Episode 366 - Bringing ID Onchain with Self

Transcript

[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 chat with Floron from Self and Merrick from Self and Cello. We revisit the topic of ZK ID and how Self aims to bring ID onchain. We discuss the origins of the project, what applications this type of system opens up, the way the system works, and some of the challenges of working with all of

the different cryptographic choices made by passport issuers worldwide. Now, before we kick off, I just want to point you towards the ZK jobs board. There you can find job postings from top teams working in ZK. And if you're a team looking to hire, you can also post your job there today. We have heard great things from teams who found their perfect hire through this platform and we hope it can help you as well. Find out more over on jobsboard.zeronowledge.fm. We've also added the link in the show notes. And now here's our episode with Merrick and Floral from Self.

[Music] Today I'm here with Floral from Self and Merrick from Self and Cello. Welcome to both of you. Thanks. Thanks for having us. So I think in today's episode we're going to be diving back into the concept of like ZK and ID with the self product. I'm excited to to cover this. Merrick, you've been on the show before, but Fon, this is your first time on the show. So, let's hear a little bit about you and the work that led you to work on Open Passport and then Self. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. So, I used to work on D5 protocols and on wallets. So, I guess more of like the other side of crypto.

But I think what really made me get more and more interested in ZK and especially applied ZK for privacy are the very first Zox projects and also projects like ZK email. And when I started seeing them, I started to realize that for the first time, ZK was arriving at a point at which we could use it for very practical use cases in identity and especially to bridge all the existing trust infrastructures that already exist online and all the sign at the stations on chain. And the reason why it was really appealing to me is that I always felt like a lot of the problems that were really in the blockchain space only like I don't know making blockchains

more optimized reducing transaction cost making transactions faster they were already kind of in a good trajectory people were already solving them but the main issues were more in like connecting blockchain with the rest of the world. So getting institutions, getting I don't know KYC user experience, all those things that are more at the frontier, but that really made um blockchain and crypto hard to use for people. Um and in identity, it's pretty hard to really bootstrap something purely on the blockchain. for instance, you can try doing webss of trust, but it's old systems that are pretty um easy to attack or for which we

don't really have great solutions right now. And so when I started realizing that we could take all those existing trust infrastructures and bring them on chain, I think that's when things really clicked and I got much much more excited by Zik than I was before. Oh, cool. Um, you were you part of the Xerox Park cohort or were you sort of just like reading what they were doing? Yeah, I was I was not part of Xerox Park. I'm still a bit nostalgic from this period because I used to read everything about they were what they were doing and there are so many like companies Axium uh succinct that came out of this very first kind of spark um of experiments.

ZK email too. Um, but I got later to meet all those people. Many thanks to Yush from ZK email that introduced me. Yeah. Cool. Sunny Fon, you and I actually met uh we were on a panel last year at the modular summit in Brussels. And this is kind of a legendary panel. We were talking about it's very similar to what we're going to be talking about today and what you just described this like connection between sort of existing infrastructure and web 3 and like all these new ZK applications. I say legendary because this America you may not realize this. This was a panel where there was like almost no one in the audience, but the panelists like loved this conversation and for like the three

people who were there, they have like I've actually spoken to someone who like came up to me like months later and was like that was the best panel I've ever seen. It was I think maybe because we didn't have that much pressure, we felt kind of like quite chill and it was a very exciting moment to be brainstorming about all of these sort of experimental applications. Was it recorded? It is. Yes, I think we can find it. I don't know if you can tell that it's such an empty room, but it was just like for the panelists, we were looking out at like actually nothing or very very few people, but yeah, at the time, you were working on open passport. What was open passport? So, open passport started a bit more than two years ago now with kind of a simple realization that

there's a lot of existing identity documents and we started with passports that have uh attestation sign atestations on them. Yeah. So, in most passports today, there's a chip. You can read the content of this chip with your phone with NFC just like you would do a payment with Apple Pay for instance. And you can get all the information that's on this chip. And it contains both all of the data that's on the main page of your passport. So, name, date of birth, uh when the passport was issued, and also your photo, which a lot of people don't know about, but it's pretty cool because then you can use this for like biometric applications. Yeah. uh and also it contains a signature. You might already know about this, right? And the

signature is made by the issuing government. There's a whole infrastructure with a chain of certificates. Basically, there's a top certificate that signs intermediate certificates and those intermediate certificates sign passports. But the TLDDR is that you can get all the public keys of those countries online on registries and so you can directly verify that the signatures are valid. Now the thing is that if you kind of have just a naive approach, you could have people scan the NFC chip in their passport, send you all of their data and verify put it on chain. You could put it on chain. Yeah. But then that means that you reveal everything about the person, right? Because the way that Senator are is that they sign over the whole um the

whole data. And so what really sparked the idea of open passport was to say, okay, maybe you don't actually want to do that. Yeah, maybe you want to do ZK proofs to reveal specific things about yourself. For instance, you can reveal that you're US person or not a US person. You can reveal that you're above 21. You can just reveal that you have a passport but redact everything and not sure anything about yourself and kind of open this whole new modular uh range of use cases that require identity proofs but neither require you to give all of your data which is very personal and private or to rely on less reliable um sources of identity verification like a

lot of websites today just use captur numbers And this is just not a great way in practice to do civil resistance, especially in crypto where so many airdrops and incentive mechanisms are just gamed all the time. Totally. Well, I want to just pause the story right here and also do a bit of background with Merrick and then after let's like kind of figure out where Open Passport and Self join together. So Merrick, you've been on the show before. I actually checked it out before this episode. It was all the way back in 2019. Wow. and it was episode 93.

And this this is actually surprising to me because like I've seen you a fair bit over the years and we've even done like live events. Like I feel like I've interviewed you but not for the show. So yeah, it's it's actually been a long time. And the crazy thing about that episode is in that episode 93, I think you are introducing me to Kobe Girkin for the first time because you brought him on the show and I think a lot of listeners of this show will know Kobe's a sometimes co-host of the show. He's now a long-standing collaborator of mine. He was part of ZKV. He's a great friend. So yeah, it's just it was funny to see that old episode. But yeah, it's great to have you back on. Thank you.

Wow, what a throwback. Um, yeah, it's good to be back. Uh, yeah, really excited to be here. Cool. Um, back then we were talking about like light clients and using ZK for light clients. I don't even know if we used the term Plumo, but that was the project that became Plumo. I actually worked on it a little bit on the trusted setup. But before we dive into self, maybe you can share a little bit of an update from your perspective on Cello, what's evolved and like yeah, why would you even kind of be interested in this space? because last time we spoke we were really talking about like light like clients and ZK for compression. Yeah, great question. Wow, 2019 well a lot has changed since then.

Um but you know you and maybe some Yeah. Wow. crazy. Um but you know you and maybe some of your listeners will remember that you know back then we were working really hard to kind of create a future where anyone in the world could um have a self-custodial wallet and use it. um not you know not necessarily to ape into memecoins but use it for real world use cases use it for payments use it kind of the way that maybe you and I use Venmo or or Revolute and you know I think since then we we've worked uh tremendously hard on on realizing that that vision um you know that was before mainet for Cello so that was really early so you know I think the community stood up um the cello network on on

Earth Day um April 20th 2020. So, okay, a little bit after that episode. Um, you know, obviously all the top exchanges listed the Cello assets, many great projects um deployed on Cello, but you know, our vision and mission was always um you know, one of really enabling these kinds of real world use cases. Perhaps we were a little early. You know, there's a lot of talk now about stable coins and payments. Uh totally and you know this was you know 6 years ago that we were already kind of pushing on this but you know we're I'm really proud of you know all the progress we've made um you know since then um you know we we've launched um Encelad's Mento. It's a stable coin

protocol that has you know on the order of 20 different um stable coins for different local currencies around the world. They're frequently a top DAP cited as a top DAP in our space. Valora uh which was a wallet that we built initially as part of Cello but later spun out launched uh and um yeah spun out did a series A and series B with some really great investors um and it's like a really great example of of kind of one of these really easy to use Venmo style like wallets and since then uh Opera got really excited about our our vision and our mission. Uh Opera the browser company browser Yeah.

Yeah. So they're even older than us, which is rare in crypto. Uh so I think they're on the order of 30 years old as a company. They're public company traded on the NASDAQ. Uh you may remember they, you know, had a very popular desktop browser back in the day. Uh and you know, I think when when Chrome came out, I think they focused a lot on on mobile and and they have really good u market share on mobile browsers in emerging markets specifically. Nice. um with lots and lots of users. Uh and they launched Mini Pay uh which um really is just like an incredible kind of incarnation of kind of our vision of what we wanted to

see on Cello. It's a stable coin only wallet. Uh you can pay for gas uh with stable coins on Cello. So there's no need for any volatile assets. So it's really easy for for people to understand. It uses um this thing called selfconnect which lets you verify your phone number um and and use your phone number as your address effectively without you having to um you know be intimidated by these public key derived addresses that you know we all know in crypto but for most normies can be kind of scary. So they don't actually show addresses to users. They just show phone numbers because they peg back on phone numbers. You can send transactions to people in your contact list really

easily. And they've grown um they've onboarded 7 million people uh into this wallet. Uh and people are now using it the way that you know you and I again use Venmo or Revolute uh primarily in emerging markets. um you know primarily for either remittances or or for saving in in with a dollar wallet uh and now increasingly with some of these DAPs that are showing up in the mini pay uh wallet which again uh have to operate entirely with stable coins. So these DAPs autoconnect to to the wallet and uh and they operate in stable coins and so they're very accessible to your your everyday user. Is mini pay a separate

project though or is that part of is that coming out of cello? Yeah, that is coming out of opera that is built on top of Oh, it's coming out of opera. Okay. Out of that project. But now I'm cur so like I think you're you're sort of painting a picture where like wallets, payments, ID like they're starting to see kind of a connection here. But now I'm curious where self comes from. Is it coming out of cello? Is it coming out of mini? Like and then joining with open passport? I want to hear about how yeah those projects connect. Totally. You know, seven million users is great uh for Opera. Certainly by web 3 terms, that's like a really large number, but um you know, to really fulfill our our vision and our mission, you know, we

need to get to everyone in the world having one of these really easy to use self-custodial wallets. Uh and that's a lot of users. That's a lot of network effect bootstrapping that we need to still do. And that got us thinking, you know, how can we incentivize that kind of network effect bootstrapping and we were very inspired by a lot of things that have happened historically in crypto, right, with proof of work. Initially, people who had excess uh you know, computation were were incentivized to come and mine Bitcoin, later Ethereum, and they got rewarded and they effectively were pulled into these amazing ecosystems. Mhm. Later on, proof of stake meant that anybody with some

capital could do the same. DeFi summer then kind of expanded the tent a little bit more and people with capital taught us about yield. Yeah. They could uh get incentivized to create network effects for these uh DeFi applications that needed capital uh in their smart contracts for utility. And so with every one of these cycles, you know, there's been incentives that have onboarded more and more users into the web 3 ecosystem. And they all offer some sort of civil protection. Um, and what's been missing is a way to incentivize and reward people, you know, who might have time, who might have a smartphone, who might

have willingness to contribute or to use your projects, but may not have the capital to bring or, you know, they may be have capital, but it's not something that they're willing to risk on something that's totally new to them. Um, and I think that's where we got really excited about, you know, the prospect of using something like CK Passport technology to um to create a decentralized identity system that offered that civil resistance that could then be used for, you know, incentives that could bootstrap network effects. And so that's ultimately uh how you know Floron and I started talking was in service of this kind of exciting kind of goal. Um, and yeah, I'm extremely extremely bullish on

on this technology for, you know, not just, you know, helping uh bootstrap network effects for many pay, but really for any project out there that's looking to grow their user base uh and looking to, you know, attract the next, you know, billions of people into into web 3. Were you in Cello already building something like this? Like were you working in that direction? Were you looking at passports and ZK and the privacy aspect of that? So, we were looking at phone numbers. Um, and so, you know, as I mentioned, Mini Pay uses uh self-connect, which is a protocol that lets you um map phone numbers to wallet addresses in a way that's hard to reverse engineer. Um, and that has been

working pretty well for Mini Pay. one, it lets you um you know send value to people in your contact list, which I think from a usability perspective is really nice. And this works across wallets too. It's not just in mini. Uh this is a standard that can work across wallets and we were thinking of spinning out that company. Initially, this was part of, you know, the work that we did for for Cello. Did it have a name back then? So, previously it was called Social Connect. Social Connect. Okay. Mhm. Got it. And then as part of the spin out we we transitioned the name to to self and then selfconnect. And in that in that spin out were you like were you joining forces with open passport right then or were you it was pretty immediate. Yeah I think I think it was

very clear early on that you know there was this excitement for uh for solving you know these really I think difficult but impactful identity uh problems. And yeah, right from the get- go, um, you know, initially I think we were talking about partnering, um, you know, just as two different companies, but over time it became clear that, you know, there was a lot of excitement for for joining forces as as a single company. And so that happened um, yeah, earlier this year and it's just been off to the races ever since. Now, I'm curious what Self is today in that regard. So like open passport as as I understood it was kind of I mean and stop me if I'm wrong Philan but it was it at least when we

spoke I think it was kind of like in an experimental phase there was a sort of a like a portal or somewhere where you could like tap a passport you could get some of this info there are actually a few other projects sort of in the similar vein things like what ocelot was zk passport rmo I don't know if they actually work that way exactly but so basically in 2023 2024 I I saw a few of these projects pop up. I sort of put open passport in a similar category. Correct me if I'm wrong, Fon. It was it sort of experimental before like joining forces with self? Yeah, I think it was more experimental. We had deployed things in production. For instance, we had a mobile app. We had done um in uh in July of last year, we had done a new

Democratic primary project. There was a way for people to vote for their favorite like candidates in the Democratic primary using their passport. So we had done like experiments with activists. We had like explored the space a bit. But I think it's really when we met the team at social connect ourself and that we started chatting with Maric and all the rest of the team that we realized that this could be um distributed and productized way better than what we were doing cuz we are kind of like a lot of just technicals, right? Um, and I think this is where it really took form because it sounds like you already have in place like a few things.

You have a distribution channel. You have users that are using a product not exactly the way you want them to, but like that they would potentially be be able to also use these features kind of in place. So now what is self today? Like at what stage is it? Is it in incorporated into things or are we still in like building phase? Yeah. No, it's live. It's in production. And um you know, as far as we can tell, it is kind of the the first um fully in production ZK Passport protocol that's available for for builders to and users to use and and and play with. And so we're really proud of that. Uh we we hustled really really hard as uh as kind of this this

new team that just formed with these two two companies. Uh we hustled really really uh hard to to launch um at ETH Denver uh and and I'm really proud to say that you know we hit the the the milestone and and we did so you know in in a fully audited you know production ready way and so self is is audited today by you know David Wong from ZK Passport sorry from ZK security um he's actually on the show just recently as well. Yeah, it's amazing. Um he's he's incredible. Uh him and his team did a wonderful job. Um and you know, we're we're just really proud to have been able to hit that milestone and

to be uh to be the you know, the first to really bring a production version of this really exciting technology, you know, to to the rest of the world. Um and so yeah, if if um you know, if you as a listener are interested in hearing or learning more, you can go to self.xyz. You can install the app today. You can play around with it already. There's uh a bunch of different protocols that have integrated uh self-today talent protocols I think was the first one to do so. And we have just a lot of um you know big big I would say partners uh that are in the pipeline right now that are um actively building against it. Would this also be incorporated into mini eventually or is

like and how would that even happen? because you were saying that they're using phone numbers. So like do they even need something like self? I would say yes. Um you know as Floron mentioned you know phone numbers can be gamed right I think it's possible to to to buy multiple phone numbers and some countries they're cheaper than others and so you can actually do tens of these if not more. Uh so if you want something that's more akin to to civil resistance um the true civil resistance then then certainly this technology is better. Uh, phone numbers I think are are still valuable. One, they're really good identifiers, so it's still useful for helping people find each other. Um, I like to say that the biggest social

network in the world is the amalgamation of everyone's contact lists in their pockets, in their phones, uh, likely bigger than than Facebook's social graph. So, there's a lot of value in in phone numbers. uh and certainly they can be like a lightweight civil resistance mechanism. But if you if you want something that's a little more robust then piggybacking on on what I like to think is the most trusted kind of real world at the station of who you are you know and that's the passport. Um you know then I think you know to do so uh with this tech I think is is just a really nice path forward. And one thing that I should add, you know, Florant mentioned how amazing it is to be able

to, you know, selectively disclose using ZK uh only the things that you want to disclose when when using the self protocol. But the other thing that's really amazing is that you're doing so without a counterparty. When you typically go through KYC, usually you're giving your ID to a third party to look at checking. Yeah. Exactly. So here the counterparty effectively is the blockchain. M uh and that I think is is just really powerful to be able to do it without, you know, third party uh looking over this information, you know, it's it's just so so incredible. It's both privacy preserving and without a counterparty. It's it's it's just really really exciting. Nice. I think it would

be great to dive a little bit into the ZK system and how it's built. I think conceptually on this high level I think it's understandable that there's like a passport a physical object that has a chip that has a signature it has information and then there's this sort of ledger and you're going to create a connection and the connection will be private because it's ek but that's very high level so how how exactly is this happening yeah so I guess there's a few different components one first thing to understand is that we can directly prove that the passport was signed correctly by the country's uh public keyhm M but then we don't want to just do that. We want to guarantee a layer of anonymity when someone does approve because we have to have nullifiers to make sure

that people can't like register multiple times in our system with a single passport. So the way it works is kind of similar to semaphore or tornado cashache which is that first you're going to do a proof that your passport is valid and it's going to register an identity in a miracle tree which is like a registry and this is onchain on the cell blockchain and then you're going to be able to use this identity this commitment that is registered to do proofs that selectivity disclose any information that you want. Okay. So in this commitment which kind of represents your identity, there's both a private key that's hashed to um give it so that you can you are the only person that's able to use it and also the the data of your passport so that you can

selectively disclose specific things. And the reason there's this barrier is that we need to prevent people from registering multiple times or for instance claiming an airdrop multiple times with the same passport. M and to do that we need to have a nullifier. But because the nullifier has to be deterministically derived from the passport data, if someone else were to read your passport or if the issuing government were to keep all of your passport data, even the signature that they made over it in a database, they would be able to track this nullifier and know who you are. And so with this level of indirection that works exactly like Sema for does for instance, you can register once and then every time you do a disclosure proof that will disclose

things about you, you will not show which commitment was originally registered um with your passport. You're separating those two steps. The commitment that there is a passport being registered and like what's actually in the passport. Exactly. Yeah. It's uh it's kind of the the original system that was created by like tornado cash for instance when you deposit money it's not linked to when you withdraw it. We're doing basically the same but for identity. So you mentioned a Merkel tree but is like where's the ZKP? Is it in each leaf of the Merkel tree or is it at the top? Is is the whole thing a ZK system and within it are these leaves?

Yeah. So that both sides are on ZK. Basically the registration is in ZK because you want to reveal your data. Yeah. And the disclosure which is the second part is also in ZK. So I guess it's a bit different from for instance semaphore. The there's not really a registration in which you prove that you have some kind of valid attributes. It's just a semaphore group that's decided by the creator and then disclosures are in ZK. In our case everything is in ZK. And I would say there's even another part that's um nice in it is that when you register, you don't even have to show which country signed your passport cuz you would have to naively you would have to reveal which public key signed your

passport. But the way we do it is that we also have a mer tree of public keys of all of the public keys of all of the countries. And when you register, you just do a proof that your passport was correctly signed by one of them. one of them. Okay. And then it goes back. What's really checked is the root of the mer tree of all the public keys. And so you're basically both able to uh register and then disclose without a link in between. But also when you register, you don't even show from which country you you come from. But in that info, the selective disclosure info, you would have your country in that kind of pool. That's separate from this registration CK. Yeah. If you're choosing. Okay. But like the info would

have to be somewhere. Yeah, it's in the passport for instance. It's um three three letters in the in the main data group of the passport. Okay, interesting. The passport data stays on your phone and you can create these disclosure proofs um based on any of that data on the phone at any point in time after you register. But you don't have to reveal where you're from, your name, uh really any of your sensitive information. you only have to reveal what a third party DAP might be requesting. So say there's a DAP that wants to do an airdrop. All they maybe care about is that you are not a civil and so they may just ask for uh a proof that says you have a valid passport without revealing which country issued

it and that can be any info about it. Yeah. And so that could be um you know one really amazing um kind of very simple proof that you can you can do uh but because we have um or each user has their own passport information um they can they can do additional proofs that are pretty powerful. So um you know Floron mentioned you can you can prove that you're over a certain age under a certain age. I think this is a very common uh example of this type of technology. Uh you can also prove that you're not from a set of countries without revealing what country you're from. And then one thing that I think is pretty unique as well. Certainly hard to do by other identity systems like say

world is we can also prove that you're not on the OFAC list. Okay. Um because the OFAC list is composed of people's names and birthdays and sometimes passport numbers and you can effectively prove that you're using a Merkel exclusion proof that you're not in that list. And that proof can be either verified offchain or even onchain uh and so applications can compose with that proof uh onchain uh to you know for example prevent bad actors from from using the onchain protocols. So, there's a lot of really powerful things that you can do. And there's even fun things, too. Like, you could, if you want to, you could reveal, for example, your first name. Uh, say that someone wanted

to do um a meme coin for, you know, only Anna's. Then, you know, you could prove that your first name is Anna without revealing anything else. And you could claim that airdrop. Um, which, you know, might be might be very very valuable in the future. Who knows? Anyone can create any memecoin for any name. Uh, and you could even do something that targets birthdays as well. Or you could reward people on their birthday. There's just a lot of like things that you couldn't really do before. Some of them are fun. Some of them are c certainly more serious and more compliance focused and and you know, more DeFi focused, but you know, there's a whole spectrum of really exciting things that you can build on top of this. It's funny as you're talking about the OFFAC list. It just

sort of dawned on me that I feel like we we need a new list which is because OFAC it's such a kind of old-fashioned it's like it's one country's list right but there are known bad actors like bad addresses for example like scammer addresses or yeah kind of pools of addresses that we know are suspicious have done hacks have been like outed by the investigators of the web 3 space and I feel like there's no official list for that And I wonder why not like I feel like someone should start maintaining that. It's a good point. Yeah, it could be international. I don't know how you fund it, but could be useful. Going back to the ZKP, the two ZKPs. So, one is to

create the reg like to register the the passport. The other I'm guessing is coming directly from your device. Like you have the information locally and then you'd be creating these EKPS. But yeah, tell me like the first EKP the one that's registering like are you generating that once you have the passport just the fact that there's a passport and then writing it on chain and what kind of ZK are you using? Yeah, so that's exactly what happens uh when you register you register it on chain. Uh the registry is all on chain on set and are you making the proof or is the app making the proof? Like where's the proof coming from? Yeah, so we used to be working only with client side ZK. So we used to do only proofs on phones and

after some time some experience we we realized it would be really hard to rescale that for mainly two reasons. One of them is that we want to be very accessible to a lot of people and there's a lot of low-end devices especially in developing countries that are just like not able to handle this right now. Uh and the other reason is that different countries use different signature algorithms. So for instance the one mainly used in the US or in France for instance it's pretty it's um SHA 256 with RSA. Yeah it's pretty quick to do proofs with gross 16 in circom and with current text tax but for some countries it's going to be like shaft 512 with ECDSA brain pool uh with like a

large curve and then it's it's just going to be completely impractical to do that on the phone currently. Um and so right now we use trusted execution environment to do proofs. Okay. So they don't store any of the passport data. They just get it sent and to an encrypted and then they generate a proof and then they just delete the passport data. Where does the TE live? Is it on the user's device still? No, no, no. It's it's on the cloud. Okay. It's a T in the cloud. Got it. Yeah. So I guess that's this trust assumption uh currently. And um yeah, again it doesn't store any of the data persistently. It's just used to do a proof and most of the time it takes a few seconds for the largest signature algorithms can take up to a few minutes but of course like we

started working on client side DK at the beginning it's still where we want to go we just want to have this very pragmatic approach of giving this power to as many people as possible and I guess in the very long run um we want to get back to just proving on device when it's possible. Mhm. Could you use a TE on a device to do it too? Not really. Well, if you if you prove on the device, you don't really need a TE because it's the proof is coming off the device anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But we do use a TE for example to uh encrypt your passport information. Ah like an ondevice TE you're saying? Right. They're used to store uh keys that you can use to encrypt data on your phone. And so

that's part of you know uh Apple keychain which we use extensively for securing your passport information. And so certainly you can use them for that purpose but for generating the ZKPs uh you wouldn't probably one you wouldn't be able to because these things are not generally programmable yet on mobile phones the way they are on on uh servers in the cloud. Ah I didn't know that. But uh but two you also don't really need to because the user already trusts their own phone. Got it. Okay. So you're you and is the TE mostly for the registration ZKP or is it also for proving things about the content like are you with both of those actions are you sending it through a TE so right now

it's both. Uh but the nice thing is that we can pretty easily now get the disclosure proofs back to be just client side. So this is also on our road map. Um and that might be important for some people. Yeah, because I guess it's it's proving something like it's a tiny amount of text or a tiny amount of information. Yeah. And also the the Merkel tree that we maintain uh is Poseidon based for the hash function. So so generating the disclosure proofs are are generally a lot quicker than doing the registration step. Got it. I think Florent touched upon this. um you know different countries use different uh hash functions, different signature algorithms for signing their their

passport data. Probably one of the hardest things about this whole project was the fact that uh there's so much diversity here and that some countries use just very expensive um both hash functions and signature algorithms. And so the a lot of the effort to actually productionize this and to make this work for for everyone in the world was to implement circuits for all of those different combinations. And worse yet, some countries even their passports may claim that they're using, you know, one signature method and turns out they're using a different one. So, we've had to do just a lot of just blocking and tackling type work just to

bring the quality and and the reliability to a level where it's ready for for the masses and and yeah, that was a huge amount of work. Do you find that the cryptography choices do they tend to like be regional or like continental? Are there like large areas that tend to use one or are they really country by country? From what I've seen, it's mostly country by country. For instance, dear France has like just one and it's very simple. Germany experimented with a lot of different signature algorithms. Oh, really? Like within the EU even? Yeah, we actually have a map if you go to map.self.xyz and you can see all the signature algorithms that each countries use. We mainly created the map at the beginning just to have a good visualization for

ourselves, but now it's used by different actors in the ecosystem as a kind of reference point. And you can see Germany for instance, they just sign a few passports with some ECDSA, then another curve, then another curve. And so, of course, it's like a bit more challenging to support everything. But now, now that we got there, we were pretty pretty confident. Wow. I just Sorry, I just pulled it up. It actually is. So, I we'll definitely add this in the show notes, but it's pretty wild to see this the distinctions. And you're right, Germany has all these certificates with like slightly different variations. This sounds like complicated, but I guess this is where the work that you that you do come in.

Have you decided to roll this out like by certain regions first? Are you trying to cover the whole world or have you kind of decided okay well maybe we're going to have to reach different areas later? So we started originally we just supported one signature algorithm that was the most common one. So I think it covered like maybe 40% of countries. For instance, it had the US a few other countries. So it was like good enough to start with but we ended up realizing that we had to support everything. So that was also kind of a common effort cuz we also used circuits from other project got some help from other projects like raro that were working on similar problems but we ended up reaching close to 100% support. So yeah basically now we support all countries.

There might still be some countries that do not like that have certificates that they do not publish and so we did not uh see some combinations of think natural algorithms and we're going to figure out when people scan their passports. Um but overall I think we are pretty close to 100% now. Wow. So now our focus actually is rather than um adding more signature algorithms for passports we're focusing on other types of IDs that use similar component. I was about to ask Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask cuz we just did we did an episode with Google Wallet, the folks from Google Wallet recently and they've recently added ZK but only for only for driver's licenses in the US. So I yeah I was wondering if you

were also tapping into driver's licenses and maybe you can list some other kinds of IDs that are out there. Yeah. So, we kind of did the back of the envelope calculation for just the amount of coverage we could get with different ID systems and we really want to have the most extensive solution possible. We started with passports. Now we are uh working soon rolling out support for European ID cards. Oh yes, which have a very similar specification as passports. So, it's not that much work for us and it's a new European specification that they um created in 2019 and I think they mandated in 2019 that all the new ID

cards were going to be in this format. So, there's a lot of people now that have it in Europe. Not everyone but same thing as passports. They have a chip. And the other one in which we are really interested is ADA in India. Oh, yeah. Of course, there's like more than a billion people that have it. What is that again? It's Adar. Is that okay? Is this the one that ZK P2P is tapped into? I I think they tapped into the Indian payment system. Okay. Maybe it was different. I'm not sure they they did other verification in ZK. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they were focused on ID, but I thought maybe it had a similar maybe I thought it was a similar umbrella kind of. Yeah. I mean it it has some similarities because India is just very good at deploying good infrastructure at

scale. So their payment system is great uh and other is also great. There's a mobile app that allows um people to get signatures live even timestamped. There's uh PDF, there's a card. It's just very very easy to work with compared with passwords. So this is also what we're rolling out support for. And because we also have a lot of partners asking for Africa uh and in Africa it's a bit more tricky because there isn't really an ID solution that has signatures and documents with signatures at the stations deployed at scale. We are currently looking at another approach which is just like using government databases that you can query

that map people's identity to for numbers and then issuing an attistation ourselves just issuing a credential and then um letting people do proofs about it um in CK. So I guess we don't have the same like fully 100% like chain of truth from government directly to proof because we you're kind of acting a bit as like the third party who's double-checking here. Exactly. As if we were like issuing the passport ourself in some sense. But the nice thing is that one we can do it in the TE. So it kind of reduces the trust assumption in the sense that the code can be open and people can see that we don't just issue credentials to people that don't really have um those credentials. Uh and two

because people still do selective disclosure proofs it's still unlin from the original query that was done um to the database of the government. And so even if you're like a state actor in Africa, you wouldn't be able to get back to tracking every person for instance that claim an airdrop. You wouldn't be able to do this link. And this is also where we see some value. I see. Are there other types of ID that you explored here? For example, health care in certain countries like a healthcare card if it's universal healthcare. I think I haven't lived in Canada for a long time, but I feel like where healthcare card was sort of also an ID that we could use. So I'm wondering if you ever explored that and in something

like China like what WeChat or these like big apps that get used for all sorts of things. I don't know if they have an ID component but have you explored any of those things? We've seen a bunch of ID cards that have smart chips in them but don't support NFC reading. Okay. So those are you know the chip that looks like your credit card chip. Those are interesting but the the challenge then is how does a user actually read what's on that chip? H you might need a real reader, not like exactly it's not your phone. So we're we're not prioritizing those types of cards right now. You know, there are I think 13 states in the US that I think are the ones that Google was targeting um with their product that offer these driver's licenses electronically and can

be put into an electronic wallet and and those signatures can be verified uh then electronically. And so that's an interesting avenue as well. And then one really nice thing that we're noticing is the the same standard that these EU IDs are using are now increasingly being used for national ID cards by other countries outside of the EU. Okay. So, for example, Turkey and the Ukraine use those same cards. Uh and uh and we're seeing just more and more countries adopting them. Um and so so I think there's definitely ways to to get to you know very very broad coverage. I mean just with uh biometric passports, UIDs and ADAR uh we're talking about you know three billion people out of eight

billion people that would be covered and so that's a really big percentage of the population. Does China have any sort of equivalent ID system to Adar? I think we've heard that they do. We haven't yet investigated in detail. We have looked at Japan's ID system which is also very advanced uh and would support the techniques that we're using and so we're excited about about that as well. Have you looked at Korea? Sorry, this is just me being curious about like places that I feel could have good ID systems but I I know nothing about. Yeah, I haven't looked much at Korea. Um we've looked at Japan.

One of our team members is the first person that implemented the Zika verification of Japanese IDs for instance. Um, so yeah. Okay, that's cool. What about using non identity like nonid cards? I mean other projects like back in the day Sismo and actually you know a few months ago we had RARO on the show and they were definitely exploring more like a combination of things between IDs like physical IDs as well as like online behavior or participation or like ownership like being on some sort of app like I'm just curious if that is also part of the road map for self or if the focus is going to be purely on IDs issued by governments. Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on what our um

users and um thirdparty builders who are integrating with self will be requesting right now that hasn't really come up. Um the thing that has come up a lot is you know a lot of excitement for this from wallets. So I think you had earlier ask about mini by opera and whether they're integrating. Uh so one thing that we're working on right now is a version of self that doesn't need a standalone app. So right now uh to use self you need to install you know the self mobile app either on your iOS device or on your Android device. Um but there's a lot of people who already have wallets integrated you know installed on their phones. Uh and the ultimately they want to use something like self with the DAPs

that they're accessing through those wallets already. And so it'd be much nicer if users wouldn't have to install a second app to be able to um create these proofs. And from our perspective, you know, we don't necessarily like we we see ourselves more as a protocol um kind of project and not necessarily as kind of a full stack project that owns a user from all the way from the app to to the protocol itself. And so like you're not trying to get just like as many people to have the app. You just want people to use this sort of system.

Exactly. We think that the network effects around, you know, having a lot of users who are onboarded, who are registered, who who can do these selective disclosures, um, you know, at the touch of a button and lots of DAPs that are integrated with the protocol interfacing with these people. That's where, you know, the value is. Um, we want to work with thirdparty companies that have really great, you know, mobile experiences for their users to extend their offering to to offer, you know, civil resistance and all of the amazing um, identity related uh, offerings that we we present. And so to do that, we're actively right now working on a version of self that can be integrated into any mobile app. Nice. So

it's not just a standalone app. And so that's something that we're discussing with uh with Opera, but also actually with other really big wallets as well. And so we're we're super excited about that. When I did the episode with Raro, one of the points that kind of came through was the question of like whether to work within the system or outside of the system. And in their case like they really you know are working outside of the system because of I think the founders experience having like built tried to build like in government credential technologies is very challenging to actually get it delivered in time for it to be relevant and so yeah their approach seems to be to be going very much outside. Where would you place self on that kind of scale?

Because it almost sounds like you're just you're working with industry. You're just like working with applications. You're not necessarily working within the government, but you're also not completely outside it. I can say what what I think the approach is. Marrick, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but um in my opinion, we really want to walk outside. Uh and it's similar to Raro because um we're like open with working with institutions and governments but I think just the iteration cycles are whole in a whole different category compared to what we can do by just bootstrapping on existing systems and kind of repurposing them just like we're doing currently with passports ID cards and I think this is really where the power comes from. If we

had to work for instance with the EU on their new identity wallet system that they're discussing right now, I'm sure we would still be there discussing like in a few years, right? This is this has happened over and over. And so I think for us it's just a requirement that we don't ever think about what if a government what if an institution changed their system like we like of course you would respond to it. I guess you would just Yeah, you would adjust. Try to convince them, but it's just not going to be as fast and as efficient.

Okay. So, you're not trying to influence it, but you I guess you'd have to respond if they did change something. Mhm. I would say we're just really excited about the application of this to web 3. Um, and what this means for, you know, onboarding the next, you know, billion people into into web 3. And so I think we're we're very focused on just creating a really great product that everyone can use uh and and that will ultimately you know I think continue to grow uh the web 3 ecosystem. That's I think our our number one focus and whether that's with or without governments you know I think depends on yeah both what we're seeing from the

market and um and the willingness to you know from these folks to to collaborate you know I wouldn't be surprised if governments do excited about do get excited about this tech I think it's really powerful and I do think that ultimately will be uh rolled out in some way but um but I think it's going to take a very very long time and I think we have a big opportunity to do something really really impactful in in the meantime. Nice. Kind of just going back to that idea though of like so if a government changed its system, if it started using a different type of cryptography, I'm assuming you would adjust and and add that. But what happens if the ID itself, like the piece of ID is lost or replaced, expires? I mean, I guess expires is quite clear

because there's an end to it, but yeah, what if it was lost and you needed to replace it? So, yeah, I'm just curious how you deal with those sort of more I mean, this is what all passport offices have to think about. This is what like anyone who's integrated with them would have to think about. Yeah. One thing that we're currently experimenting with is adding um biometrics too. So, for instance, doing face ID checks with passports to make sure that you know if someone were to take your passports, they can just register um as if they were you. And yeah, we're just exploring those solutions right now. So, this is if someone if you're not registered and someone stole your passport and then registered you, this would be maybe an extra layer of checking that you would

add, which is to like actually check the face that the faces match. Exactly. Yeah. but it's not currently in like right now if someone has not registered and someone steals that person's passport they could then use it to register extra motivation to sign up now uh and extra motivation to keep your passport safe which obviously I think a lot of people do keep their passport safe um but I guess coming to your original question you know I think one thing that's interesting is that some countries do issue uh revocation lists that you can use to see that a passport has been revoked. And so that could be, you know, one way as well um that that we can protect the user if if their

passport is stolen and they go in and they say, "Hey, I need a new passport because my my last one was stolen." And as soon as, you know, they receive a new passport, they can register again and they can use that that new passport. And so I think that's the the thinking behind what the long-term solution is for protecting users in that case. There is there's another case here though that you're making me think of it which is like what if you don't have your phone like if you've registered a passport connected to an instance of the application on one phone and you have to redo it do you end up with a collision?

So you can re restore your account if you lose your phone and you um you need to you know restore it. You will need your passport to restore your account and you will need uh a secret uh that's used in the in the beginning of the registration process to uh effectively give you that privacy that that uh Floron mentioned before. And so we store that secret in in your uh you know iCloud backed up key store uh or in an app specific part of Google Drive on on Android. And so, you know, chances are you you will have access to that if you still have access to your Apple or Google account. And if you want, you can

also write down the secret, too, uh, and choose not to have it backed up directly to to those places. And so, we're we're pretty flexible and pragmatic there about, you know, making that easy for most people, but also very privacy preserving for people who really want it. Let's dive into this face kind of ID checking making sure that like your biometrics match your face. I mean because there's another project in ID that you've mentioned Merrick but I don't think I've mentioned yet which would be like WorldCoin which is trying to also create like the anti-Bible or civil resistant ID but they're using the orbs as most people know. I'm not a fan of the orb. I find it super creepy, forever creepy. But I mean, using your

face and scanning, like if that's on an an orb or some external device, I think it runs into the same problem. Where does this work? Where does it happen? Like where or where would it because I know it's it's something in development. Is this directly in your phone? Is it all local? Do you have to interface with some external device or like some third party device? Yeah. So certainly I don't think we're that bullish on external third party devices. I think one of the things that makes us really excited about this approach to civil resistance is that it can scale to, you know, I mentioned 3 billion people will soon be able to to create an account uh with self and uh and start passport

IDs atar um it's just a lot of people have these um you know ID systems that you know are federated. It's not it's not a centralized ID system. There's not one government, right, that issues them. There's many, many countries. And there's really great cryptography that allows us to know for certain that someone, you know, didn't forge one of these credentials. And so, we're really excited about this approach primarily because of its reach. I do think there are some advantages, right, to to what world is doing. I do think that the fact that it's um open to everyone, right?

You don't need any credentials. you don't need an ID to to sign up I think is very uh elegant and does offer some advantages and so you know I don't want to be you know uh necessarily negative on them but I do think that to scale to billions of people is just really really hard when you have these devices and and I know that they're working hard on on you know uh growing that and so maybe this will be a solved problem um but you know this this approach is just another really I would say elegant way of reaching just a lot of people quickly uh which which is why we're really excited

about it. So how would that work? How does the face checking work? So we're early still on that. I think we um there's a lot of advances now happening with you know ZKI that allow you to do something on your mobile phone. I think that is interesting. Uh I think we're um still trying to better understand just how much um accuracy you can get uh with doing this entirely on on a mobile phone and what kind of phone um requirements are needed. And then you know there's also the approach potentially of of using a TE which I think would then work on a lot more devices um an external TE again. Yes. And then at that point you

could use the most cutting edge um you know face recognition algorithms. I mean the interesting question to me though right now is um with AI now you know being able to generate arbitrary v videos of of anyone. Uh it's going to be interesting to see if you know what this even means for the world of KYC and identity verification, right? Like this little video that we do where we move our head up and down and left and right. I feel like doesn't like the Apple photos now create recreate that. Anyway, like it basically creates the angles if you move your phone around according to their demo for their like upcoming picture AI stuff. Yeah, for a while

maybe, you know, they'll randomize the the direction that you turn your head and that's how they're going to know that you're not deep faking. But it won't be long before, you know, these deep fakes can generate. Yeah. Uh these these movements in real time. And and I think that is an interesting world that we're going to go into. And I think when that happens, I think being able to prove that you're yourself with some very difficult to obtain credential that's cryptographically signed by a trusted entity like your government, like your, you know, passport, you know, something that you keep safe because you needed to travel, um, it could very well be that even without the picture, that will be very

very valuable and very very trusted for for people to prove that they are not an AI agent or yeah, not not some bad actor. I think um I think we're very very bullish about that and it is it is interesting, right? Like I don't know how often you're on Twitter now or Farcaster and you're wondering like did a bot write this or did a human write this like or even like a human may have posted it but like what wrote the original version of this but yeah totally right. I think it won't be long before, you know, humans will want to know, you know, if they're interacting with the bot. And even more interestingly, I predict that even AI agents will want to know if they're interacting with a human or not. Uh they

too will want to know. And so I think, you know, being able to in a privacy preserving way reveal that you in fact are, you know, a human, I think is going to be really really interesting. And we're very excited about what self can do to to help you know people answer that question. I feel like in the meantime though there is this sort of like scary time of and I think we saw this with the Coinbase KYC leak like that hack where people were able to access KYC data. They didn't get the money from these accounts but they got the KYC data. To me, that was like one of the scariest type hacks because once you have that KYC information, it unlocks a lot of

things about somebody and you know there's total identity fraud. There's like the chance to kind of like wreck someone's life. I think those types of hacks are so scary and I think I've become very very annoying about every vendor who's asking for my passport and I'm just kind of like please no. Like especially there's like like a hotel you check into. You're like you don't need this. Like why just look at it. It's fine. Why are you making a photo copy? Like it freaks me out. So like yeah I'm just I'm I've become very very difficult I'd say with those kinds of questions.

And the reason I think it's because of the work I do. I think it's because of doing these kinds of interviews. But it's like I feel like there's going to be this sort of time of pain where like a lot of hacks will happen un like there's going to be very unfortunate cases of identity theft and like trying to unwind that and then hopefully stronger KYC systems like IDs that are much more digital and much more provable and much more tied to somebody without us like constantly sending these like important but also very revealing pieces of data and certificates around the internet. like yeah, I'm just hoping that we get to the point where there's enough adoption, enough acceptance, enough trust in these like future KYC systems that we could actually use them.

But I also get this I get the sense it's going to be so hard because it's like every time you look at the KYC problem, there's someone who's like, "Oh, I'm going to solve the KYC problem." But it's like then there's all these like then there's a ton of small solutions, but not like one unified one. Yeah, I think you're going to you're going to like my answer here. Um, I at the the ZK summit in Toronto, I got this sticker from from someone. It says, "Don't share your data," which I stuck on the back. You're showing this to us. Um, and yeah, I mean, I think the Coinbase hack is just a really great example for why, you know, we need technology like like self and and I think it comes back to that point that I

made earlier like you can prove uh aspects about yourself now uh without a trusted counterparty without uh without a third party having to look at your ID and without them necessarily having to store it. Now there are of course you know um compliance related reasons why you know maybe third parties will will want to store it but for some use cases uh there aren't those requirements and yet people still ask for the for the passports and still you know save them um and that's where I think what what we offer is just an amazing uh amazing solution um and the fact that you can you know verify these proofs either

offchain so this can be useful for web two companies. We're talking to a bunch of web two companies that, you know, really care about age verification and and this is um like a really interesting solution for them, but it also works, you know, onchain. Uh unlike, you know, I think Google who you had on recently, you know, they're offering um is is never going to or at least not anytime soon likely going to work on chain. And so if you're a web three builder and you want to compose with this information, then you know I think an offering like self just makes it really easy to do so.

Um and so yeah, I think you're you're literally sharing one of probably the biggest value propositions of self. Uh you know that that data doesn't have to be out there and and doesn't have to be you know hackable and and stealable and uh and we're we agree wholeheartedly. Mhm. So what's next for self? I feel like we've heard about a few of at least the ideas. So this kind of like face recognition using the biometrics. Yeah. What else is in the pipeline? I think the main things we're excited by are uh mainly adding more ID support. So making sure that we can support like the vast number of human beings on Earth. I think biometric checks are also something

we're excited by. Maybe one point is that it's a bit different from what you were mentioning with Walt current because Wurren because they're just using the biometrics. Then they have to like map those biometrics to a fitter space and then make sure that there's no collisions for instance using fuzzy commitments. But what we're doing is that we're already using passports as the source of truth. So we just have to check that faces are similar for instance. But we wouldn't have to really make sure that they're unique and get back to like a unique ash and have to prevent collision. So I guess because it's like used differently, we we have like more it's like easier to to implement basically and to just add this layer of security instead of just using

biometrics. And this is where you can use a face which is actually less of an identifier. There are people that look very similar Yeah. to each other. You wouldn't be able to use a face as like a unique identifier. Yeah. uh which is why WCON had to go up to the IRS. Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, this you just have to do that match, but then you have sort of the proof of uniqueness in the document certificate itself. Anyways, yeah. Yeah, that's the difference. And I think I'm just excited in general about I feel like identity in crypto and onchain has been kind of stuck between just checking that someone has an address and they do a signature or checking a phone number, checking a capture or checking like the fingerprint

of um the browser. And on the other side, like the traditional KYC that has always just been like you send all of your data and they can keep it and often they keep it for a long time and do monitoring. And I feel like as we're starting to develop this whole range of possible solutions with selective disclosure and different levels of security in between, we're starting to see applications realize, okay, I don't need to be on one extreme. Maybe I don't need to be on the other extreme anymore. I can like start to compose and really look for what I'm looking for. And this is kind of like the open space. I'm just very bullish on. It's all the things that we're not even necessarily thinking about, but people are going to be able to build using that. So, this is like

kind of the open new space that's starting to be created that I'm optimistic on and that I want to see people build things on. Nice. We're also working on onchain uh multi-chain support. So the registry is stored on Cello and you can verify this was a question I asked and forgot about. Okay, cool. Yeah. So the registry is stored on Cello. Uh and right now if you're verifying a onchain proof you you can verify it on Cello and Cello you know recently transitioned to be an L2 and we're working to to make um it also a valid style L2. So we're working with uh with succinct and SP1 on that. uh and so you know this this ultimately means it

can be trustlessly verified uh on Ethereum and and therefore everywhere but we are also just working on more direct uh multi-chain support as well. How do you do that? Do you have to rewrite do you have to redeploy the like Merkel tree? just a route we have to uh communicate the route to other um chains ideally in a fully trustless way using again the fact that you know Cello is an L2 but perhaps if if you want to use a chain that isn't within the Ethereum ecosystem that isn't Ethereum mainet or another L2 uh then maybe you want the route on that chain and then you could use a third party bridge to get it there

um and so we're we're looking into all of these options now of course you also verify these proofs offchain. Um, and so for a lot of use cases, you don't really need um this multi-chain support because you're happy to just verify it offchain. But if you want to compose with this directly in your smart contract, then then this multi-chain support will be will be needed. And so that's that's a big focus of ours as well right now. Nice. Okay, last question. A little bit more for you, Merrick. going back doing a throwback to that initial episode back in 2019. We were talking about the Plumo case. The work I actually did with you was on this trusted setup. We were

running it was a big trusted setup. I was meeting with the team once a week. We were like organizing a lot of people. Do you have to create a trusted setup for this ZK system? And if so, have you already done it? We do and and we have done it and and there were a lot of um similarities to to the one that we did back then for Plumo. I think back then that was the biggest I think trusted setup that anyone had done. It was huge. It was huge in terms of participants. It was huge like the size of the computation. It was like a two day. You had to run your your computer. I think for like for some people it was like more than two days. And like Kobe did all this innovation with like parallelization which we hadn't done before. It had never been done before.

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. When we the the fun one little fun fact about that we we finished all the circuits. It was an insane amount of circuits. It was on a very big curve and and then we did the math for how long it would take to to do a ceremony. We're like, "Oh, it will take if we do the ceremony sequentially, it will take over half a year for us to create the ceremony with enough participants that we'd feel good about shipping this like that is too long." Uh, and so then we we realized we need to paralyze this. And at the time there was no um ceremony tool that paralyzed uh contributions. Uh this was again, you know, 2019. It was very

early. And so I remember, you know, as you just said, Kobe worked on on this pipeline. I think Georgios was a little bit involved too at some point. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Uh and and we built that whole system and it was a big uh big effort. This time around there's off-the-shelf solutions. So we use potion um for for these uh ceremonies for the multiple circuits that we did. And yet even now this was a huge ceremony and we also ran into a lot of um different complications and had to work through a bunch of different work. Uh and so yeah I think even to this day you know this continues to be a really big I think pain point

for certainly for for us and I'm sure for many other people in in the same boat. I know that there have been proving systems that don't have trusted setups. there are like more systems coming out maybe in that direction. Are you guys keeping your eye on those? Would you be switching over at some point if you felt like they were battle tested enough? Yep. Yeah, we're looking at all of them. Looking at Noah, looking at Leg's obsessed with Lihero right now. It seems to be like the thing. Yeah, we we just we just have some pretty high requirements cuz we need to make sure that systems are audited and they're ready for production right now. Fair.

Um, which is why we haven't switched to anything else yet, but we're looking at a lot of it. Sounds good. Cool. Well, Floron Merrick, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us sort of the journey to self, the combination of both of your works to create this ID system and yeah, all the work you're doing to connect a lot of people worldwide to it. Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, I want to say thank you to the podcast team, Rachel, Henrik, Tanya, and Kai. And to our listeners, thanks for listening.

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