just like trying to get

more followers but maybe it's the revamp of the personal tokens yeah like soon maybe you'll be able to do it it's more hey I create this group for people that follow me on Twitter or follow me on lens or I don't know I don't know and that creates your communities and then you can give those people I don't know access to your newsletter and to to physical events that was something that was cool nice and then there's this team is UK pay that are building on top of Aztec that gated their Community to the holders of the Aztec users so they created like a very nice badge that is trying to remove Farmers from their badge like doing an average of I don't

know 0.1 wide deposit uh in three times I don't know what and so that was cool because that was the real Vision we didn't push for it that's going to be for next year but we didn't push that much for now we were more trained to let people understand what Suzuki about this Source you prove stuff from The Source you get a badge on the destination but now they directly use it as access control and that's definitely what you want to do so that was fascinating to see those and yeah I guess the number of badges that are created we don't push we don't have marketing that much we don't push that much but in two weeks after the update that we did we did 2x uh on these things so and now anyway so it's just the beginning to be honest but yeah we

hope to see real things to be honest I didn't see the weirdest thing that I want okay you you're saying you're waiting for something weirder okay cool yeah to be honest because it's so powerful because imagine like let me give you like some things that are possible okay so now it's okay group of eligible users we can get the keyboard but now imagine that you say Okay deposit into this contract ether for instance and then you get the ZK badge that proved that you deposited this contract either and the only way to withdraw your ether is to burn your ZK badge oh if you do that it's close to a very known protocol that if you think about it you manage to

deposit from an account and withdraw from another interesting so I think this is what D5 did like that's actually in the very first days of this one that's what I wanted to do is that D5 thanks to the standard erc20 and this open source and talking the same language did really weird stuff you know I was building a different project early I couldn't imagine that you would go this far like this weird stuff like the the Yum stuff like the liquidity mining all these things it was weird because just because yeah it's a freedom for for innovators and you can do very good stuff that are new that's so true though the the idea that like these D5 kind of things were built a lot of the early ones were experimental but they were

very thought out and then you'd start to see these people like iterating quickly and some a lot of those experiments most of those experiments failed in fire like it just burned everyone to the ground and like yeah as an example but like you did have these just sort of I remember that acceleration of ideas like you'd seen a little bit of success and people were like oh it's actually easy to do no one knew the full outcome you kind of had to play it out you had to see like what are these and and you needed people sharply looking who maybe even want to maliciously attack it to even be able to figure out like what is the actual outcome of put putting this thing out into the world I want to understand a little bit like the future for the product there's sort

of two ways I want to understand this one is just like the road map you have so like what's coming for sure and then also just like philosophically if there's something else but on the roadmap I also kind of wanted to understand like who is the team how many are you now and yeah tell me a little bit about what your plans are yeah so I think that 2022 was about the ziki badges about educating people building all the infrastructure like the group creation like the market tree building the team also so we have a great team I think that we are 13 today so the team is in real good state so 2022 was about like getting from zero to one mailing a lot of Partners I think that we have good relations with people and this year will be about to two main things to act

on these Trends we have many friends but we didn't yet build many Partnerships because we were still beating the infrastructure and the product that we will sell to all this Partners is the proof who is this more flow so that's the core thing behind what we want to do is that we want applications to be able to let users import their reputation of the history directly directly so I'm a lab developer my goal is to create a airdrop for a specific set of users with the way it will work with gismo is first you choose your group the people that do your white list the the people that are allowed to get access to your job so using the factory but you don't need to even to create a ziggyback you just say

Okay I want to create another job for My Lens followers so I choose on the factory okay or people that follow system of that lens that creates a group and then you will have several Integrations that you can do from this group you can see okay I want to create a new contract that is gated to this group so we have a solidity library that allows you to get specific functions to eligible users how it works that okay so I'm the SDK Drop app I integrated the solidity library to accept zero natural from csmo how to access the key batch we'll see that later it's okay so I'm the airdrop app people to prove that they are eligible usually what we will do today is do

connect to wallet you'll do a sign in with ethereum to prove that you are the owner you assign a transaction in your wallet to prove that you are owner of the accounts I'm part of this group you can access my audio that's how it works today today they are often a central server that checks your credentials you prove them that you want to have an address they check in your wallet whether they have what you want what they want to have and then they will sign a message because they are owner of the nft contracts so they will say okay I mean to token for this person because you proved me but it's proved me in the centralized way which is more how it would work is that as an app I don't ask users to sign in with ethereum to give their wallet address I just integrate the

previous system button and so when users click on this they are redirected to sismo in this mode they already have their accounts in their vote in this mode you have the vote you import your account in the system word and that uiable from these accounts to create ZK proofs out of it so you redirect to system you maybe have already imported your 10 accounts your your favorite country your value to address your credit for it and your five accounts and so in this mode you join the UK proof then you redirect it back to the app that has Louisiana proof and so then the executive proof will be sent on chain and verified Unchained by the nft contract let's say okay this proof is valid I give you an nft but somewhere in there you're still printing a badge it's

not direct direct that they're just like they're verifying and then they do whatever they want to do you're always getting the badge that like is also going to be connected to something they want to give you so now yes so actually the the applied to the robot is available on gkdrop.io it worked we allowed all people that contributed to the nurse like all the different the clients teams and stuff they they created this module pass nft that was airdropped in the Privacy preserving way too of these people and the process was okay are you eligible prove this is more you addictive this is more in this more you prove you're eligible and then you use this decal function to do first you verify DJ proof you get the ZK bad but it's like uh it doesn't matter it's like

it doesn't matter that much and you get the energy and our goal will be to be more and more into the serving these applications like I think it's very important but there are some cases that we yeah it might not be needed everywhere and we could do exactly the same process but with the enough chain service like the education board that just wants to get your physical address and instead of giving you having you giving their address promises more you're good as you get proof redirect it to the key shop they reflect okay is valid so now give me your address your physical address so that I can ship you the hat and I don't know your wallet and I'm happy about it like we had several people that came with us for this solution

kind of going on that and right now A lot of people are talking about like real world assets have you thought about sismo attestations attached to that yeah actually that's another part of the protocol that is modular like today to create the proof it's part of a group but actually we can feature several proving schemes the ZK and not DK by the way yeah for instance there's a team of students that is building a CMR for zkr tester so you will be able to generate from the semaphore group The ZK badges but maybe tomorrow we can create a new formal approving scheme and the printing scheme is it's not easy care proof it's just a proof hey I have the signature from the French government that I'm older than 18

give me the badge that I modded at 18. it's not privacy preserving well the where the badges it is I guess but like yeah that that first part is is not so these are like this is also what we're trying to do many different proving schemes and that's the thing about the UK community that we hope to to be users of the research like semaphore for instance we want to leverage that we think we have a good play we have a good spot to help ZK for privacy get adoption or get user feedback or see how it can actually be used by real users so that's why we're trying to be really close to all the CK researchers and we're really part of this community we don't just take we're trying to do you also think like don't you already

allow GitHub or Twitter accounts to be used directly into it so like you don't always have to use on-chain data to prove something so this is like this will be the technical path that the seismo scheme the way it works is that it's hard to verify ecgsa in snark today it's costly it takes time and even if if some teams have been able to reduce this time you have the issue that it's hard you cannot compute a newly fire because the ecds is signature is valuable yeah you cannot have any if IR of it so the way system works is that it will create an auction commitment meaning I

have the address they don't eat I will go to the comment on my prizo of chain service managed by System where you will be able to associate hey to the deadline.it I associate this commitment so the hash of the secret and so for Twitter since we are the commitment what we do is that in your system volt so you have this moment it's it's a it's like a password manager where you store all these signatures because when you import an account web free accounts to see small you sign in messages that create your commitment like we basically we we derive the deterministic secrets from your signature to be like Aztec anyway so in your world you store your signatures and the volt

has a key basically mnemonic and we will associate your Twitter account with a secret from this key okay how do you do it though do you have to get on Twitter do you have to do something like how couldn't someone just submit the wrong thing couldn't they just be like yeah this is me but it's like not them yeah so that's the problem so the community mapper verifies that you are well honored of the accounts so in case of Twitter there's a sign in with Twitter okay so the comment on my purse is okay and uh went through it so as this one the thing that we can learn is that you are a user of this one but we cannot learn anymore because what you what is taught in the server is the commitment so the hash of the secret and then you will be able to

prove from the knowledge of the secret you will be able to prove that you are well the Twitter owner of Havana and you will be able to do proofs so yeah that's a way for us to you are able to basically return your Twitter account into a secret and return also the ethernet content to a secret and then in logical seems you you prove that you know this secret have you had the creation of sismo badges where you needed to have like multiple inputs or is it always kind of one to one like so far almost all the examples that we've talked about have been like are you part of this group yes no and if yes here's your badge somewhere else but what if it was like actually you need to be part of

this group and this group in this group and like all of those things have to be correct in order for you to pass through does that exist or is that yes something you're thinking of doing that's the core value that we bring to the table you know before I told you like all people that have great data like perhaps like digital score like I don't know people that have great data they should tokenize in our system and that's the reason why because our one of the core girl of cismo is to let users aggregate data from multiple accounts and to reuse their reputation for multiple groups and stuff and we focus only on that flag how data provider can create these groups or create this ability for apps to get the service depending on their data and to use approved stuff on this data so we

have three kind of people the users that have the data the data creators that generate this this through this credit score this reputation score these things yeah and then you have the apps that consume this course so yeah that's definitely why like that's why we don't go after the CV resistance that is very important that's what we don't go about the tokenizing option for unchain we focus on making it supermodular and interoperable and yeah that's our Focus that's why we think we'll build infrastructure okay that's okay so you're basically saying someone could do that with what you've built yeah exactly but right now that's not what you're you're not like your system that's like people are using to build badges that's not possible there at this time so now you can already say it's a small part of

it but you can say Okay I want to create a badge for people that are eligible to the proof of humanity or have the proof of that intensity badge that we told you about yeah yeah but can you do and that was the question because I'm I'm wondering like what if you need people to have three different things that they've done in order to go through and if they only have two they don't get to can you do that already with your system can she know but that's that's being worked on like that's that's needed if we want to go where we want because I do I really do think that that combination is going to be fascinating like who gets through that then you can almost like you can start to refine if you want to give badges to a very specific group subset of your community

you can start to like narrow it down like you know how there's like roles in some you know on Discord or whatever it's like if you've done certain actions you get a certain level of roles but if you've done more you can kind of get higher you can almost start to do that more on chain where it's like you can make certain badges only eligible for those who've been like super active in a way that you want on your system yeah so actually let me tell you I'm sorry but let me tell you about the the current governance of this world I told you that we come to in the community and so we have this badge that it's called the chismo contributors and there are several levels to this batch so small technical notes the badges are IRC 1155 they are fungible they are not nfts they are fungible

tokens okay meaning that and and we say that the balance for a badge is your level point so meaning like if I have one seismo contributors Decay badge it means that I'm a system contributor level one okay but like when I told you you prove that you are part of the group it's a bit more complex it's I I prove that I'm part of this group with a specific value so for instance the groups are okay Anna as level five Adrian has a level four and so you will be able to meet maximum level 5 but you could prove that you are level two if you don't want to read the entirety so that's the group of the system contributors uh have several levels one two three we have three

levels people that helped us the more likely help us with like a great PR on GitHub so Dev developer 3 the core team has the level three people that I have used this mob level one and in between your people lover too and you send because to flag these people we give them two ups and then you actually give them Pro apps yeah we give them questions so that's why so we give them perhaps and then they are part of this group and then they have the ZK badge and then they can access different channels depending on their levels and in the system of governance in the snapshot level one have one vote level two have 50 votes level three have 500 votes and that allows us to have like reputational

based voting system instead of a token based system right like the actual points and badge can live on a different address than the exactly whatever where the PO apps over the like the exact level is and stain so yeah I think that this is these are all small experiments about things that will be interesting we hope to have like for instance the governance that takes into account your financial Capital but also your contribution Capital within the the ecosystem and imagine that a product has to converted multiplied that can be increased by your contribution level I think that's a good thing so we hope to see this would be the kind of weirdness I'm expecting yeah

what I think maybe doesn't come across right away but the more I dig into what you're doing the more I realize like there is so much potential for like experimentation by other organizations who have their own needs with a system like this the Taps into the Privacy part of ZK but in a far more interesting way than I thought like a lot of the other like a lot of the cases so far have been like sort of singular in what they can accomplish and this is seems very very wide-ranging because like you could see it being used for Discord groups like little you could use you could see it being used for small communities for events and stuff like that but I mean here you get into certification you get into

governance levels I wonder if there's like ways to do even like delegations somewhere in here so yeah there's something really cool going on that's why I'm not satisfied with the current weirdness I think that yeah we open with a wide spectrum of innovation yeah and and we can see more we hope to incentivize people to do more but I think people still need to understand it and like you said you're still an alpha so maybe there's even maybe it's good that that there's still like a pretty small community although actually would you call your community small or do you think is it like it's pretty big it's bigger than expected let's say that I think so we have a great Community the the thing I'm most surprised with is that like the badges are you you need to pay for it

as a batch players and we have several pages per day we didn't even try to Market that at all so we have people that are ready to pay to get their ziki badges that pay for using the factory and the like very organic people from the community start to take ownership and yeah we have a lot of opportunities like so it's it's small but a all right Adrian thank you so much for sharing all of this about sismo and talking with us about some of the kind of initial observations that led to the creation of this and and now what's possible with it or will be possible

with it as it grows yeah thank you very much it was really great cool so I want to say big thank you to the podcast team Henrik Rachel Adam and Tanya and tour listeners thanks for listening