Trust-minimized P2P marketplaces on Ethereum by Richard | Devcon SEA
Devcon 7 · 26 Nov 2024 · 7:03
Richard explores the design space opened by connecting data on the internet to blockchains in a trust-minimized way. Blockchains already give trustless settlement for stablecoins and DeFi, but those uses sit apart from the real world. With zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation and other programmable cryptography, the talk looks at apps such as trust-minimized peer-to-peer marketplaces.
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From Devcon 7, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.
Transcript
[Music] awesome hey guys I'm Richard uh today I'll be talking about trust minimize P2P marketplaces uh on ethereum uh go over the why how and some thoughts of looking ahead so why are we here um if we look at web 2 today uh data currently exists in these centralized data silos whether it's fiat currency in your bank account uh your social graph concert tickets domains Etc um these lead to high switching costs for users for example
you can't bring your followers from Facebook to Twitter or and these also are very extractive uh to these users for example Ticket Master charges like monopolistic prices because they own both the secondary and primary uh exchanges and lastly there's like closed apis uh which make it very difficult to interoperate uh between payment apis for example additionally if you look at web 3 in our permissionless database uh the problem is that it's really detached from The Real World uh if you look at your social graph stable coins like these defi instruments and even eth uh all of its runs in a parallel system in fact most of dii today is self
referential uh and so the solution here is to bring the real world to ethereum and the question is how uh we can break through these kind of wall Gardens using cryptography and also maybe tees uh so we can use ZK and MPC uh these new technologies to allow us to ex permissionless export uh data from these centralized data silos uh techniques such as ZK email and TLS notary which also can help us redact any kind of private sensitive information prior to exporting uh check out some of the other talks on ZK EML or TLS notary today if
you want to learn more deeply um but yeah now with these tools we can kind of compose any kind of web two action with web 3 action uh such as proving a Fiat transfer using ZK email to swap for some stable coins uh on chain or Pro uh ticket transfer using TS notary to swap for stable coins uh or swap domains for eth ETC or even put a social graph inside a te to do some defi stuff with uh an example of this flow uh that is in production today is ZK PDP the project I work on uh the problem uh that it fixes some of the issues I mentioned
earlier um such as the high fees uh the construction for this is pretty simple actually a seller comes in escrows some funds in a smart contract and provides a payment ID a buyer comes in pays a seller and uses that proof uh to unlock the escro contract uh kind of replaces binance or any kind of centralized exchange with a smart contract and replaces the manual process of unlocking the escrow uh with instant unlock upon satisfying a predicate this construction extends Beyond Fiat uh simply replace the offchain payment with a digital asset transfer and a proof of payment with a proof of asset transfer now you can kind
of do PDP trading tickets trading domains trade social media handles csgo skins uh gift cards and much more you can even further extend this construction if you if you trust tees as a credit po third party you can kind of encumber a web 2 account put it inside a te and act that act as a escrow for the web 2 asset and both seller and buyer send requests through the te uh once the te owns both funds and the web two asset say tickets uh then they can proceed to unlock funds to both parties uh yeah now you kind of can see the web 2 account is fully programmable
you can do some weird stuff like make the te run a amm pricing model for exam for example yeah in conclusion uh this design space is huge to do trust minimized marketplaces uh the tech here is ready uh Dev tooling will continue to only get better and instead of only bring ethereum to the real world I think it's time to bring some of the real world onto ethereum uh thank you and that's it thank you Richard do we have any questions shy crowd today come on guys graphic of the P2P Marketplace I don't
even know if you have the ability to go back in slides yeah sorry is this better yeah yeah if if you can't go back that's okay I was GNA ask something about it but it doesn't matter yeah I don't think we can maybe you can just talk to it okay any particular use cases you're most excited about like in terms of future of peer-to-peer marketplaces uh I think there's just a lot of ideas out there like you can put almost any internet data on chain and use it uh like use yeah trade trade any kind of web to asset or even data and anything that you think has value on an
internet you can kind of bring into onchain to do cool stuff with yeah yeah love to see it I mean just the like you said Ticket Master I think a prime example of just like marketplaces that are absolutely using monop monopolistic pricing to just gouge consumers and what is becoming yeah a very much frictionless process to do straight straight Peter peer um I guess a question have you seen any regulatory issues um how are you thinking about navigating that uh yeah I think think um there haven't been so far I think P2P is a legally I guess gray area kind of
thing uh you are allowed to transact with like your peer for example Facebook Marketplace is like a huge P2P Marketplace and we're just basically enabling uh the coordination of that to be easier through onchain means on ethereum totally all right thank you Richard appreciate it give it up