The interoperable web: moving from logging in to connecting

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm welcome back to another episode of web3 academy it's kyle read head your host today on this episode this episode is called the interoperable web from login to connect uh what we're about to talk about here today is going to make a lot of you very happy so long as this comes true which i believe it is this is the future of web3 the future of the internet and we're going to explore what that may look like and how that may change the way that we interact with applications and websites

and people on the internet and i think this is just a very exciting thing that web3 offers outside of all of the noise of markets and money and number go up we had a difficult weekend this weekend uh for anyone who's interested in the markets we've had price go down uh for quite a while now and this was a an ugly weekend uh and so we're gonna talk about something that's just outside of that and we're gonna look further into the future uh and as this stuff starts playing out i'm sure our markets will start looking greener and uh and much better in the future uh before i get into this um this is an article that i wrote uh and i'm gonna read the article and then i'm going to dive into some more details

i've been doing this a few times over the last few weeks i will do many more if you have an article that you would like to write and have it uh sent out to our web3 academy community and audience please join us in our discord or send me a message on twitter or there's also inside of this article and in the show notes there's an application form where you can write an article send it in and as long as it will provide value to our audience in terms of web3 innovation we would love to share it to our audience and get your name out there okay so make sure you do that a few other things one if you'd like to join our community or our discord channel we are now tokenizing our community okay

this will go into full action on may 15th so it's coming up very quickly and basically what we'll be doing is token gating the discord and so you need to fill out an application once you complete that application we will um so long as you're approved we will send you a link where you can claim an nft and you will use that nft to verify and discord and that will give you access to the channels inside to speak with the community we'd love to have you if you're an entrepreneur a marketer a creator a developer even we now have a developer's channel which is exciting um then we want you inside there so long as you want to stay on the forefront of web 3.

so make sure to check that out you can find the application in the show notes below and final thing is the following week from this week depending on when you're listening to this but i will be at permissionless a uh web 3 d5 and crypto conference in west palm beach miami florida and i would love to meet any of the web 3 academy community and listeners so if you're going to be there as well or you're in the area please reach out hit me up in discord hit me up on twitter uh my name there's kyle read head um and also you can find it in the show notes below um but i'd love to to meet up while we're there and if there's a bunch of us maybe we can do a web three academy meetup but otherwise um i'd love to share a drink uh you know

maybe we'll film a podcast who knows what we'll do there's lots of events lots of things happening and i'd love to just meet others inside of this community so please if you're going reach out and let me know without further ado let's dive into the interoperable interoperable web from login to connect so this is how web3 will make the idea of logging in redundant so the internet took a wrong turn at some point in its development right it became a siloed network whereby every application and platform was left to build and manage their own account in login systems for users right there's only one of me yet i have hundreds of accounts and profiles across the internet

as a result we're all left trying to remember hundreds of passwords and then verifying who we are with sms authenticator apps personal verification questions and even alternative emails right even worse is when we're forced to share our electrical bills or upload a selfie holding our driver's license and a written word or date on paper right is the internet really progressing or are we going backwards here it's insane that in 2022 this is something that i have to do right there's got to be a better way well there is a better way right it's called web3 interoperability so currently there are tens of thousands of developers building out a new intera iteration of the internet called web3 right they're reconstruction the back

end infrastructure so the internet becomes things like more permissionless censorship resistant trustless you know i talk about those a lot we talk about those a lot in our in our podcast but what we're going to talk about more in this article is it's also rebuilding the internet to become more interoperable and composable so applications can start to share features of the internet instead of having to create their own databases and logins and accounts and things for every single application so in web 3 we no longer log in we just connect and i'm going to dive into what that means but first let's look at what's happening in web 2 and the problem with this other than it being a pain in the ass there's a lot more problems to it than that so

in web 2 we rent out our profiles and accounts from the applications that we use okay we are at the mercy of the corporation who owns the application and take on the risk that they could block or restrict our account whenever they please right this is also true of the assets we have within the applications and i say assets in quotations because we don't really own any of that it's not really truly an asset but think of things like the images we post on facebook or instagram right our personal data the things that we're doing and clicking on and sites we're visiting are followers that's definitely an asset right anyone who has a business that has followers on social media that is a big asset that helps you generate revenue

and bring traffic to your website right so any of your followers your content it's all owned by the application rather than you the user and it can be shut down at any time and this is the problem i mean i actually had my facebook account shut down uh about three and a half maybe four years ago now my personal facebook account along with i used to have a bunch of big facebook groups uh with big communities in the health space i had an ads account um i had a full business running basically from facebook and instagram and it and it shut my facebook down completely um i actually um i won't even say it in case someone from facebook is listening and they decide to ban me again but i had to skirt around the

system in order to get that back um and so it's unfortunate i basically lost the business as a result of and i didn't even do anything wrong facebook just blocked me um i i guess due to they said spam or something we don't really know i didn't really get any answers that's the problem but this is because as users of the internet we don't have our own profile or account for the internet that part of the internet was just never really built right instead we're forced to create new accounts every time we use an application right in the physical world this would be like a kind of having to put a on a certain outfit or a name every time we enter a store and then when we leave that store we have to leave it there and and then we can leave and then we got to do it again at the

next one right it doesn't really make any sense whatsoever uh but this is what we do with the internet right now um and and the problem is is that every time we create one of those accounts it's not ours it's that it's that websites and they are now entrusted to store our data we have to trust them to not use our data and we have to hope that they keep their servers up and they don't go out of business otherwise that account is all gone everything that i've built or put on there is at risk of that corporation right so before diving into um into the benefits of how sort of the web 3 version may work it's important to note that this technology actually already exists so

what i'm going to talk about it does already exist i'll be it's in a very nascent form right so for any of you that have used web3 already you probably know what i'm talking about but these accounts or profiles that i'm mentioning um are in the form of a non-custodial crypto wallet like let's say your meta mask or phantom if you're on solana right these crypto browser extensions you could call them right many of us use this today to buy and um and exchange tokens right we do it with our nfts we do it with our um social tokens and our defy tokens and and this is how we interact with um with protocols uh on the blockchain right now these crypto browser extensions or these wallets that i'm

talking about they're different from like a crypto account on something like coinbase or binance right as these are non-custodial what that means is the wallet is not owned by any corporate corporation or application or company right not even the company who built that specific wallet like the technology for it it's not even tied to their application okay so meaning no one not even them the owners like the ones who built it they can't alter your wallet they can't block your wallet or restrict the assets in it or do anything with it it is completely yours um whereas on coinbase for example or binance um it's just simply account inside an application just like your facebook account and every web2 account that i'm

sort of discussing above right so let's sort of look at how do web 3 wallets um how they're going to work in the future right for a user to begin using web 3 and this is true today they first need to create a unique wallet again a meta mask wallet a phantom wallet whatever you choose um you need to create one and that wallet is not just while it might be the wrong word here because it's actually your account or profile for all of the applications that you're about to interact with okay so this wallet is non-custodial it exists only on your specific device and can be recovered only through some sort of biometric screening or social recovery of friends and family we'll see where that technology goes today this is

the equivalent of you know memorizing your 12 to 24 you know word seed phrase but i'm pretty confident that ux will not last that's not what we're going to be doing so i need us everyone here needs to be thinking in the future not right now wallets are terrible ux right now i get that but eventually they're going to improve and there are already wallets that are improving on this argent for an example is a layer 2 smart contract wallet where it doesn't have seed phrases you don't get a seed phrase but it uses social recovery so you you choose contacts people that you trust and if you were to ever get locked out of your wallet lose your device whatever um you can go to your i forget what they're called delegates maybe or custodians i believe it is and

they can help you recover your wallet so very interesting again experiment we'll see where this goes i got a feeling eventually it goes down to some sort of biometric screening and maybe a combination of friends and family kind of social recovery we'll see where that goes but in this wallet you can update any personal information you choose right and you can already do this i can attach an ens domain to my wallet so when i log into things it it logs me in as kylereadhead.eth not as whatever numbers o x f blah blah blah blah right you can upload a unique avatar i can already do this i can use a verified nft that i can upload to my wallet in ens again is where you can do this which is ethereum uh ethereum name

service um and and now when i log into applications my nft my profile picture or my avatar it moves with me i don't have to create one every time i create a new account my name my picture it all just goes with me as i connect in to these applications so i can connect a decentralized domain name so meaning like a website or a way to accept funds instead of again the ox and these crazy long numbers i can make a name based off that that i actually own as an nft um and inside these accounts or these wallets i can load it with any digital asset that i please um as well as control the data that um i'm going to be sharing with any application that i

connect with right so once this is set up whenever you want to use the internet moving forward you simply log into your wallet once and then you move in and out of applications okay so all the information mentioned above it just moves with you from one application to another and anything that you accumulate whether that be assets like money right it could be followers it could be ratings think of something like um i don't know airbnb or uber things like that where you get ratings on like how good your customer service was or whatever that's an asset that could be useful to you in the future and so that can be stored and controlled inside of your wallet let's say testimonials maybe

you earned rewards through you know think of like credit card rewards or rewards inside of like air miles or inside of other applications these all go into your wallet and can be then taken out the rewards are not stuck and locked into that one app or that one you know website it's in your wallet that you can now leave with those rewards and do what you want with so that's cool you also can store things that you purchase right nfts digital goods skins inside of games like whatever that is it all goes into your wallet not to an account of an application so things you purchase with an application can move with you and all this can move from one app to the next and so if you're looking at the picture here i have sort of web one

which is you know your username and password so you create an account um then you have sort of web 2 which really web 2 is both username and password i think many people still use this but the image shows sign in with google sign in with facebook sign in with twitter this was sort of the first interoperable let's call it that um idea here of not having to have accounts anymore instead you have one that you just move into different applications with it's not really that you still are sharing the data with both applications at this point and also your account your one account is now it's even worse because it's controlled by one company google facebook or twitter probably not what you want to be doing if all of your assets your reputation your followers etc are all in

that one wallet not the way you want this to work um but either way you're still logging in and signing in the data is going to a third party in web 3 we have connect wallet and so that's the big term i want you to differentiate here is connect versus log in so if you think about when you go to a new website right and you need an account there what does it ask you it says log in with your username and password or create an account and if you choose create an account or you already have an account what that's doing is again creating a brand new account stored on that company's date database and now they control your account okay and they can do whatever they want with it

um which also is is difficult for applications right they actually have to go and build in these features for every single website and every single application like that gets to be a pain right because it's just it's being replicated on every single website and it makes no sense whereas the way that web 3 is doing this is through just connecting so now it removes the need for these databases in these accounts inside websites and all you're doing is just you have your own account that lives with you it is your kind of um you almost want to think about it as like your personal dashboard to the internet right when soon as you want to go to the

internet right now we go to google typically i don't know that's my main page when i get on the internet right but what's going to happen here is it might even be just your entire browser is this wallet and so when you open it up you're already logged in your browser is literally your your wallet right and now in your browser every time that you go to a site it's just auto connecting in right and it's just taking the data that's in your wallet in your browser in your account that one account and you can just start to do whatever you want with it okay so it removes that whole account thing that uh applications need to make and you just connect in and then when you disconnect you're no longer part of that application it doesn't have your data anymore right but when you're

connected it might be able to use some data because you want to give data applications sometimes it helps to make the ux and the experience much better for you right so what you might be able to do then is choose the data that you're sharing with that application but what's great is whenever you're ready to leave you just disconnect and now that data comes with you and it doesn't stay with them okay so that's kind of the idea here of connect verse log in so this is true interoperability and what the internet needs to create digital experiences more like the real world so let's take a look at some of the implications here there's a lot that can that's really going to change in the internet as a result of of these new wallets so first and i have a bullet pointed list here for those that are

listening so i'm just going to walk us through each one and i'll give some insight on each one as well so users will only need to log into one account moving forward the rest will simply be just connect after that already that seems like it's totally worth it let's just do this web 3 thing just for that one functionality and i will be completely happy uh because the amount of times that you know you got to create new accounts and manage your passwords and all this it's just it's absolutely insane um my spotify account was hacked over the weekend uh and someone just somehow got in i don't know how they found my password maybe and they changed the email and so i could still get in on my phone but they were also in so i was at the gym and i'm trying to listen to a

song and this person on the other end i don't know where he was or she and they would just play their own song and then i would play my song back and they would play theirs and i'm like this is insane that this is happening right now um but that's the way it goes and for me to get my account back i had to share credit card statements and all this stuff it's a mess okay so if required in the future and we'll see how regulation unfolds here um but you'll only need to verify or kyc you know know your customer your identity just one time for that one account that's it right and you don't have to do it for every single banking or you know financial application that you want to use um and even even better is there's a new cryptographic

technology called zero knowledge proof so i'm not going to get too deep into this right now but essentially this will allow you to verify that you are a unique human right you are the human you say you are but without actually providing any personal information whatsoever right so a lot of these applications are requiring you to upload i don't know your electricity bill and your id et cetera and this is just to prove that you are human right that you are a unique human more or less um and so there are ways that we can like that we can show that we are a unique human without actually giving away my name in my address and my electrical bill and and it's called zero knowledge

proofs um and so it's proving things without any of that knowledge so um it's it's very interesting it's a new technology um the argent wall that i talked about is actually built on top of a zero knowledge proof layer so basically these are being built currently as layer twos for ethereum um there will be many use cases for this i think this is one of the most uh exciting technology in the space there is an article that's linked inside this article on zero knowledge proofs if you want to learn more about them but i expect you're going to hear a lot more about them over the coming years though it also might not be i mean they call them zks and probably we just won't even know we'll just use them we don't know actually what they're called um but they're gonna do cool things for um identity um and uh

and that in the future so moving from one application to another will become frictionless so imagine um imagine your twitter followers can be ported over to your instagram follower or to your instagram account seamlessly right think about how much of a pain that is if all of a sudden i'm like i'm kind of over instagram i don't want to use it anymore or i don't like what instagram does i don't like meta and facebook so i want to use a different application right well if i have 20 000 followers on instagram i'm not i'm probably not gonna do that because i'm stuck over here on instagram because that's where my followers are that's where my my um potential uh customers are right um and so in my community is in my audience so i can't really move elsewhere web 3

allows us to people will start to just follow your wallet right or your profile and you can go from one social account to the other lens protocol is one that's sort of building the the infrastructure for this to happen where you can build as many social platforms as you want on top of lens and then you can just move from one to the other and so let's say you like what this social platform's doing more because i don't know it's more like twitter and it's more text based you can go there and then all of a sudden a new thing hits and it's like video is better you can just move over there and your followers can go with you over there and that's really cool it's somewhat similar to how email works right whereas um you know i can send emails through gmail through outlook through whatever it

doesn't matter what platform people are they can still get my email it still works somewhat seamlessly and i can move from my emails from one platform to the other sort of similar to that not exactly payments become seamless and without the need for trusted intermediaries across any application right now every time you ever make a payment online unless you're using crypto at the moment although most of the time it's still this way but you're using something like stripe or paypal or whatever else these are all third-party intermediaries and we have to trust that they will do what i say they will do right there are many times that people buy products let's say using paypal and paypal has a different refund policy than the the business itself and so if

someone um tries to get a refund through let's say our business i can say no you're past the deadline you don't meet the rules whatever but they can go just do a refund and paypal and so long as it fits their rules they'll just do the refund and all of a sudden i lost out on money for no reason um it's also if you live in certain countries paypal doesn't work there and neither does stripe so all of a sudden some many people millions of people in the world if not more are blocked from a lot of commerce a lot of products and services in this world just because stripe doesn't want to use it or it might not be stripes fault but because the underlying technology that stripe uses right so again we have to trust it's not permissionless once we are only using

our wallets this is all gone we no longer need have a need for intermediaries anymore we can just move payments um seamlessly and permissionlessly and that is really exciting so you own and you custody all of your internet assets right this is of course one of the promises of crypto we all are aware of this but similar to the physical here's the best way to explain this similar to physical custody of cash or your passport where like no one knows if i give someone some cash or my passport is in my hand no one can just like delete that or block that or take that from me right this is not true of anything on the internet right now okay and so with these wallets um i now can custody let's say my digital assets my

data my identity my followers my you know business ratings right again think airbnb or uber these are all important things that could have been deleted and now they can't once they're all inside of our web3 wallet your privacy settings your notifications and other unique design or functionalities that you desire while using the internet may also be interoperable across each application now this isn't really a thing we have yet but if you think about it how many times do you create an account and you i mean you upload your picture of course you upload your name maybe you put in a bio um maybe you choose night mode or day maybe you have notifications where you don't ever get emails or you don't ever make a noise um or whatever

you have to do that every with every single application and that's frustrating well once i just choose those settings on my wallet and i connect in those those um those privacy and notification settings will just interact with the application and it will just automatically happen and work as i intend it to and i don't have to change that for every single website you control what personal or ac activity your personal or data applications or other that other users can see or use we have some spelling errors there will fix but basically what i mean is that you control your personal data or your activity data that applications can use that's the way i meant to say it

and an example of this already just to kind of paint a picture is is brave browser if you've ever used brave and brave the way it works is um it's sort of like a web 2.5 application it's still a centralized organization etc but basically what you do is you have control of your data and so um users can select if they want to receive ads from third parties and if they do select that then they are paid in a cryptocurrency um if they choose to see it and the cryptocurrency here is um is called bat bat and they can choose to be paid to see the ads if they choose not to they don't want to see ads that's fine they will never see an ad and they just don't get paid and where

does the money come from it comes from the advertisers so the advertisers are paying direct to the user now it's not direct yet but this is the way it's going to go as i said brave is still a web 2.5 company let's call it but it's split so the uh the users get some of the funds and then brave gets some of the funds um so for example on facebook facebook gets all of the funds right so a big change there what could be even cooler is you think about this as we protect our user data you know you might think a lot of people are just not going to want to see ads we're all going to block our data but here's the thing big corporations and governments they need this stuff they need to see our data and if all of a sudden we take it from them they're

going to want it you know what they're going to do they're going to pay for it okay and so all of a sudden what's going to happen is there's going to be a market an open free market for your data and so in the future you may have the opportunity to sell your data to them instead and not just sell it like in the way that brave does it but you might be able to put auctions right maybe you're a certain um uh type of person and you have data that as x company or x government really really wants and needs and so you say well you can't have my data or you can't see this unless you pay x amount for this data kind of thing and we'll see it'll be an open marketplace but i would bet this is where it's going to go and we all start

to earn revenues off of our data because it is a valuable asset right data is the new oil we've been saying for years except if i had a bunch of oil i could sell it and i would make some money from it i can't do that with my data well that's what's coming and this i think is going to be a massive industry in the future i'm really excited to see how that plays out so as we can see from the list above this technology offers users more than just a simple login experience web3 puts control and ownership into the hands of the users and forces the corporations to do what's best for the users right if they choose not to users can simply move to a competitor with essentially no friction and that to me is massive i believe that this will have

a massive impact on the relationship that businesses will have with their customers ultimately creating a better user experience across the internet and potentially this is what we hope a more fair and community driven digital experience if you think about this right now everybody hates facebook right everyone hates it but we all still use it there's more than two billion people on multiple of facebook platforms why because we have no choice where are we gonna go we can't really go anywhere else right and so they have this sort of monopoly on on social and communication and they can treat us however they want and we can't do anything about it um but in web 3 as this gets built out people can leave easily really easily and it's

literally to the point of just disconnect and then connect to another one that's how simple it is and so this is going to force protocols and applications and corporations to do what's right for their users because the users will just leave right it's similar to if we think about the way it works in the real world where governments are supposed to do what's right for their for their people right and i in an ideal world if governments don't do what's right for their people they leave okay we see this right now a lot of people are not happy with what russia's doing many of them have fled to turkey into georgia and other countries around there now not as many as i'm sure um they would like to i'm sure many more would like to leave but it's very very challenging to

leave if you have a job a home a family etc in that nation state and you don't like the rules it's very difficult for you to go anywhere right and this is what's also true in web 2 online web3 flips that on its head and allows us to just move to the places that we are treated best and to me that i think is one of the most exciting things that's going to come out of web 3. um hopefully you guys uh had a great uh experience from this episode and you've learned a lot from this episode i'd love to hear other ideas that you think um are gonna come from uh these web 3 wallets and sort of this interoperability aspect so join our discord and hit me up in there and let me know one that you listen to this podcast um

and two let me know some of your own bullet points what are the things you're thinking of this is not an exhaustive list this is just what i was thinking of as i was writing um we'll see where this goes right we're still years from this i mean it's already there it exists it's not for all of the applications we use every day but it's coming but i'd love to hear what you guys think might also happen or what you've seen being built out there so either hit me up on twitter please share this episode and let me know you listen to it and give me your thoughts your feedback we'll be discussing it in the discord so make sure you're there as well um but uh thank you everyone for listening to this episode and um i will see you in the next one later

this week take care friends and let's hope for greener markets uh in the near future thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point

of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one