Escape Hatches: Urgent Anti-Censorship Solutions for Specific Transactions

Transcript

[Music] so thank you very much for being here I'm very happy to be presented in PR there's a lot of starnet and Star Wars stuff around and I'm very very happy just make sure to go to get your swag like this cool swag in the in the booth and ask us anything that you want it's we're here to help you so today we're going to be talking about anti-censorship in a layer to not only in the starnet but using the startet case but this applies to

everyone so this is a small disclaimer it is not necessarily the opinion of a starware or the star foundation and sensorship is is crucial for us I mean sensorship really is maybe the reason that why we are here we don't want to be sensor in our trans actions we want to be able to withdraw our funds if we want if needed this is why we're here I mean this is the issue with this was the issue with FTX with banks with governments and more so basically sensory resistance tries to answer the question what can a user do if they are being sensored and currently in layer twos let's be very honest you cannot do a lot it's you're very frile against layers 2os and well this is something

that might change in the future with the centralization of the layer TOS but the current situation is that well stuff is not good so of course the centralization is the end goal we want to be decentralized and this something that we say always why do we want to be decentralized so that no one can can sensor you right but the centralization is not easy at all I mean the centralization is a very very hard problem ethereum we could say that already solv it maybe yeah very likely yes but it wasn't easy it took G years a lot of money a lot of attention a lot of energy so if you want to create a layer two for example that is decentralized it will it will take time it will take money and patience and of course certain mistakes along the way so again

decentralization is not easy of course it's our idea however there can be cases so our main goal here is to provide self- custody to users but maybe decentralization is not the only way to get there or at least it's like a it's like a like the ideal case but we can do some stuff before and this is very very important and something very important to know is that validity rollups or you could call them layer twos validity rollups ensure well validity Zer knowledge rollups ensure the state's validity so that means that a layer 2 is not able to to steal your phones well if they are well implemented and so on and I can guarantee that that

is the cas the case of a starnet at least so they cannot steal your money even if they want they cannot steal their money because they are using ethereum at the base right so this is very important for you to know but they can censor your transactions for for example they can not allow you to withdraw your phones from the from the layer to but they cannot steal it from you okay so that is very important to note so for us Val RS are the are the choice to go Val RS is the is the best way to scale ethereum but we need to fight this censorship but they cannot steal you this is very important for you to know and something that we want to talk about is the escape hch Escape hch is a

mechanism where that would allow a user to always be able to withdraw their phones no matter what no matter if everyone dies for example if everyone in in Star War dies or or if they got killed if something happened to them or maybe they got malicious suddenly and they don't want you to withdraw your phones escap hat will always be able to to to to allow you to withdraw your phones which is very important right if FTX had had this things will be different right if banks would allow you to always withdraw your phones no more what well things will be different and this called This is called self custody of your fonts you can always get access to them so Escape catch guarantees

that and yeah so they they want they want allow you to withdraw your funds right what what I talk before so the hypothesis here that we want to talk about is that not all businesses need to pursue full decentralization immediately okay but they still want to provide self custody to the users so they then then they can use other type of measures for a specific types of transaction what is the transaction I'm talking about withdraw your funds it's crucial withdrawing your Fones is is so important in the crypto ecosystem so imagine that we have a case study of a fintech let's call it fintech a that is creating a trading company so it's

exchange they are trying to provide trading services and the priority let's be very honest here like very very honest I know that the the ethereum ecosystem is very idealistic and and will love to talk about the centralization and privacy and that and and that stuff but in the end what matters well for for companies for entrepreneurs is profitability they want money okay and they want to create a product that attracts people and something that they can say to their user base is hey I provide you with self- custody okay what does what what that means is that I won't be an FTX I won't be I won't be able to steal your funds from you so I

am an entrepreneur I creating the trading Finch a and I can provide you with self custody if it goes well well and it attracts people then this this entrepreneur will have success no matter what blockchain they settle on that whatever they only want profit to be profitable okay so these guys want money as soon as possible they don't care that much about the centralization and so on so for them the the minimum they want to allow the users to have is the ability to withraw their phones independently without third parties again think about the FTX case FTX W with a full withdrawal H transaction you would be I don't know stuff would be

very very different so there are two critical operations in this case and this is actually the the a very similar case we have in starx already so the full withdrawal of funds and the force State and these are the two transactions that for example who who here knows dydx dydx all right so dyx is very famous so I don't know if you know this but they have they are not decentralized but they have these two transactions forced by escape hatch so what I'm talking about is not hypothetical it's something that has been already working for years successfully so in in dydx you can do full withdraw of your phones and a force trade so this would allow you not to be sensored in in case the ydx

becomes malicious or something like that but this can be provided to other type of companies right so for this entrepreneur those are the two crucial transactions and the moral of the story that I'm telling here is that this entrepreneur only wants profitability and for them self custody is a selling point to their users they if it doesn't work they will jump and go and do it in Amazon web services right and we need these entrepreneurs so we need to make it as easy as possible for them to be able to sell their product to to the user base and Escape hatches is what that is so and this very important from a regulatory point of view and this is

this is a real case again you cannot say that you provide self custody to your user base if you don't show it like legally really legally because you will get you will be claimed that you are not providing self custodial services but you can do it with escape hatch and this is and this is the the case of dydx for example so having escape hatch allows you as a company as an entrepreneur to say that you are providing self cost to user base you cannot do it otherwise because if you're doing it I don't know maybe I don't know in polygon if you're doing it in salana something like that they will ask you are you decentralized is your is your is your product the is the blockchain where you are decentralized the answer is no the

answer is no for arbitrum optimising to whatever you want it no no Layer Two is De centralized yet not even a stet I mean both if you provide them with start with scape hatches then you can legally claim that and this is very very important like for for entrepreneur that actually wants to build something this is crucial and and again this is good for everyone the ydx cannot steal your funds for example so H in the end it's a happy story so trading fch a boost their profits there's user satisfaction but because they able to withdraw their funds and there's more security and the ethereum dream uh happens right blockchain complied with its mission of providing self

custody ER okay so as a corollary you don't you don't you I think we don't need to pursue the centralization immediately we want more entrepreneurs we want more self custody for millions of people like let's make it as easy as possible for them to do this and for this H an app play an A play case for this I talk about the ydx for example but we will also have it in startet app chains so basically an app chain is a chain dedicated to a specific transaction so what is my purpose you are sted app chain you own an exchange and that's it very simple like very very very very small case an exchange uh an nft ER

platform something like that so I don't know how they call it in other blockchains but app chain is how it's called in startet maybe they have another name in CK sync or other or layer TOs and this is a very very cool image as you can see up change which which is a blockchain for a specific uh use case are already active a lot look at this this is the L2 bit dashboard and as you can see h i Mark in Orange and in blue different blockchains that different layer tools that are specialized only in in a single type of of trans like they provide their uses with a couple transactions they are not Universal blockchains where you can

build whatever and in particularly in blue you can see the starx or star net ER related app chains you mean like I mean the ydx immutable ipex so as you can see there are a lot of these type of of of app specific blockchains layer twos all of these are use cases for escape hatches and actually a lot of them already have Skye hatches if they're using star kicks so actually the star war team is here and if they can correct me but there are Escape hatches already in in several of them am I wrong right yeah right it's not yeah yeah so the blue ones are a perfect use case for for well all of them are use case for for escape hatches while the blue ones very likely already have esape hatches

so they cannot steal from you even though they are not decentralized so this is this is this is this is very very very important and it's very relevant to for people to know this and escap hatches have been have been used already in the wild a lot of times so this is the the case of dydx H there have been about 150 for transactions in dydx for that people that want to experiment the the escape hatch so they withdraw their phones from dydx this is through data that you can see L Tobit so Escape hatches again are already providing self cust to the users even though the ydx is not decentralized and is someone complaining I don't know would you complain that it's not

decentralized even if you imagine you're a user a common user would you would you want it to be the centralized if they are already providing you with the ability to withdraw your fanss I mean of course always the calization is the end goal but I I mean you can live like this you can live like this they are not going to censor your withdrawal of funds so your money is always going to be your your money so ethereum dreams right so I would you I would go very quick through the to how an escape hatch actually works in the in the in the wild so what we have here is a combination between the layer two and the layer one so the layer two is on the on the left corner and in the center we have the

layer one here we have a Veri several smart contract like a verifier the started core contract the force transaction queue and the started app Chain Bridge while in the layer two we have a Balance Calculator which is the most important contract like for me right now to explain it and then we have a Escape tool which is basically in this case I put my dat plus Stone but is basically a sequencing tool plus approver right the Star War PR is called Stone and then this is well I know this looks very very weird and if you want to take a photo or something like it but but this is basically how escape hatch works so number one the user request a force transaction because they are feeling

like they can be stealed by the by I know dydx whatever app chain right so this goes into the the the layer one uh sorry in red is the layer one contracts while in blue are the Layer Two contracts so the user request the transaction in in Step number one in Step number two the the the layer one submit the request to the layer two app chain so hey please H give me my money this user wants its money back and this the app chain this app chain or for example dydx for example can decide whether whether yes or not to give them the fonts back if they give the fonts back that then it's on but if they don't because they got Mal isues or whatever then there will be um a freeze system

which will freeze the layer the the app chain it will stop all transactions and this is very bad very bad for the for the app chain like all the transactions stop once it is stop then we go to step number four in which sorry in Step number five where the user can use Escape tool the madada and stone Escape tool to generate a proof of the balance of the resources of this individual then the proof is sent to the verifier to synchronize with the latest State and uh uh and if we go to do the step number seven then the bridge will see if the if the in sorry in Step number six the

bridge the user now can request the font withdraw while to the bridge and in Step number seven the bridge will will check that the that the that the system is actually Frozen so it can withdraw the fonts and then it will uh uh uh uh so I go to 7B raise the request and prevent double spend so basically it's seeing that everything is okay and it will be able then to transfer the phones to the user so I know it looks kind of U complex but if you go to L2 bit there's actually a button that says withdraw my phones and for dydx so you can click you basically click one button and you can you need to wait I don't know maybe 5 to seven days and you will get your phones

back so you can with a with a click of a bottom do all this so you don't need to to care much about this I know this looks a little complex it's more for technical stuff but with a single bottom you can withdraw your phones in case a blockchain BEC malicious and well of course there are a couple risk and for example you you could say that if I want to to stop the ydx because I hate the ydx I can do a lot of transactions like I don't know maybe a million request to to to withdraw my phones to see if one of the funds if dydx is not able to comply with them like quickly and then dydx will be frozen right they will be punished so I will be

able to spam the network in order to affect them but for that what star war does is that there's a high gas fee to to make a withdrawal fee so you cannot it will be very very costly I think like in the order of $0 million in order for you to spam a a blockchain so like it doesn't make sense so so we're trying to prevent this this kind of stuff also another issue could be the contract updates that bypass the freeze well this is a topic for another day and well basically next steps that are being considered in the star war and star ecosystem is let's create more Escape hatches for the starnet app chains and number two what about escape hatch that

is bigger that can comply to different use cases uh well and ER just as a summary of what we talk today we need to provide entrepreneurs with the tools for them to provide self- custody to their users but to make it as easy as possible for them because we cannot expect them to to fully decentralize in order for them to provide self custody and that is what we want we want self custody right we want a world where you can be free to withdraw your phones whenever you want so we can use Escape hatches which are already been used a lot in this type of blockchain specific transactions like er trading exchanges nfts that kind of

stuff you can apply it already and and this is something that that we need to ask the layer tools to do provide a mechanism to easily ER provide self Cody to the users because again we want to provide self cost to millions of people and if we wait for every Layer Two to be decentralized in order to do this I know how much will it take five six seven years I don't know will we will we even and be able to get there I don't know so thank you very much my my name is Omar I work at the star Foundation before at the star war and well that's my Telegram and feel free to to contact me whenever you want thank you I know if there's time for questions

I think we have four minutes any any any question that you yeah you um you mentioned the general case for an escape hatch instead of an app chain I'm just wondering say um someone initiated an escape there and uh the chain got frozen because of it Y and I happen to have my assets not in my wallet but say in some sort of Vault or something could I still use the Escape hat how would that work or is that like kind of an edge case that needs to be explored uh it's a great question I think that um when you say bolt what do you mean like a like some smart contract

for example so like if the chain isn't Frozen I could withdraw it from there right yeah um but if it's frozen I'm assuming I can't but I don't hold the tokens in my wallet yeah I see no no this I think that is more of a general case as you mentioned like corly Escape hatches are done in very specific transactions like layer tools that only allow you to do for example two different movements withraw your phones or make a for example in the case of the way the way ex withdraw your phones or make a transaction so it's there's no no such of a bol right now but we want to work on that kind of stuff like how can we ediate escape hatch that will be useful for all cases but this is complex

this is very very complex because the bigger the the domain of the scape hatch the harder is for it for us to to maintain it secure so so it's a it's a it's a it's a hard goal but it's something that it's been explored already in Star War and starnet and and star war St has had Star War has already show that they can do very very cool stuff engineering wise so yeah H thank you wor any other question that you may have on this or comment no perfect okay well thank you very much [Applause]