Guardrails for Freedom: Privacy by Design

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] As you can see, we're meeting all each other for the first time. Hi, good afternoon everyone. My name is Gwen and um I'm from a company that does privacy technology specifically in crypto. So, ZKlay verify is a universal zero knowledge proof verification layer and we are designed to work with all kinds of verifiers, all kinds of zero knowledge proofs as well as all chains.

On a less technical front, it means we help with an underlying ZK tech at the bottom of the zero knowledge tax stack that enables like decentralized identities and many things like that. That's a short bit about me. Um, and I lead business um, in ZK Verify. My background includes um, founder operator. >> Hello. >> Yeah, >> like that. >> Oh my gosh. Oh my god. I can't remember what I was saying, but yeah, my background includes about 20 years of like founder um, operator investment experience. Just before ZK Verify, spent two years at Binance building up the BMV chain fund.

So yeah, Claire, please we we'll go round of intros first and what like who you are, what you do. >> All right. Well, first thank you so much to Chief I for having us and putting this on. They're always my favorite events. Um my name's Claire. I am the CMO atte. Thank you all so much. Thanks. Thanks. Um if you follow me on Twitter, I'm sorry. I apologize in advance. Uh so I'm the CMO of Aztec. Um, Aztec is a layer 2 privacy native for Ethereum. Um, we will be launching soon, so I'm not sleeping a whole lot, but it's very, very exciting.

Um, I'm from the Bay Area. I've been in crypto full-time since 2017, and I am a very vocal proponent of women sort of, you know, owning their journey. And that's something that I love to connect about. So, if you're around after, I would love to talk to you about that. I'm Charlotte. Uh I'm a R&D engineer at Inverse. So we are a team of researchers and developers and we work together on building uh applied cryptography solution and privacy solution for uh for clients that works with us such as Mcoin, Zcash and um other uh companies.

Uh so my personal uh specialization is zero knowledge and data privacy and I've been in the space for about two years now. >> Uh hello everyone. My name is Rahul. I'm the CEO at Safe Labs. Uh for some of you it may be new as well but my first time in Sim. So I'm meeting a lot of people their first time as well. It's super nice to be here. Thanks to Hifi for also hosting and learning in great space. Uh Sollet is the self-custodial smart account wallet that's being used by teams and individuals all over the world. We power about 100 billion assets which is kind of give or take 10 or 20% of entire Ethereum depending on how the

market was. Uh yeah, we've been around for a while and we've been building some stuff. uh for us privacy selflessly is a very important propeller and that's why I'm here to talk a little bit about it. >> Thank you. Thank you Joe for inviting me to um this panel and thank you for giving me this opportunity. I really can you put the mic closer. >> Oh okay. >> Yeah. Sorry. Yes. Thank you Jules. Uh thank you Jules for inviting me here and thank you Shai for giving me this opportunity. I'm Balen. I am a community organizer part of Israel Oakland East Panda also women in media protocol

and I'm co-hosting the um privacy hub at Delt and the Congress with web three privacy now MP interesting and that come to talk to me later but through web three I was actually working as a lobbyist for the government and national experience work in Singapore as a criminal defense ideator. So yeah quite interesting background and now I work both and it goes >> thank you so much. Okay, just because the audio is a little bit difficult, right? If any time you cannot hear, can I ask some of you to like like that so

that whoever's watching, we just see. Okay. Okay. Great. And just to get a sense of the audience who here um is technical. Okay. Quite a bunch. And I'm assuming everyone's in web three. Maybe everyone web three. Okay. Okay. Great. So those who did not raise your hands, web two. Okay. Web two or are you like in privacy technology like infra? No. Okay. Okay. Good range. All right. Great. So, let's start off with the key definitions here cuz everyone has a different definition of what privacy means and freedom means. So, I want to start with anyone. What is privacy for you? Oh, wait. Actually, what is freedom

for you? Lynch, if we can start with someone who has the mic. And actually, can I ask if I have one more mic for Claire if the organizers are Thank you. if you can. Yeah, I like having a mic in my hand so that I can interrupt maybe. Thank you so much. But yeah, um whoever can start actually you want to start or okay. >> Uh so question was what is >> what is freedom? Yeah. >> Freedom, right? Um yeah, I guess it's it's it's it's the right to kind of have a choice uh and not the choice being made for you in some way. Uh and also privacy. I guess to some degree I I I tend to see it as

uh uh if you protection from being observed in some way because that creates a sense of bias uh and it's it's quite different for individuals and institutions and I find this dichotomy quite interesting that an individual when an institution or a company wants privacy they it's it's it's uh it's under the guise of security but when an individual seeks privacy uh it's kind of painted as a proof of guilt. you have something to be guilty about and uh and that's that's a very cultural shift I feel but uh and from there I really see how freedom can emerge uh in general and ultimately it's going to be uh I think expression of choice every >> I like that I I did not realize yeah the

the institutions and privacy you're right cuz I'm the kind that doesn't like anything online and my husband is like you will go to jail one day right kind of thing like better warn Um so for me the definition of freedom uh is really linked to the to the to the definition of privacy and laws and like what is good and right and many things like that. So it's amazing to have freedom but we need also some sort of system to ensure that we are moving within a space that's safe for everybody. So the the notion of freedom needs to be safeguarded in some ways and that's where privacy would would

intervene. But yeah, the notion of freedom would be to be allowed to do what you need to do, what you want to do uh within uh that domain that's like safe, regulated, and that's not going to uh hurt anyone. >> Okay. So choice and freedom to move within a set like boundaries. Uh Claire, you wanted to chime in. I think a lot about freedom in terms of like being able to sort of establish your own boundaries. I mean, I know we talk about that a lot in terms of like our personal lives, but I also think like regarding technology, like a key part of freedom is being able to yeah, set your own boundaries. And I think unfortunately where we are right now with blockchain, we sort of built like

the perfect surveillance technology and we don't really have tools um to set those boundaries, you know, to say in this context I'm okay sharing this, in this context I'm not okay sharing this. Um and so we've sort of lost our ability digitally, not just in crypto, but also in web 2 to really be able to like set boundaries, which I think is essential for for freedom. And that's how I see privacy and freedom is connected. >> Yeah. Um, for me, I see freedom as the ability not to be censored.

>> I see freedom as the ability not to be censored. >> Ah, okay. Got it. Very interesting range. So in all your different work right you're doing a chain you know you're doing a bunch of things securing 10% of Ethereum's assets you know like community as well like how in your work are you building privacy as a foundation hopefully in this new internet villain do you want to start? Oh yeah, sure. So in as a community organizer, I think my purpose and my goal is to educate the community about what kind of data for example their favorite

platforms are harvesting from them and also why they should care about privacy. For example, should you really be using Facebook Messenger or should we using Signal? what kind of data is being sold on by these and what they actually used for what kind of data is stored when you use certain applications. It's it's more about spreading the awareness. What are alternatives? You know, uh for example, I'm part of EANGA and you know that a lot of the Chinese communities cannot access the same kind of applications and websites like the rest of the world do.

So what kind of VPNs they use? uh how can we make sure that information gets across to them in a neutral way that doesn't get them who's receiving that information into trouble. So a lot of my work thinks about community from their perspective so that they're not you know accidentally prosecuted or you know get into trouble with something that you know is actually quite neutral or maybe they're building something very criteria. So yeah, we're not into product voting but this is a kind of questions that keep me awake at night >> and and to be clear all these your target audience is developers right at all these ETH events.

>> Uh yes uh most of them are developers but some of them are also don't know that you know maybe heard about Bitcoin when it hit all-time high and just want to learn more about Ethereum. >> Okay thank you. Um yeah I can share like how we are kind of implementing this or how we think about it. Uh so I I have a technical background. So I >> he was hired to be CTO as then promoted to CEO. Congrats Rahul. >> Yeah being a CEO in crypto is you know it's not easy.

>> Where does congrats? I don't know. >> So I I want to you know I wanted to explain a concept. It's it's not semi but you use this in engineering all the time. Uh the concept is called plot ways work. Uh it basically says uh that the products that you build reflect the communication style that you want to ah and there's a concept of inverse corner style the communication style that you want to know which should reflect the products behind it. So when your question is like how how do you build privacy separate products or how do we actually organize ourselves? One of the things I had to do this year was we reframe the culture that we are uh we had at safe and one of the first core pillars actually you had to write it

explicitly and we call it safeguarding sovereignty and this is a like if you have a very big project we we ask our product team members to really make an impact statement what how is this going to help preserve a user sovereignty. So that's that's the product that we want to make and then the second question is how do we organize ourselves so that we are successful in kind of building it and uh we actually reflect this in our own culture as a team. So we have a lot of ownership and autonomy which which comes a lot from privacy but also with privacy or with autonomy also comes I don't know whether that so so you have to kind of put the foundations in place if you want to really build a products that want to communicate your players.

So we had to really not just build the products but we had to change the way we communicate internally and organiz organize ourselves internally as well. I find that to be the key. >> Can you give an example like all hands now all the numbers are blacked out? >> No no but uh uh think about like teams are have like many CEOs for example like uh they have they have their own accountability metrics for example. We organize ourselves where teams have very tight mission alignment. So I ask my teammates uh hold me accountable uh to knowing how you know the mission also you know uh you know the why and we we we really diverge on the what and how and going inside. So I hope that makes

sense. So yeah um as for group working in R&D in applied cryptography privacy is one of our main focus um one of our uh branding is that we call ourselves architects of openness. So basically we believe that um cryptography especially technologies as thick as the knowledge are needed to be the foundation of um open systems. Unfortunately, we cannot trust women with doing the right things all the time. And we cannot just like open everything and hope for the best.

Like it's not going to work out. We need to have some sort of um of um safeguarding um infrastructures and that's what we're trying to build. And at its center privacy is really important because um we want to respect the privacy of each individual. So in this design of the open society and open systems that we want to build, we need to respect all the needs of everything and everyone. Um and so yeah, some of the need of the system is to keep the the data private, but some other need of the system is to make sure that people comply by the goals. Uh so yeah like according uh all

those needs uh is actually uh at part of what we're doing and we're doing that using applied crypto revenues. And when you do all these work you know building all these research for example what who do you work with to get it hopefully applied and out to the market do you work with particular other companies? >> So I mean one of our client is worldcoin. So, world coin. So, um >> you mentioned that. Yeah. >> Yeah. And also, uh Zcash of Zcash.

Unfortunately, like it's like two different like very different situations. Uh but yeah, what Walcan is doing is is really nice because this this notion of being able to identify people is is very important. Uh if we want to have privacy, we still have to make sure we know who is actually doing something to have some sort of regulation because it's if everything is very opaque, it's not going to work um in our opinion because like it's it's going to be chaos and like too much freedom usually leads to chaos. So it's about finding the right balance between protecting the individual and protecting the privacy while having the option to put on some rules and put on some some

uh safeguarding. So being able to identify um the users without revealing any information uh about them without revealing what they purchased, what's on their bank account or can they send money to it? That's none of our business. just like making sure it's safe for everybody in the system. Um that's what we want to achieve. Yes. So actually the the story around how Aztec started building privacy tech is very interesting. They didn't start trying to build privacy tech. They started and I say they I'm not one of the founders.

The team asked me to join them about a year and a half ago. And so when I joined and I was kind of uncovering their origin story, it's very productled. um which I think is very fascinating. So they wanted to build an onchain lending business and they had a really good value proposition about essentially just facilitating like cheaper lending between businesses. they had some interest and then they got into the meeting and the businesses were like wait a minute everyone is going to be able to see like what I'm doing and they were like well yeah but you know you'll save some money and the businesses were like get out of here like absolutely not and so it was that like desire right they wanted to build an onchain business

and then that problem oh no one will accept this technology no one will seriously consider this technology without private privacy. So, you know, it's like the mean like, you know, is is so and so in the room with us right now? It's like, you know, are businesses in the room with us right now? No, they're really not. Like, is JP Morgan in the room with us right now? No. Like, he's not here. They're not here because we don't have privacy. So, I think for Aztec, the journey really started with product. And then, um, over time, like they actually had like one of the most viral products at Defi Summer. it was private crosschain swaps essentially. Um and then they realized wait a second what we could actually do is like go

deeper in his tech and build the tool set for other developers to build privacy products on chain. Um so the whole kind of like inspiration behind Aztec is just they feel it's going to unlock like this huge wave of onchain adoption because it's the missing feature like blockchain is not feature complete. I always say that till I blew in the face. It's not feature complete. Anybody here who's ever tried to market something, you can have the best campaign. You can talk at all the events. If it's missing a key feature that your customers need, you are not going to make it, right? You're not going to make it. And so for us, we really feel it's that missing piece that's going to bring about this onchain renaissance of adoption and really

flourishing. >> So CLA, can you give a specific example from the product perspective? You see um productled privacy right after all the origin story interesting origin story um actually not uncommon a lot of tech people build the tech and imagine customers will come right so from a tech product and tech perspective what is how is how is privacy foundational or unique in Aztec yeah so privacy is one of those interesting things because it's literally almost like the antithesis of blockchain like blockchain was meant to be observable And we have this paradigm of sort of enforced transparency, right?

So in order to build privacy tech, they really had to start like deep downing a stack which is why it's taken them seven years to come to market. So they have engineered cryptography which powers a lot of the ZK tech in the market today. Um and then they built their own programming language. So it's a domain specific language DSL called more. Um and then now we're building the network, right? So quite complex. Um, but it's really built kind of from the ground up. Like, um, we have our own VM, right? If you have the ad techch VM, it's not an EVM. So, they had to build that. Like, it's it's just a quite complex problem to be able to merge technology onto something that's supposed to have like enforced transparency.

>> For those of um for those in auditor don't know what DSL means, domain specific language, can you explain a little bit? >> Yeah. So, a demand specific language. I mean, without getting too into the weeds, and there's probably someone out there technical, maybe Bravule, who's going to be like, "You're absolutely wrong, Claire." But the way I think about it is like um you know, it's it's almost like a dialect or something, right? It's like a very specific niche language that does like want very specific things. So if you think about some of the more like generalized general purpose languages like you know C++ or Rust like they have really broad application but doing specific languages are meant to do like a a very specific

thing. Um, and so for Noir, we say it's like it's Rust for ZK, right? Rust is super easy. It's very easy to use and learn and has a lot of advantages. And we wanted to do that for the ZK tool set because prior to Noir, I mean, I'm not exaggerating. I think that there were like a 100 qualified people in the world who could what we call handroll a ZK circuit. And and that was just completely hampering the adoption of this technology. like if you only have a 100 people who can handle these circuits, your business is going to move really really slow. There weren't people who could really audit them. It was really really problematic. So with this DSL, it basically lets you know any programmer, any developer write the CK.

Um and there's a lot of auditing firms now who work with. So it's kind of like this whole ecosystem around how do you build a madam denu text which is very very very complex. Um, I had said earlier in my career like there's some things I'll never do. I said I would never go work at an L2 because I think that they're undifferentiated, but then I found Aztec, very differentiated. And I said I would never market a DSLI cuz it frankly just seemed like hell and here I am. So the accounting firms are web 2, web 3 accounting firms.

You said accounting firms are using, right? pardon me. Uh if I misspoke, I apologize. >> Yeah, there's auditing firms that are able to audit the code. So, that's just a huge barrier to like launching new apps, DAPs, smart contracts, right? Someone needs to audit it. And if there's no one that can audit CK circuits, like that's part of the reason why the adoption of technology has been frankly incredibly slow. Yeah. And Rahul you know you are heading up like a large ecosystem layer right and earlier when we were just chatting you were talking about doing enterprises you know so how do you how are you thinking about the next step you said that you have to change the culture right internally

right so in your next stage like for the next I don't know 6 to 12 months for example how are you thinking about your like any milestones are you excited about and how are you thinking about the road map >> yeah Um you know when uh safe started it started off uh we uh the team wrote the smart contracts which is the team wrote the smart contracts which is you just call a smart account which is a multisake protocol which they like uh that was many years ago. Uh and lot has changed since then because when they wrote that that was a public group it's it's free it's open source everyone can use it. uh and safe became an entire uh ecosystem and uh I think over the years

uh it it changed a lot like just like the crypto industry right there are no new people coming into the industry and we're building for new people and we changed the language how we market it to the new people that's right so it's safe and it grew a lot and the use cases really uh kind of proliferated uh expansively and uh one uh big thing that we saw is a lot of enterprises are using this. You know, it was never probably built with that user segment in mind. Uh for example, out of the 60 billion, I could see accounts that hold hundreds, 500 million or 2 billion, 3 billion in a single account, you know, and and when uh it's a completely

censorship resistant protocol, right? for example. So when you park a billion dollars in a single account on the blockchain which is not it's completely public and transparent uh by default uh you know every single app, every single company, every single hardware, every single software, every single device becomes a point of attack. You know why? Because uh the reward is that much higher. you can deploy an army if you want it because that that's their reward and that's not what we want in the first place right like so uh what we've seen is uh a a lot lot different kind of user segments started using say right and now we're changing our perspective and

becoming more opinionated we're building a more opinionated product for for those us so in product uh we have this whole addage that we say uh when you build for everyone you're building from no one in but And that's that's something we're chaining up and uh that's really shaping the next 6 12 months or probably 5 weeks for us. >> Very cool. Veilen, I love to go to you. So we've talked quite a lot about institutions, right? Institutional kind of needs for maybe privacy $1 billion for you. Veilen, you talk a lot to the developers, the normies as you said, right? When you go to them, do they actually care about privacy? How much is privacy? Like education really needed from you? Well, actually I do have a

question for the audience. How many of you when you go on to your website, you see the popup thing that says accept all cookies? How many of you accept all cookies? How many of you accept only necessary cookies? How many of you decline all cookies? Yeah, you see like a lot of people um when I asked this question at the e Tokyo uh conference, most people actually took up their hands when they say you know only click uh accept necessary cookies or decline all cookies which means that even if they don't actively think of privacy actually they might you know somehow subconsciously know that there are some

kind of data trauma involved in these cookies. So I would say that you know privacy is not something that a lot of people actively think about it unless you are truly truly truly assessed or you're you know building something um as a builder. I think maybe privacy adoption in my opinion will come at a pace and also at a frequency where it is not uh shouted out to the masses but you know this this this app is adopting a ZK tool that kind of thing it will just be launched nobody will need to know or nobody will might need to care that it

is actually using ZK stocks and ZK tools and then uh just need to know that you know your transactions are private. I think um amongst the nonies, sorry if I'm taking a lot of high. So amongst the nonies, I think that there is still uh a confusion that people doesn't know that every transaction that is related to your wallet on chain is visible to other people. people confuse uh pseudonymity with anonymity and they didn't realize that uh hey you know actually uh five years ago I got bitcoin on binance and then I transfer out into my wallet and now you know maybe the IRS

or IRD my uh finance who here has that experience on ramping on a centralized exchange and then transferring out to a wallet. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean you know lots of my community have that experience too and no shame into that because you know people get confused or people don't understand that student limit is not the money and that you know your transactions are based online and uh that's why we you know try to educate go about privacy protocols that can actually enhance their you know the way they interact with products not because they have anything to hide you is because people who because it's nobody's

business, you know, I want to send money. >> Yeah. So, so Bailey, we've been told to wrap up. So, if you can conclude, right, what are you most excited about over the next 12 months? >> Well, I'm most excited about the events that I am organizing >> which is the which what death connect. >> Yeah. Yeah. um the privacy hub at death connect and also um and I think uh we should make privacy more natural bro where when can we see safe like everywhere in all institutions >> what do you mean we are everywhere >> oh good answer >> just don't know uh no but we have a pretty big things coming up in two weeks we are doing some

big launches as well um we going to you're going to be we're going to be doing a lot of this building in public thing and uh we connecting with the convenient thing along our so yeah you will you'll see us everywhere probably if you haven't >> and Charlotte for the next 12 months when is cuz you're on the cryptography research side right I want to link it back to the word guard rails but we haven't used it this panel right now I thought we had more time so I think you're the best person to kind of talk about it from a research perspective like what kind of guardrails are you like it's next on the road map to research and think about. So currently there is a gap between uh privacy and validity. So you can do a lot in a

validity format. So you can prove that the computation was done correctly for many type of um of computation. Um but you don't have that for actual ZK. So ZK is used a lot for for validity and that's like pretty far at the moment. But for actual ZK where the input is um private, you actually don't have so much computation available. So like filling that gap will allow to have really nice um application that will actually protect the individual um privacy while being able to comply to to laws while

being able to comply to much more work. So that will allow to do much more things in a very private preserving manner. >> Thank you. And Claire, you're you're closing our panel. What's next? Well, as stuck in the next 12 months, we're going to launch. Um, it's been a really long road for the founders. Like I mentioned earlier, they really like they they sort of had this onion and they were like, "Oh, we got to keep peeling it back, you know, all the way down to the base layer, cryptography." Um, but I'm so proud of what they've built. It's been an honor to join the team. Um, a lot of my team is in the audience and we're just working really hard to bring this to market because we believe in it. I mean,

you don't find many founders who've worked on something for seven, eight years in crypto. They had a lot of chances to sort of throw in the towel. Like, privacy has not been easy. There have been moments where it's really been under attack and they've kept going. So, I'm super proud that we're going to bring that. I think it's a very advanced tool set and it's something we all need. And also like if anybody watches the charts like it's privacy season. So I'm super super super excited for privacy in general. More projects will get funded 100% because of what's going on and that's what we need because ZK verified just launched on mainet 3 days ago. So this is the ZK season, right? Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So thank you everyone for listening. Sorry we didn't get an audience questions but thank you Shifi for having us. Thank you everyone.