Season 3 - EP. 2 - Ethereum Attestation Service w/ Steve Dakh

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish them a season at a time five to 10 episodes at a time every couple months this season is impact season we are in green pill season 3 and it's all about how can we measure the meme of impact equals profit what are the most interesting experiments in ideas in Impact tracking how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that elevate impactful Builders and how do we move from virtue signaling about impact to cryptoeconomic proof of virtue these are the themes in Impact season

2024 one special thing that we're doing this season is we're allowing you to collect this episode all episodes during the season are available onchain allowing the green pill Community to collect them and the proceeds for the collection of the nfts go directly to support public goods and collectors may be able to vote on future episodes and other fun perks supporting green pill go to pods. medgreen pill to find all the episodes and start collecting if you want to learn more visit our website at Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter our episode today is with Steve Dak who is a founder of the ethereum attestation service I am excited about Steve because I think that e attestation service could

be a data layer in which impact attestations acrew reference each other reference impactful projects and the impact that they created and we together we can build a web of trust of different projects and see how impactful they actually are so I think that EAS is going to be one of The Primitives that we are building impact on in 2024 as we've got all of these different Primitives coming online and projects coming online that all need to track impact EAS is a common standard that projects like getcoin giveth optimism clear fund can all use in order to consume information about which projects have impact and which ones don't so this episode with Steve and Carl was really

quite amazing because we got to talk about the different ways that EAS could be used in order to track impact and create the meme of impact equals profit more in the real world so 2024 is impact season and I'm really enjoying this episode Steve I think you're going to as well hey Steve hey Carl Hey Kevin Steve can you tell us about ethereum attestation Service uh yeah sure so uh ethereum attestation service is a uh Bas Slayer op Source public good for allowing any entity to attest about anything on or offchain it's uh open source and has no token and it's simply a new primitive um

for evm blockchains that allows any entity to attest or essentially say anything about anything I'm kind of curious to hear a bit more about how es got it start I feel there's a version that I heard about where it's been around for quite some time but now it's gotten some renewed life yeah it's a it's a good story so I mean just like to go like a little bit further back um I've been like in in the blockchain space since 2011 I built some of the first Bitcoin wallets in 2013 I built like the first ever Chrome extension wallet called crypto kit uh in 2013 uh and uh Rush wallet which was an easy to use Bitcoin wallet and then in December 2013 I met well I met vitalic

actually before that but uh vitalic had told me about ethereum uh for the first time in in Vegas December 2013 and then in January I was in the ethereum house with with everybody so like back then you know even then we were thinking about you know how could you solve like you know decentralized identity and reputation decentralized like uh real estate and you know voting and everything and you know we were super excited about it um you know like nine years later we're not really you know using it to the extent that we probably hoped that we would and so you know um EAS was like something that you know it originally I I came I started working on

it in7 there was a a hackathon in Toronto um and uh it and and I decided I was going to build an attestation kind of platform just all came to me while I was there and uh the the issue though was two of the judges were uh uport employees and so like like that this attestation platform was kind of like competitive to theirs and you know they didn't really they they didn't rate me so I uh they didn't rate me well so I didn't win wi and so you know I thought it was a super important project and then didn't kind of I kind of didn't touch it for three years and then in December 2020 uh kind of got uh hit up my partner

and I said like hey like you know it would be awesome to actually build this out like you know because we were working on uh building wallets and I was think saying like you know wallets are cool and all but there's so many of them and like you know you know what you know what else is in your wallet your identity and your reputation that would be cool let's solve like a a real hard problem and um you know at the time like there was just like any identity platform that existed in the blockchain space is just mostly like a kind of like a glorified kyc company with its own like kind of proprietary mechanism for verifying users and then passing that data to some like exchange or entity that's that's verifying the user but that's that's not real identity right

that's not real identity reputation and I was really interested in like how do we really solve you know philosophically you know decentralized identity and reputation how do we solve it because you know it's super complex like my identity is you know both you know it's relative uh in the sense that like you know Carl might think I'm a a good programmer but maybe someone else doesn't um and uh it's contextual like Carl might think I'm a good programmer but not a good dancer right and so like how do you kind of how do you like you know uh combine these pieces into something that you know because these pieces are are like parts of your identity your identity isn't like some ident identity card your identity is

like all of these things that have happened you know throughout your life and so I started to think like you know what you know what actually is identity um and then started to think like well at some point I uh had no identity and then I did so that you know started to think about what was that point when I you you know first did and then I realized like when I was born my mom named me Steve you know you could say that she attested uh to my name and then I went to school and the teachers they attested to my grades and the the kids in the class they could have attested to whether they liked me or not um the the government attested to my uh passport and my driver's license the

university attests to your diploma and you know like your employer could attest to your employee M or whether you're a good employee or not and so actually like we realized you can actually represent something as complex as identity and reputation as an aggregate of these attestations and so if you really want to solve this problem on like a real scale you need to start with a base layer where anybody can attest about anything and so like EAS itself isn't an identity uh protocol or or layer it's just a base layer for entities to attest and from those attestations one could aggregate an identity but the we're not trying to solve the identity problem directly we're just providing the tools that that

make it possible to because your identity is made up of all these little Lego blocks right these simple Lego blocks that we think we believe are attestations and you know if I show you a bunch of attestations that might be relevant to you if say maybe I want to go into business with you and I show you a bunch of attestations from entities that you care about saying good things about me and all these different you know uh categories you may decide to work with me so you know so back to the story in 2020 we we we kind of like redid it with the with a schema structure and the attestations basically in 2020 we built what we have today and uh we first like announced it at uh at uh

ECC at in around the same time in 2020 and uh it was at the same time that vitalic uh came out and started talking about sbts and so every it caught everybody's attention and so EAS kind of went off to the side and I feel like maybe it was a little bit too early and then also you know our our our team it's right now it's only four of us it's it was only three at the at the time and we had it was just all Tech dudes with no like we didn't have anyone that was good at design or marketing or you know stuff like that and so now we have uh Bryce on our team that that I met about like a year and a half ago or or so and he joined EAS um and and like kind of

restarted EAS I restarted EAS back in like November last year and then we launched it in March and so um this time it's really picked up so this is the third time third time is a charm I think I think we built something really cool this time and and we built like a really good ux for developers and and the tooling is really good and the documentation is really good so I think you know this one's the the charm for sure yeah it feels like it's a very generalizable primitive but also potentially very deep uh as well as being very generalizable I'm looking at this graphic on your website where you have the settlement layer like ethereum and then on top of that the attestation layer and then above that is the application layer so

we're kind of looking at a protocol for attestations uh about anything that can serve as a data store and um I think that one of the things that's really powerful about having the attestations in their own protocol in their own layers the interoperability that creates between different applications gitcoin and optimism could both send attestations on the same protocol but also consume attestations from each other which is just going to be really key if we're going to build this network effect of attestations about about impact together um I'm wondering if you could tell me uh a little bit about the technical design of of EAS and how you designed it to be both generalizable but also deeply impactful

yeah so so one of the key things when we were designing is we wanted to presuppose as little as possible we wanted to build the system to be like as as simple as possible and presuppose as little as possible because the more you presuppose the more you limit uh possible applications and so EAS is actually really simple um there's there's two base uh smart contracts for ES there's this schema registry and then the attestation Ledger and so the the schema L the SCH registry allows any entity to register any schema or you can say a type of attestation so you know attesting to a vote is would be one using one schema attesting to someone

being an R RPG of badge holder is is another schema anyone can create a schema it's completely permissionless every schema gets its own unique identifier uh and anytime someone makes an attestation they have to you know select the schema they're attesting to a particular schema and that's schema also describes the data structure of what is in that attestation so maybe something simple like retr public goods funding it just says you know it's like a Boolean true or false that you're a retroactive public goods holder but maybe if it's like you know something detailing you know maybe some uh contribution that you made maybe there's like a few rows like maybe one of the columns is one of the

fields is you know type of project and you know like how much hour have been put into it you can have as many fields as you want and designed you know to whatever level and then additionally uh schemas can also have optionally a resolver or smart contract attached to it and what this does is anytime an ATA station is made of that schema it will run through that uh smart contract so you can do interesting things like for example uh you can make it so that only certain users can attest maybe only users that have specific addess tations can ATT test you can say um uh if an attestation happens in these rules pass you know an nft is generated

or a token is sent you can write whatever logic you want and so that was this is what allows EAS to you know be kind of extendable to whatever level that you want users can attest all they're doing is attesting but you know you can have like smart contract logic that you know maybe that attestation is an oracle uh attesting to a particular fact that happened and uh that attestation now is is is is being like automatically pays out the the Oracle for a reward for for telling the truth or for for submitting a a response and so that's the basic lay layout there's a schema registry and then the attestation Ledger and every attestation just

references a schema additionally any attestation itself attestations can reference other attestations and this is huge like so say uh I attest that I met Kevin um you know rather than Kevin also attesting that he met me that would create two different timestamps and like maybe we're not talking about the same meet maybe we met two separate times what if I attest that I made Kevin and then Kevin attests using a schema that just says is true and then references my attestation so now what happened is I attested that I met Kevin and Kevin attested that that attestation is true and so this kind of composability is is uh in is super powerful um attestations also can be revocable which is super

huge like if I attest to something you know and I want to revoke it I'm not necessarily making it go away like an nft might just disappear but I want to kind of I want it to still exist but it should just appear as revoked maybe I had U some sort of like position at a company and my position was revoked but it was there at some point you know and I want to have this record um attestations also can uh expire and so that's also uh powerful and one of the coolest things is attestations can also be made offchain gasless Le and can also be timestamped and revoked offchain and that's super powerful because you know and we think like that this this kind of ability is what's going to help you know

onboard you know the rest of the world that might not be not might might not want to hold eth but still want to participate and use blockchain technology being able to sign using their like ethereum key for example um so we're we're we're super uh excited about offchain ad stations that are completely portable and verifiable uh by anyone and so you know we have we have that and then we have the EAS Explorer which is like a front-end website which allows you it's like The Ether scan of attestations allows you to like easily review and see all attestations that are happening easily create schemas uh and and verify on and offchain attestations uh super easily one of the things I think is elegant here um is the

trade-off between generalizability and really constraining constraining things further up the stack so by using ethereum attestation Service uh I basically have a protocol that I can use for attestations but there's so many different types of things that you can attest to in the world that um by adding in schemas above that then I'm basically able to constrain the variables and the types of variables that will be uh in in each type of a attestation schema so uh as I go to the EAS website I can uh and I create an attestation it's asking me which schema I want to use and so I can use a signed document schema a username schema is an accredited investor schema

and what I like about this is that it if if I'm a developer that's integrating with e these constraints help me know something useful about the attestation that's being made while still getting the benefit of the generalizability of the ethereum attestation service so just that tradeoff between those constraints and the generalizability feels like a really elegant thing to me yeah I think so too um it's uh you know EAS like I said is not an identity platform you can use out to stations you know for supply chain you know verification maybe you know when you when you buy something in the future you get your you know new phone there's like an attestation of that phone like being initiated and then all these referenced

attestations of it moving throughout you know different processes and different uh entities kind of coming into contact with it and attesting to something about it one of the things that I observed most recently with retr pgf which used attestations quite heavily in the round design and the experience from applying to participate in ROP pgf to becoming a bolder to actually signaling which projects you wanted to vote for was that once you start making one attestation you immediately think about how you can connect other attest St do that one and so it really highed the power of composability across multile stations and so I'm kind of curious if um there

are other examples like retrop pgf of taking one attestation and then layering on more and more attestations on top of that yeah so I mean well so one one one kind of uh example that we like to talk about we built this um example application it's not meant to be serious but uh speak. org like speak and then e.org um it's a it's like a like social network kind of app it's kind of like like a like a Twitter uh where every post is an attestation every like is an attestation referencing a post and every comment is an attestation

referencing uh uh uh referencing the post also and so you can have like you know a comment is just a post referencing another post and so you can have posts continuously referencing each other in for infinity and you know you can you can just build a UI where you know you have the whole thread and you know you can build uh you know all sorts of interesting uh kind of things like for impact I think it's like a huge one right because you don't want to ever have just like one trusted party so like you know you have one entity maybe ATT test that they've created some sort of impact and then perhaps you have other entities who have been witnessed to that and they also attest and then like overall when someone looks at you know

this impact attestation they can decide for themselves based on who attested like and whether or not they're they're valuable and like that's actually like brings me to like an important Point like if we really want to have like true uh decentralized like relative reputation and Trust uh we need to start we we need we need to we need to be able to kind of need to be able to attest to each other and then aggregate all of this in some sort of way to be able to kind of make these uh decisions but it's actually very natural and much much more natural than it's instead of like a government score saying this person is a 500 you would say well like how who is this person to me right like uh this person is attached to me through through

this entity and this entity you know three three hops away and uh so therefore I there's some sort of weight positive or negative depending on what were the attestations that I can kind of derive from that and that'll be like super interesting when in the future when you want to find like a plumber or just you meet someone you can say like who is this person related to me are they connected to my network in some way and then like really be able to kind of see and understand uh the the connection in a way that you could uh you couldn't really do before yeah I think that's really powerful another thing that I observed during the retrop pgf round was that people who wanted something that the current frontend didn't offer they would just go in look directly at the

attestation data and either do their own analysis or build their own front end on top of that and so in addition to making it so that you could stack different atst stations on top of each other if you wanted to curate the data or if you wanted to visualize it in different ways all you have to do was just go directly to the source and then you liberated from the front end yeah and and yeah like we never wanted we never wanted like our provider to be like the main one we we want it to be as open as possible that's why we open source our indexer we open source like all all all of the codes so that anybody can easily like aggregate all this data for themselves and build their own uis and in the same way like um you know you you

you can technically use Unis swap Through The Ether scan interface but you probably wouldn't it's probably not recommended it's better to build like a custom uh UI you know uh basically for that for for a use case uh rather than having to reely on you know this kind of developer tool Carl wonder if you have any more questions on this on this line of questioning if not I I have a new Direction I want to take us in so uh green pill season 3 is all about impact tracking and impact attestations basically how can we move from people funding public goods that they know about to having data about which public goods are actually having impact and so um I see I see ethereum attestation service has potentially a very important primitive in tracking impact because uh

you can create a a a um decentralized set of impact attestations about which public goods are good and which ones are having impact one powerful data structure that I've used in the past is called a web of trust so basically you have an attestation hooked up to an attestation hooked up to an attestation and through looking at who the actors are and the context in which they've given the attestation you can basically uh flow trust through the network this is how Google does its search results page rank is a form of web of trust trust where uh if vitalic doca links to my post then that gives me a certain amount of page Rank and if I link out to Carl's post then I can then pay that forward to him and so on so web of trust is an important I think primitive for

how we're going to separate shitty attestations or fake attestations from the ones that are actually plausible um uh so so I just want to put that Vision on the table web of trust impact attestations on E I think is going to be a really important primitive uh as we start attesting to which grants have had had impact hypers sorts have had impact and I'm wondering if you have any reactions to that uh just a general question to start Steve and then maybe I have a a couple more specific questions to ask from there so what's your reaction to web of Trust on EAS is the is the reductionist question there yeah so I mean just to go even further back like the original web of trust was kind of pgp based and uh it was back in the day you you had this protocol called pgp

which still exists allows you to send private messages and and users also had their own you know uh public private key pairs uh but the that web of trust is kind of very limited like at what what context you know like if someone trusts someone does that mean that they trust them with money does it mean that they trust them to like you know as a friend like what does that actually mean right and with EAS attestations you can have real context right like maybe someone shows up on this web of trust of attestations as like reputable but maybe they're only reputable for one specific use case you know and that's and that's something that you'd be able to understand looking at attestations that could be about anything right um you know you might look at an attestation

from someone and it's like their you know Mickey Mouse Club membership or something you know and that's not you know really uh valuable to to to someone but to someone else it might be and uh yeah I I think the aggregation that and also the important part of this web of trust is being able to kind of derive a relative score rather than kind of like a Global uh a global score and and so I'm I'm 100% uh on on this on this Vision I agree I I think that uh and I'm excited for uh applications and pl platforms to be kind of aggregating all these all these interesting attestations that come out and derive really interesting kind of uh relative uh scores and and metrics like

for example not only how much should I trust this entity but how far away is this person from me you know attestation or like from attestation hops um and also like you know maybe maybe the same person is connected to me through five different individuals for many hops but because in general all those individuals have passed like a positive kind of score downward to this entity I should see him as somewhat positive right with obvious like diminishing returns as you go further out but those diminishing returns can be almost like reversed when you have more connected entities that are also far away from that user and then also if maybe you assign negative

trust to somebody and they attest to someone positively you know my enemy the friend of my enemy is my enemy right so it should also show up a little bit negative the funny emergent uh prediction about the web of trust uh the web of dis distrust um web of trust there's something profound that you said in there that I just want to pull out uh with Google there's only one page rank because centralization monolith um but with ethereum attestation service we could have oh let's well instead of page rank let's called impact rank uh we could have aaki impact rank we could have gitcoin impact rank we could have Carl impact Rank and because the data the data structure is is open source then you can have many different impact

ranks that are on on top of there and I feel that there's this EB and flow between a very reductionist um Kevin's impact rank is 99 um which is you know I'm collapsing all the things I've done in the world into one dimension of impact but for that Simplicity is a feature because you can say oh I'm doing a um a getcoin grants round on Kevin impact Rank and therefore I can just rank everyone on this one-dimensional number but that doesn't reduce everyone's whole identity down to one number because we're going to have multiple we're gonna have the data is still available and we can have many different types of impact that can be calculated on it so there's this EB and flow between reductionist simplistic scoring which can bootstrap the network effect and usefulness the network and then looking at people in high

dimensionality when we've got the time and wherewithal to do so that I think is derived from the plurality of scores that can be created by an e style web of trust and that feels like a profound step forward in web of trust to me assuming that this Vision comes to fruition IM imagine imagine in the future right you just you know you you you uh you have your identity or your you know your private key pair and then you attest maybe even privately right you can attest offchain just to the people that you trust like I trust my mom this much I trust my brother this much I trust my friends this much if everybody does this um if if everybody does this or enough people do that anytime you look at someone that's in the network even if you don't know who

they are even if they're further far away you should be able to derive some sort of relative uh relative score right and and and and then be able to make decisions based on that score and then like imagine you make a decision based on that relative score but then you get screwed over you can then look over look back and say like well why why did that person have such a high score and you can see all the connections and you can be like oh well actually I shouldn't really trust that guy tune him down tune this guy up tune him a little bit this to get better kind of uh information and so I I think that's that that's that's going to be like the biggest if you really want a real web of trust it has to be a decentralized web of trust that

calculates uh scores that are relative right we're we're going to also have you also have like the equifax's and of the world that'll you know they'll aggregate their own Global scores and you'll have you'll just kind of trust them and businesses will trust them but you know when if you have so many entities that all derive their own scores you you have a choice you know and and uh and it's it's not even that I think in the future everyone's not going to be always attesting someone might say you know what I trust Kevin aukee uh I trust the people that he attests to you know I don't really I don't really know who to trust I just trust the people that I like you know and then then if you if you if for some reason someone ends up doing a business deal with somebody and

they get screwed they'd be like well why did I why did I why did I trust him oh well like this guy actually wasn't trusted by Kevin he was trusted by someone else and you know you you can you can really like clearly see what's going on and and another thing to notice is like we attest all the time like attest it sounds crazy like an attestation sounds like a really weird kind of abstract concept but we're attesting all the time I'm I'm attesting right now by speaking when I make a post eyot test when I sign a document iot test there's just never been like kind of a generalized uh way to do that digitally in like assigned way that anybody can easily verify and and and attest with so yeah I mean one of the things which is important here when it comes to who you

trust is is the question of who's going to watch these Watchmen and so if in a traditional system like an eoa it's very difficult for me to actually understand what formula they're using to come up with my credit rating it's very difficult to understand if they're using it fairly if they're being good Steward of the data in a decentralized system it's actually the opposite which is that anybody has the ability to be a Watchmen and and to watch this actor and see if they're actually doing their job they have the ability to audit the formula to propose a new one and so I think in order to become an eifax or someone who's going to have that kind of clout you have to operate with a very very different mindset which is you need to you know

your your whole intent should be to maximize the um you know the credibility and the neutrality of what you bring to this as opposed to coming up with a proprietary algorithm that only you know and your whole business depends on keeping that secret another thing it'll be in different categories right like so like you know you might have a like a low score in like you know engineering but maybe a high score as a another thing that's interesting like it's not just one credit score it's like you have a score in so many different things and and also this this also allows for stuff like you know un being able to have like under collateralized loans as well right it's something that

you know we don't have in Defi and in the real world you know you can trust you the the the the loaners will trust you because they know they can wreck your reputation if you have one um whereas like it's something that you can't have but imagine if I basically can risk all my attestations right imagine I have all these attestations that I got from all these trusted people in the space and then now I attest Carl I want to I want to take a loan from you and then you attest referencing that attestation sure I'll service that loan and we come into an agreement and then I don't pay it back you can then attest referencing that referencing those the station saying I didn't pay back the loan anyone looking at that chain will see that I agreed to do a go in agreement with you you you you you

attested that you agreed we went into agreement and then now something bad happened and you can follow this kind of uh Trail yeah it's it's interesting once I started to see the world as being a series of attestations and I'm sure you do too and when you look at existing like Legacy processes I don't know if if you or anyone who's close to you has applied for a green card or for citizenship for the first time and effectively what the process entails is just getting all of these attestations about you from different parts of the government so your birth certificate your marriage certificate your uh identity stamps where you've traveled Etc and when I look at these things again it's hard to imagine a world where

those are actually replaced with attestations but at the same time what you're looking at is just a series of attestations that have been made arbitrarily by these these entities so I'm curious how you kind of reconcile kind of the state of where things are right now and this new world where everything is just an attestation I mean you know like you said like we we already these are all already like attestations they just use like you know specific like proprietary formats that like you know not everybody can verify not everybody can make and so it's just it creates inefficiencies um and also like you know these documents they're not super like you know they can be counterfeited you know there you can't break a digital

signature I'm surprised that actually you know we're we're we're in 20123 and and we're not signing everything you know with with uh digital signatures but you can say that you know in just the last few years because of you know all the all the entrance into the crypto Market that all have wallets now everyone so many people now have a private key uh pair and can and can now start a testing and I think this is actually the Big Boost that helps get everyone uh to start a testing because like now if the same guy who just you know he has his nft or his coinbase account can now attest using a a private key that only he owns and this was not uh possible before that there's never

been like a mass you know key generation event and I would say that you know 2017 uh 2017 was and also uh 2020 I guess um on the on the subject of starting to see everything like attestations uh this is something that's happened to me since actually I listened to your bankless episode Steve in which you were talking about all reputation being attestations and uh Carl and I were on a Twitter thread in which I was talking about how the next I was talking about this season of green pill the one that we're recording right now and and I said Carl's going to co-host with me and Carl responded I'm looking forward to it and I was just posting back to him I said ATT test that you're looking forward to it on chain or GTFO and then

he did he uh he made a like schema and then he attested to it and responded and then there was a whole chain of people doing e attestations about their attestations um and one I I mean I don't know this is this is kind of a sh post question comment but uh the the the thing that I thought that was really profound was that it was so easy for him to create a new schema and to create the attestation and um and and the the final comment on the thread is thus a new social media giant was born a web 3 social media so it's just really easy to once you see the whole world as attestations to actually use e to do that and and I think that that's cool that you know that's actually a good

point you know one of the things right is like ethereum promised promises all these amazing things to decentralize everything but the average company or average person who wants to actually you utilize ethereum they're not smart contract developers and also you know they don't want they don't want to they don't want to hire developers to kind of come up with their concept they essentially want to attest all these companies want to attest and there's no simple way to do it and without build and everybody's just kind of building their own proprietary mechanisms for doing so and that just kind of uh makes more silos and and reduces the interoperability um and so like you know we all just need to be you know attesting with kind of like one you know language essentially have you thought at

all about private attestation say I want to attest to something about Carl but I want to ZK it or I don't want to reveal everything about it on chain uh what does that design space look like so so EAS doesn't presuppose what kind of data you will test with right and so you canest you know with zero zero knowledge proof data for example um what we do what we do have right is is are so we have a few different tools so offchain attestations by default are completely private right so say like Kevin attests to that he that he trusts me and I have this offchain attestation that I can just show Carl or I can show someone else right it's not a zero knowledge proof but it's like it's akin

to like you know uh like a signed document that you have from someone that's provable you know and and being able to uh kind of uh pass it around another thing that we have is the ability to do like selective revealing of data so we have a tool built into the EAS scan indexer and our SDK where you can attest to a bunch of data and then we kind of we meriz it in in a way that's like very secure and we only ATT you only attest to just the merel root hash of the data and then you can later prove to any entity pieces of that data but it's it's not a zero knowledge proof so with with in the sense that like when you share the data you're sharing the

actual data you're not sharing like like a signal about it um the so the the with EAS offchain atst stations right now they're they're they're ecdsa signed they're signed with EIP 712 with your with your wallet uh because of this creating zero knowledge proofs off of the data is a little bit computationally expensive at the moment and if you notice all the firms right now like polygon ID and others that generate zero knowledge proofs from uh like usually verifiable credentials all those verifiable credentials are signed using a en a mechanism that is not like not evm uh signing mechanism so I'm like super bullish that and and you know I've

been this has been kind of confirmed to me by multiple people working on ZK that uh the possibility to make zero knowledge proofs off of uh ecdsa signed uh data will be much more efficient soon and then that would be really cool because then you can have all these offchain attestations from all these different entities and then I can prove to you uh Kevin attested to me that he met me but I'm not going to tell you which address you know it happened to you know you can do things like that um and I'm super excited about that and we have like multiple you know projects that are playing around with stuff like that on top of amazing uh hey Carl we probably got to

land the plane in the next seven minutes or so so uh next question is for you if you want it one question that I wanted to think about is if if you look at Es as a as a primitive and if we wanted to measure the impact of es itself in adoption or becoming something which is widely adopted I'm kind of curious how you would think about that task of like what would be the the the tool set to actually measure the impact of e on the broader ethereum ecosystem or even the broader digital public goods design space I mean generally generally just watching the adoption who who adopts it right and um and and you know it's not

just the attestation count but who's attesting or is it just one entity that's attesting to a bunch of people or is it a bunch of entities attesting you know to each other like with retroactive public goods funding every application every applicant had to make an attestation uh they also received every rpgfan um no one's really like attesting to useless data which is which is really cool to see um coinbase adopting EAS was probably like the the biggest thing

that's that's happened recently and uh they have lots of uh plans for for using attestations within you know the base and coinbase ecosystem and so that's that's super exciting um I really believe 2024 will see like a ton of attestation uh use cases um on top of EAS and you know you can only really you can only measure you can only me measure impact relatively right and so like relative to you if the company that you think are valuable are attesting using EAS and you know like those attestations have real value in the ecosystem I think that that's EAS is having impact then is there anything we didn't ask

that you want to say Steve um just just that you know you know we built EAS as a public good um you know because we really want to we really care to solve this problem and you know um it's it's tokenless it's permissionless it's completely open source um in the same way that like you know because if we if we didn't do that someone else is just going to make another version and then make you know tie tie token make it a little bit cheaper a little bit different and we don't want more fragmentation we want to get rid of the fragmentation and we're not trying to replace the identity companies in fact a lot of these platforms are actually implementing EAS rather than you know continuing to build on their you know

kind of siloed uh infrastructure we want to bring everybody together and actually what it does it helps these companies because it it improves the value of their attestations because you know if if their attestations is only useful within their Silo you know what's the value of that versus like being able to use that attestation outside of it if tcpip or email you know had a token or you know had a profit motive I don't think we'd be using it you know in that same form so that's another important thing one of the cool flywheels that we were talking about in our pre-episode record or pre-episode was this idea that EAS if it's a public good and it enables more impact of public goods and it gets funded by

retroactive public goods funding we've kind of taken out the leg of the stool that needs a token in in order to to be monetized you know not all everything that has a token is for monetization reasons but this flywheel of of better impact tracking meaning more public goods funding and then e itself gets funding would be really cool and I know you all were in I think maybe have been in a getcoin round so uh it'll be cool to see that Flywheel spinning yeah we're really excited about that for sure it definitely you know it's definitely useful to us because you know we have been you know we're we're self-funded we self-funded this whole project because we really you know care about it and you know it's amazing that you know things like rpgfan gitcoin grants exist

definitely like is it definitely helps keep us uh going for sure so I just want to place before we wrap up in the listeners mind this vision of a web of trust in which we're all attesting to each other and then we can create scores denoting how Cil resistant different wallets are and how much impact they've had on all these different impact vectors there'll be a plurality of scores there for the plurality of values that humans have and I think that there's going to be this is my prediction and also a call to action for the audience there's going to be a bunch of things that can be built in between EAS and gitcoin grants gitcoin passport EAS and R pgf EAS and every other public goods funding thing out there so call to

action for the builders get to know these Primitives and find ways to stitch them together uh there's an opportunity I think for Builders to build uh I would put make the analogy mortar between the bricks so if we've got all these different money Legos out there how do we connect them in ways that create the meme of impact equals profit and in more impact funding for public goods so that's what I will end on as as a call to action for the builders let's find a way to stitch these things together Carl you have any last questions or anything you want to end on I think that was a great way of ending it thank you so much cool Steve thanks so much for joining looking forward to seeing EAS grow in 2024 thank you Kevin thank you Carl all right we just heard from Steve

Dak I am excited about ethereum attestation service because I think it is a primitive we can use to track impact and to approach the meme of impact equals profit thanks again for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world like Steve like ethereum an testation service like the people who are building on these Primitives again all episodes during the season are available on chain the green pill Community can collect these episodes go to pods. medgreen pill to find the episodes and start collecting as you're closing out the podcast please remember to make an offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and

review please gratify us with likes and share this episode with friends that's the source of all our powers that's how we build the green pill movement that's how we build this network society that is using crypto for positive some games peace and love see you next [Music] time