Freedom: Reinventing the Browser

Transcript

a little bit about that. Let's welcome Florian from Freedom Browser. >> Thank you. Hi everybody. I'm super excited to talk to you about Freedom Browser today. We're literally reinventing the web and I couldn't be more excited to bring this new uh software to you. So, the browser really has not changed for ages. Really 1993 when the first modern browser was introduced to the world where you could enter http:// some some URL into the address bar and it would render an HTML page. Well, that's literally what browsers still do today.

They look more sophisticated. The web has really advanced, uh but the fundamental principle of how the browser works has stayed entirely unchanged. They still only speak really one protocol, which is HTTP. Now, we use HTTPS, so it uses some transport layer encryption, and domains are resolved via the DNS system. And that's the same since the internet or the web the modern web started. Now, here in the web 3 community, that's actually a problem because if I type vitalik.eth into Safari, Chrome, Brave, name any modern browser, it will it will actually send me to google.com and do a web search for

what vitalik.eth might be. What it doesn't understand is that vitalik.eth is a new kind of domain and it's hosted on a new kind of web. It doesn't do that. And that's the problem we want to solve. The problem behind this the bigger political problem for our political economy and the web in general is that the way that the web was built, unknowingly at the time, really perpetuates a structural power imbalance that disadvantages us as as the user and gives all the power to the server operator, which is the platform.

And now in 2026, all of us who are using modern browsers are nothing but consumers of platform capital. We're being surveilled, we're being profiled, our data is being sold and resold and repackaged and resold, and none of the value stays with us and none of the control stays with us. But wait a second. Those of you who are around for some time might remember when Ethereum launched and this young genius boy was telling us that we're building this peer-to-peer web, that we're actually getting rid of the platforms, we're getting rid of the intermediaries.

And if you look for old blog posts on the ethereum.org blog, you can actually find schematics that explain exactly how this was supposed to work, that the internet back then, and unfortunately still today, has all the important business logic, the communications, user credentials, data logic on a server, aka the platform, and the user device is really just a dumb terminal that renders the stuff for you. And how in this new blockchain world that we're going into, the peer-to-peer world, the data logic, business logic would live on a blockchain, the user credentials would be stored as a self-sovereign identity on the user's device, and static files and communications could be hosted on something like Swarm, a fully

peer-to-peer decentralized storage network. This is the vision from 2015. Well, those of you who remember Mist actually do remember that there was a sweet moment in time where this vision was being worked on. But for those of you who speak German, you might understand why calling it Mist was maybe a stupid idea. Because instead of dapp, we got crap, right? We're actually accessing the DWeb through gateways, Chrome extensions, and all kinds of shenanigans while not changing the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge,

Apple Safari are not our friends, and they are not speaking our protocols, and they are not going to change that. You might say, "Hey, but Florian, for a beautiful moment in time we extracted value by serving dapps over centralized gateways." And that's true. Some of us made insane fortunes on this broken stack that we've been calling the web3 over the past decade. But what does crypto look now today? Well, this is the new face of crypto, and consumer crypto is all but dead.

Right? Look around you. This room is half empty. Well, we're going to change that today. We're shipping Freedom Browser. It's an entirely new browser. It's a software you can download right now on your computer, and soon on your iPhone and Android phone. And this browser allows you to access the decentralized web the way it was meant to be. This is what it looks like. It already exists. Actually, I have it on my iPhone, but we haven't shipped it yet in the Apple App Store. So, desktop is the way to go for you right now.

And um it looks kind of like Chrome. It actually uses a lot of the Chrome or Chromium code in the background, but we've entirely switched out the networking layer and other pieces of it in order to teach it the language of web3. And so, we're shipping the browser that this industry deserves and really should have had for over a decade. You You actually see it's a real screenshot of how vitalik.eth has been loaded and fully resolved on my iPhone without any gateway. There's a trustless resolution of the domain name and then there is a peer-to-peer node that is fetching the content behind the content hash that this ENS domain

uh points to. And uh we really had to bring a lot of different technologies into one package to make this possible. It starts with trustless ENS resolution using zero-knowledge proofs thanks to the Colibri team who sits here in the audience and will give a talk after me. Trustless content resolution by running local nodes for IPFS, for Swarm, even Radical, which is another interesting Git-like protocol here uh built here in Berlin. And through these trustless nodes getting the content that you want to render.

We're even allowing you to trustlessly publish to the DWeb. So, it's not just a read situation, it's also a write situation. You can publish a website, you can publish messages, you can publish whatever you want through Freedom Browser without any gateways right back to the DWeb. We've built a wallet into the browser as a first-class citizen, which allows us to do things like HTTP 402. Some nerds of you might know what this is. It's a status code that the web is familiar with for over 40 years, but no browser in the world has yet shipped the actual ability to uh use that status code productively, and we actually shipped it.

And if you actually go through the list of Ethereum Improvement Proposals, you will find dozens, maybe hundreds of EIPs that would rely on a browser implementing them. And so, they are specified, but they are not used in the real world. One example is EIP 681, which allows you to just put an Ethereum address into to HTML link tag. And well, what should happen if I click on a link that points to an ETH address? Well, it should open my wallet with that address as a recipient. Well, Freedom Browser does that.

No JavaScript, no browser extension, nothing like that required. It's just pure HTML, how it was meant to be. But we didn't stop there. Because the vision is really to ship an entirely new web. And that requires developers. And so, Freedom is really having developers in mind and is shipping new kinds of APIs that allow you to build real DApps, real decentralized applications, meaning there is no traditional back-end involved anymore.

And it really takes a new browser to ship this vision. The very first API that we've shipped is called window.swarm. And window.swarm allows any website to connect to the node, the swarm node that the user is running inside Freedom Browser to publish content back to the DWeb on the user's behalf through their node. And that really closes a loop. Uh you can do almost anything with this simple recipe. For example, one demo app that I've built is a fully decentralized Reddit with no servers involved whatsoever.

It's just you and Swarm together creating something that just it has full feature parity with reddit.com. It's just there is no platform intermediary anymore. And when I think back to 2015, this is what really nerd sniped me into getting interested in Ethereum in the first place because that's what Vitalik was promising. We can build a web where the users actually control the platforms in a peer-to-peer way. And well, that's possible now thanks to these very simple building blocks that we're putting together in this new kind of browser.

And really the limit is your imagination. And just to give you some ideas of the kind of stuff that I would be building now if I was sitting in the audience listening to me speaking and being like, "Oh well, that's interesting." Uh we need a new WordPress for Web 3 to make it easy for people to publish content. We need a new GeoCities for the Web 3 to make it easy to ship mini sites. We need a Yahoo.com for the Web 3 to discover other pages. We need a Google.com to search the Web 3.

We really literally have to rebuild the entire stack on this new decentralized web. And at Freedom Browser we really love Swarm as the sort of peer-to-peer infrastructure to host this content, but you can equally do it on IPFS and I'm sure there are other interesting networks out there that might be suitable and we are having the vision of integrating all these networks that actually are decentralized and allow you as a user to access it without any gateways by running local nodes.

Who's actually using Freedom Browser? So, this slide is a bit old. We actually have even more users now, but we're at about 7,000 7 and 1/2 thousand users who've downloaded Freedom Browser and are trying it out with about 2,000 2 and 1/2 thousand monthly active users. Which to me is a ridiculous number. I would have We have done no distribution. You've heard the talk before me explaining how to get distribution. We did none of that. We just shipped and we're like, "Well, let's see if someone cares about this." And to our surprise, there are thousands of people from over 134 countries who actually care about accessing the web, the dweb, without gateways and without

intermediaries. And so, uh to us it looks like a really promising idea that we're excited to pursue. Some of the challenges that we encountered when building this, which are maybe interesting to some of you in the room, is that when building freedom for mobile, we found out that running local nodes for IPFS and Swarm on a modern iPhone crashes the iPhone. These nodes have been built for desktop only. They've never really been run together on a single device. And they were just not made to be resource efficient for the mobile age. But let's be real, if you're not shipping on mobile, you're not really a serious platform.

And so, we had to rebuild both an IPFS and a Swarm node from scratch in Rust, which is a very sort of efficient language, in order to create mobile-optimized versions of these nodes that can actually run on your phone. And it's super exciting that this worked. And we will ship this in the iPhone and Android app uh later this summer. And you can download it from the App Store and experience it yourself. It's quite exciting. Another really big problem in Ethereum is the light client situation. So, you can't really back then, when people used Mist, uh so, this original Ethereum browser then 2015, it actually ran an Ethereum full node, which is unimaginable unimaginable today

because an Ethereum full node just needs a ton of storage and needs to be online all the time and just it's not feasible for consumer devices. So, you need some line client situation to actually have trustless ENS, and we're very happy to work with the Colibri team, who are shipping an entirely new way to do this using zero-knowledge proofs to create a trustless ENS resolution um through through RPC service. And another issue that we're just starting to tackle that we haven't solved yet, that probably will take us a while to make to do it really well, privacy.

And so, I will talk about that in a moment a bit more. If I would give Freedom Browser sort of a CROPS rating, so CROPS being this sort of, you know, uh uh North Star of Ethereum now. Uh CR standing for censorship resistance, I would say actually we're really good at censorship resistance because we are allowing you to access the decentralized web without gateways, which probably you've never done in your life before. I don't know if any of you have ever run a local IPFS or Swarm node on your computer.

With Freedom Browser, which is bundling it in the binary, and it's just there, you don't have to take care of it. We solve it for you. So, probably when you use Freedom Browser for the first time, you actually experience the real Web 3 without gateways. And so, there is a much higher level of censorship resistance by using Freedom Browser. Now, Swarm and IPFS are actually not themselves perfectly censorship resistant networks, so there is a lot of work to do on that network layer after all, but I think we're making a huge improvement already. In terms of the O, which stands for open source, I'm happy to say that we're fully open source under the Mozilla public public license, and then some adjacent things like our nodes that we've built are open source under Apache

and MIT. The P, which stands for privacy, is really the biggest sort of work package we still have ahead of us. I want to be very honest here. We have not perfectly solved privacy, but I'm going to mention some ideas that we have there. And in terms of S, which stands for security, we're actually a huge improvement to the current status quo. Because you remember earlier this year, a centralized gateway that people used to access the DWeb called dot.limo got hacked. And so, if you would access websites through dot.limo, you would be sent to phishing sites.

Right? And other hacks like there were other hacks of RPC service that were poisoned and so on and so forth. So, there were a lot of issues already this year that would not affect you if you would access the real DWeb with Freedom Browser because we're removing the intermediaries and thus the entire attack surface that you're being exposed to as a user. So, overall I would say we have a pretty good crop trading, but there is still work to do. In terms of our privacy roadmap, some exciting things that we want to do is for example um build Nosis VPN right into Freedom Browser to allow anyone to access both the clear web, but even the DWeb, so the nodes that you're running

on your computer to access them through Nosis VPN and thus masking your real IP. Uh obviously Nosis VPN has not launched yet, so we would love to ship it already, but we can't, but we're talking to the team. We're in in exchange and we're hoping that later this year we might already be able to ship the first version with Nosis VPN. So, this is sort of the transport layer privacy, if you want. In terms of transactional privacy, there's another set of really interesting developments. There is uh Quorum being developed by the EF, which includes things like privacy pools and railgun to really give you privacy when you transact. So, I mentioned that Freedom Browser has a built-in wallet.

And we want to make privacy a first-class citizen and a first-class feature of the built-in wallet. Right now, it doesn't give you any transactional privacy. You're really fully exposed to RPC servers profiling you and DApps profiling you. So, by building in these protocols and just making them sort of ambiently available in the background, we hope that we can make it much easier for you to actually have transactional privacy as well. And I'm sure there are actually more possibilities to build privacy into this browser. So, we really want ideas from you, our community and potential users, of what else we could be doing to make the browser more private. We would be

excited if you reach out to us, share your ideas, start discussing with us. Me and Meinhard, with whom I'm building this, are here around and we would love to talk to you. So, that was the Freedom Browser. You can download Freedom Browser from the DWeb. It's freedombrowser.eth. And if you have no trustless way to access it, you can just go through by freedombrowser.eth.link. Download it and then never use a centralized gateway again to access the DWeb. Make that the last time you ever use a centralized gateway to access the DWeb.

And yeah, that's it. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, Florian. Um, do we have questions? >> Yeah, one. >> Hi, I'm really interesting. How do you, let's say I want to build a a YouTube or Google Google Drive collaborative documents? How do you handle that sort of data volume?

Can you? >> Yeah, so in principle, you can build this with the kind of loop I described where the you sort of ship an app through, let's say, Swarm and then your app connects back to the user's node, which then publishes data back to Swarm. So, you can have an app that allows a user to create a, you know, a Word document in their browser and then your app allows the user to store that document they created in their browser locally back to the Swarm network, for example.

So, um, that is in principle possible, and your question points at something that I can't fully answer, which is that, well, how scalable is actually the Swarm network? Let's say we have a billion users suddenly starting to use this new web, would it actually work? Frankly, I don't know. Um, I mean, Swarm has been around for over a decade now. It's really sophisticated uh, peer-to-peer network, but they've never experienced that amount of users. So, it would probably crash, and they would probably have to find new ways to make it scale. The Swarm team is actually here at the conference uh, to discuss these questions with.

I think that's an important point you're making, which is that what are we actually focusing on at Freedom Browser? And we're not building these peer-to-peer storage protocols. We're actually making them accessible. But are these storage protocols like Swarm and IPFS actually able to handle 3 billion, 5 billion users? Probably not today. That's probably something that would have to grow together with the usage uh, of what we're building. And I think it's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Nobody's browsing IPFS or Swarm today because there's literally no browser to do it.

So, we're trying to solve that problem by making it accessible. Uh, now I hope there are some developers in the audience who are going to say, "Oh, cool. I'm going to build some super cool new YouTube that is censorship resistant or something like that on that." That would bring users, and that would force these teams like Swarm to be like, "Okay, let's scale this because suddenly there's major traffic on there." So, thank you for that. That's a good question. >> Cool. Thank you so much. If you have any more questions >> And there's another one. >> Uh, ex- yeah, we're we're over time. Sorry.

>> Okay. Well, talk to me afterwards. >> Yeah, please. Thanks for your