Self Protocol: Prove-moi if You Can

Transcript

[Music] Hello everyone. Uh my name is Maricosvki. It's really wonderful to be here. Uh and today we're going to be talking about self protocol. Uh prove mwa if you can. Uh if you like this talk, you can find uh self-protocol at self-protocol on Twitter uh and at self.xyz. Uh and you can find me uh at marik_. So I saved you the uh pain of having to remember how to spell my last name on Twitter. It's just me_.

And you know, it's the afternoon and, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, had had a probably a nice uh nice lunch and are probably getting a little tired. It's a hot day as well. Uh so I wanted to make this fun for you guys. I wanted to make it interactive and engaging. So I have a little game. It's called Guess the Country. Um, and so the whole idea behind this game is throughout my slides, I'm going to be showing little country shapes in random locations in on the slide. So you have to kind of scan around to find the shape. H, and uh, the whole game is for you to yell out as quickly as possible the name of the country that you see.

And so this isn't arbitrary. Each of these countries that you'll see are countries that are supported by self-protocol. And so it's a fun way for you guys to uh, learn which countries are supported. We actually cover the majority of countries. Uh but it's still fun to see all of them um as shapes throughout the slides. Uh and you know, just to warm you guys up. France over here. We got one in the front. And it's good that you are fast because this time I'm going to raise the stakes. I've done this game before uh but I want to raise the stakes a little bit. Uh this time, uh there is actually a prize. So yesterday at the speaker reception, uh, I participated in a raffle and I won a free glider tour for

two and I'm going to pay it forward. So the person who guesses the correct number or the most uh shapes is is going to win this prize and you are in the lead. And so we have some volunteers who are going to be keeping score and of course we're going to also rely on you guys uh to keep track of your own scores. Okay, so you know the game. Um, okay. I think over here one point uh to that person. So hopefully the volunteers are keeping track. Um, and so you know one of the reasons certainly not the only reason but one of the reasons why uh we were excited about building stealth protocol is because we've been

thinking about this question of you know how do we onboard the next billion people? you know, we've had, I would say, a bunch of different waves, um, where we've successfully onboarded people into crypto. Um, I would say probably at least three different waves. Uh, we've had proof of work originally. I heard it somewhere here, but I don't know who was first. Um, okay, volunteers, hopefully you guys can reconcile uh those two people competing for that. Um, so proof of work certainly early on was a great way to bring people into crypto, right? If you had excess electricity or if you wanted to buy uh electricity, you

could turn uh the money that you were spending into electricity, you could turn that into crypto. Uh, and typically you did that because you expected a profit from participating in in mining e initially bitcoin, later ethereum and other chains. Later on, we got proof of stake. With proof of stake, you know, you just took your capital, you bought a crypto asset, you staked the asset, and you started earning rewards. It was another big incentive for people to come uh enter crypto uh and start making making money. Later on, we had DeFi summer where the same thing happened over here. Yeah, I think he's got two now. Um later on, this happened with DeFi summer, right? people started

putting money into DeFi protocols, creating network effects in those D5 protocols and then frequently being rewarded handsomely uh for that money. Um and you know all of these things had you know one thing in common and that's that you had to effectively put capital. That is right and I think it was this guy again. Um okay guys, everyone else you need to really pick it up a notch because he's in the lead. How many points do you have? two. Okay. Three. Okay. Three. Okay. Everyone else is still in the race. You guys still have a shot. Uh but you gota you got to be a little quicker. You know, he's all the way in the back, too.

And sound travels, you know, not that fast. So, the people in the front should have an advantage. So, uh hopefully you can use that. Um but coming back to the talk, you know, the thing that all of these things had in common is that you had to bring capital in order to receive these rewards. And I would say that you know one of the reasons why our whole industry right now is so obsessed with number go up is because we've onboarded so many people who have been really attracted into crypto because of this idea that you can bring capital uh and and earn additional rewards. And so there's a lot of focus on that. Um, but there's a lot of people out there uh who, you know, may not have

excess capital that may not uh be willing to, you know, put it to work or or even risk it. You know, crypto is certainly very a very risky endeavor. Um and um and it's a real shame and and I should add that one of the reasons why all of these incentive mechanisms uh use capital uh in this way is because at the end of the day capital is this really good civil resistance mechanism. Right? If you reward people proportionally to how much capital you bring to the table, there's no incentive to create a lot of accounts. You just create one account, the reward that you get is still the same. And so I think what's missing is a way to solve for civil attacks uh in a

way that doesn't attract or doesn't require capital. And if we can solve that, then we're in a position where we can onboard people who maybe are less interested in number go up who who may be able to get real utility out of coming on chain. Uh and certainly, you know, the demographic, the audience that's suddenly addressable that we can reach is also much greater. And so we're really really interested in how we can solve this civil problem in a way that doesn't require either proof of work or proof of stake or or bringing capital uh onchain.

And I think that's one of the things that self really does well. Uh self launched uh earlier this year. It's uh one of the first and I believe only productionready ZK passport protocol that exists today. And it solves a civil problem. You can with mass and we'll talk a little bit how it works prove that you are a unique individual uh in a way that doesn't require a counterparty uh is fully privacy preserving uh and doesn't require capital. Uh you can also prove that you're human. It turns out with self protocol. So self is useful for not just civil resistance but also for you know proof of humanity. Who would have thought that that would be

important in this day and age? But with, you know, agents, as you guys know, suddenly you're on Twitter and you're wondering, is this a real person that I'm talking to? I'm seeing that a lot lately. Uh longer term, even the AI agents are going to be interested. Uh are am I talking to a human? Um they're going to be confused, too. And so being able to tell if you're a human is also going to be really important. And it turns out that you can also use self to prove that you're not a bad actor. So we'll also talk about how you can use self to prove in zero knowledge without a counterparty that you are not on the OFAC list. Um and so self does all of these things. Um and um it does so by leveraging what I like to call anyone want to guess this country.

This is not Turkey. No Ukraine is right. Um so this leverages the most trusted uh attestation uh of uh who you are certainly in the meat space I would say uh which is of course the biometric passport right biometric passports are very difficult to obtain um you know they're issued by issuing country they typically only give you one per issuing country uh people tend to uh value them you know because you need them to travel so they store them securely so they're not you know stolen as often as other uh accounts and forms of ID. And uh these biometric passports

um which are the ones that have that little logo that you see in gold uh on the right over there. Uh these actually have a little microchip in them and these are actually machine readable uh by your smartphone. Um and so that's um really really important and relevant here. Um, and what's inside that chip that you can read with NFC on your smartphone? Um, Turkey, did someone say Czech Republic is right, although there is a new name?

Czecho is right. And I think I'm going to give it to this person. Um, and so in that microchip is your biometric data. It's all the data that you have on your uh main page of your passport including your your photograph and it's cryptographically signed uh by the certificate authority chain. So it's signed by this document signing certificate which is in turn signed by a country signing certificate. And so by verifying uh these signatures going up the chain, if you have the public keys of every uh country in the world and that's a very manageable amount of public keys, then you can verify the authenticity of anyone's passport data.

And so they did this, you know, um 20ome years ago, uh to make it so that it's much harder to forge a passport, practically impossible now, uh because uh you can't get access to this country signing certificate authority. And so you can't um uh effectively forge the data that's sitting in the passport because anyone could easily check this uh certificate authority chain and see that that data is not valid. And so that's really great obviously for you know travel. But it turns out that we can use this as well in crypto uh because we have smart contracts right we can actually verify this these signatures in a smart contract. So you can actually prove without a

counterparty that your passport data is valid. As long as the public keys for these countries uh exist, you know, in a in a Merkel tree with a Merkel route on uh on a chain, you can effectively create a proof uh that proves without a counterparty that that your passport uh is valid, right? So who likes that idea, right? Who likes giving their data to third parties so that they can be hacked uh later? Anybody? No. Um, who would rather, you know, use a smart contract that can't be hacked?

Yeah, a lot of hands in the air, but it's actually a trick question because if you were to do this, you would be revealing your password data to everyone. Uh, so instead, what we do is we prove in zero knowledge using a snark that this chain is valid and then we verify that proof on chain. So, we still do it without a counterparty, but we can actually do it in zero knowledge. can do it anonymously without you revealing any of your information and that's really really cool. Um and um and we again we can do it without a counterparty. I looks like I talked over the last slide when I should have been talking over this one. Um and again it's just so nice to be in a world where you

know you don't have to necessarily give your passport data to a third party. A lot of third parties don't even check that biometric data. They just look at the passport and just look at you and see, okay, this looks legit. Uh, now you can actually do it without the counterparty and with stronger security because you're actually looking at the underlying uh data in in the actual biometric chip. Now, what's even better is once you've done this, once you've proven that you have a valid passport on chain, uh you can actually then start doing selective disclosure. You can start proving other things about yourself. And so self has an SDK that allows you to reveal information about yourself. You can either prove uh zero knowledge

statements that are uh derived from the data on your passport. So for example, you could prove that you're over 18 uh or over 21 or we're actually talking to a bunch of dating sites who actually want to prove that your age is under a certain age. You can do that without revealing even your your actual age. And so that's pretty exciting. you could prove that you're on the you're not on the OFAC list which is a sanctions list that you know the US government maintains without revealing your name or your date of birth or your passport number. Um and so you can prove these functions um that can be derived from your passport data in a way that's fully privacy preserving and you can also optionally reveal whatever part of your

data that you would like. So maybe someone is interested in, you know, which country you're from. You could just reveal that without revealing anything else. You could also prove that you're not from a set of countries. Uh you can prove uh you can reveal your first name, maybe the month and day of your birthday. Um maybe your hair color, which could be fun for some memecoin type uh activities. And you can associate all of these proofs with your own wallet address so that again you can then connect to some um application and then perhaps interact with that application uh once that proof is verified.

And just just uh pretend like you didn't see that. Um, one of the criticisms, so all of this is really exciting, but one of the criticisms that we've received is that not everybody has a passport. Um, right in in Europe, I think there's about 40%, sorry, 50% uh penetration for adults having passports. Uh, and and that's a really valid criticism. Um and and so you know we've been putting our heads together on how we can you know address this this issue and uh today we're really excited to announce um that as of this morning uh we have actually

upgraded self uh to now support um EU ids. So how many people here have an EU ID? Okay, whole bunch of people have EU IDs. uh the numbers say that roughly 90% of adults in the EU have EUIDs. So a much bigger jump from that 50% number. And critically EUIDs, they have that same logo. If you look in the top left, it's the same logo that's on your passport because that ID has the same microchip with the same cryptography.

uh even the data is signed by the same root certificate uh as your passport by your um from your issuing country. And so we can do the exact same um cryptography, the exact same proofs using EU IDs uh but now reach a much broader amount of people. And these aren't just EU IDs. We actually support other countries as well. We've got Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey, uh as well as other uh non-European countries, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, uh and a few others that are coming. And then critically, um maybe over the weekend, some of you may have noticed, Vitalik wrote a really compelling and interesting piece about um um

uh ZK IDs and the risks that they present. and he talked about how nice it would be to have pseudonmous um support by these things. By being able to on board with either your passport or with both your passport and your um EU ID, you can now create two identities for yourself which then unlocks this pudonmous friendly um account. Okay. So what does this experience look like? Poland is right. Um this is the onboarding uh experience. So, first thing is we, you know, tell the user that you're going to have to scan, uh, the machine readable part of your EU ID.

Uh, next, uh, you're going to have to tap the chip on the ID. Um, and so we're doing that right now. Once you've read the data off of the NFC chip, we construct the ZK Snark proof and then we submit it on chain and we're done. That's it. Pretty easy, right? Um, and so once you've registered and so you might be wondering, okay, what's going on here? You know, I mentioned we're creating the ZKP. Uh, we're also uh asking the user or we're generating for the user a secret uh that we use to uh Croatia is right uh to create a

commitment and we put that commitment into a Merkel tree. uh Chile is also right. Uh and this commitment is then used effectively to create a new privacy layer so that your subsequent actions in the application can't be linked together. And so what are those subsequent actions? Well, the Switzerland is right. uh subsequent actions are uh to interact with thirdparty applications that are requesting these proofs, these disclosure proofs that I mentioned before. And so here we just scan the QR code. Uh an application just requested some data. Uh if the application requests very sensitive data, we would

give a little warning and then we create a new ZK proof that effectively is a Merkel inclusion proof of Brazil is right as well. of uh that last Merkel tree as well as a ZKP that proves the underlying statement that you're disclosing. So if you're not on the OFAC list, for example, it'll be proving a Merkel exclusion proof uh that you're not in uh the OFAC list. This is the highle architecture. You know, we have a passport of course, a mobile app application that you can install. Highly recommend going to soft.xyz and checking it out. Um, and because

with the latest proving technology, uh, it's still quite expensive to construct these proofs on your mobile phone, we actually accelerate the proof creation in a TE that your phone securely connects to. And so that TE is running some code that can be verified by the mobile application as being code that will generate the proof and then quickly delete your passport data. And so it's still extremely secure and privacy preserving. And then that TE submits those proofs directly to uh the chain specifically to uh Cello which as it recently became uh a layer 2 and so it now becomes accessible throughout all of Ethereum.

So if you're at all participating in the ETH global hackathon this weekend um you know we're we're going to have a presence there. Uh would highly encourage you to to check out our our full developer SDK. uh if you have any use case for incentivizing new users to join your protocol where you don't want them to have to necessarily bring capital to join. Maybe you have other civil attack issues that you want to defend against. Uh maybe you have bad actors that you want to prevent from you know adding liquidity or or trading uh using um liquidity on your protocol and you want to filter out people who are not on the OFAC list or who are on the OFAC list. Uh maybe you want to have to just launch a memecoin and reward people for their you know first name like a

Bobcoin, maybe a birthday coin where you just give people money on their birthdays. All of these things you can now do with self. Uh and again this is all production ready including the new EUID support that we launched today that has been audited by ZK security and it is good to go for you to start building with. And normally this is where I would end uh but there is one one last thing. Uh and that's today we're really excited to announce that we have just partnered with Veladrome. Uh Veladrome is uh I didn't quite hear that.

It's not Taiwan. It is South Korea. That person got it. Um, Veladrome has now uh will soon be launching boosted LP positions where you as an individual, so everyone in this room will earn a bigger uh reward uh than uh you know say some big fund that can put a lot more money than you in. And so the idea is to use civil uh protection to reward small-time LP positions which makes the money more sticky uh and critically rewards I think all of us in the room which we're really excited about. That's everything for me today. Thank you so much.

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