 For those that don't know I'm Taylor Monahan I'm going to be talking about the original send basically some of our early choices and how they've shaped this ecosystem and More importantly, how can we make better choices so that the world is better tomorrow a little bit about me? Again, my name is Taylor Monahan. I've been in this space since 2013. I got in right before the Mt. Gox crash I've been building wallets in 2015. I started my ether wallet We then did like a brand fork into my crypto and we were acquired by MetaMask earlier this year It's been a it's been a ride. That's for sure But I'm basically like an expert in how to like build wallets also how not to build wallets So maybe I can like share some expertise today So I have a four-year-old now and this is one of our favorite books and it's like quite ironic because it's basically the story of my life When I first started out I Was just building I was building something amazing and I think a lot of you here are probably in the same boat Right. You're in the early days. You're in the early stages. You're building something Inspirational right that's going to change the world. It's going to make People's lives better. It's going to make society better And I hope that you're really proud of what you're building, right? Like you you you create something you brought something new into this world And this space specifically is like truly Remarkable it is next level in terms of like what we are actually doing and the impact that our products can have These are all of the best web three words all of the most amazing things that we can do with the technology and our products and most importantly like I think You know at the end there we have the inclusive community And we have the genius people and the good vibes like that's what I'm here for and That's kind of what I like to focus on most right like when I get on stage. I like to talk about people Because if we only think about the technology and the products that we're building Well, you're gonna end up in this situation quite a bit because the second that you sort of I don't know The second your dreams start to come to fruition the second that everything starts to line up And you feel like you might have a grasp on it. It really does seem that then out of nowhere Everything keeps crashing crashing down because building shit is really really hard and especially when you're a wallet and You know, you're the product that people are using to access and manage all of their digital assets It's really hard things come crashing down a lot and the worst part of failing Like building a good product is actually like the failing people right? We're failing the newcomers that enter the space They're getting fished. They're getting scammed They're optimistic one day and then they have their hopes and dream crush the next day And that's what basically the last I don't know like seven years my life have been right like trying to be better every single day Trying to help people understand the technology trying to get people to understand how they can use this technology to actually improve people's lives Because this shit is fucked up sometimes as hopeful and as optimistic and lovely and as much as we want to believe that we are building a better world It also means that sometimes you have to face the reality That our world is one where like This is money. This is people's livelihoods. This is their financial well-being. This is their families or mortgages their children's colleges and This ecosystem specifically the entire ecosystem from the get-go has really been Built on top of these public-private key pairs like every single thing that we do traces back to the private key and That private key is just like a single string of characters And it's so important that I've spent countless hours trying to educate people about the importance of this private key I worked with metamask years ago to rename it now. We call it a secret recovery phrase So that we can like hopefully have people understand the importance of it and the secretness of it earlier But the reality is like the products that I've built are responsible for a lot of money getting lost And if we don't get Significantly better and make web 3 significantly easier to access in the coming years It means that the products I build and we build are gonna be responsible for Billions more dollars lost And that's like a hard thing To wrap your brain around. It's not super pleasant. I Would say it's pretty fucked up And it's been pretty fucked for a while actually this is a comment I made in 2018 One of the earliest mistakes I ever made was when we created my ether wallet We didn't really understand why you shouldn't let people enter their private keys in the browser on a website And so we did exactly that you would generate your private key You would enter it on the website and that's how you access to all of your money That was a terrible idea don't do that seriously don't do that This is This is Dan down is one of the founders of MetaMask And he has a bit More optimistic take right the way he kind of looks at the world around us and the things that we're building is He praises it as we're basically at the eating poisonous mushrooms phase of product development and we are all just Leaping we're taking the leap of faith Hopefully we're coming back and you know letting our product creators know like what hurt and what didn't what worked and what didn't And hopefully the people that are building those products are listening to the people who are adventuring out there into the abyss and updating and improving and iterating on all of their products so that Ultimately it hurts less in the future Because what we are doing is truly like a new paradigm like web 3 We are really starting at the ground floor We are creating entire new systems. We're creating new tech systems. We're creating new social systems financial systems Everything is brand new unfortunately sometimes these new paradigms just You know they come with some struggles and I think one thing that it took me years to really comprehend and really grok was the fact that there is such a huge incentive for bad actors to get your private key to get your secret recovery phrase like it is so huge that I don't know hundreds of thousands of like random scammers around the world North Korean hackers like literally like nation-state actors are trying to get your private keys and We're building the product That houses that thing that has all the people's money That's cool Over the years. We've seen like an increasing number of scams and sim swaps and social engineering fishing spearfishing account takeovers web 2 account takers web 3 account takeovers Supply chain attacks DNS hijacks BGP hijacks injection attacks and Even at the root the cryptography itself. We've even screwed that up a couple of times Resulting in keys either being stolen or inaccessible and this incentive is So so so large like I cannot emphasize the traditional world just does not operate like this There's almost nothing in the traditional world where if you lose it Like that's game over and there's no like path to recourse like that doesn't exist We have so many layers to protect people And in crypto, we just don't have those yet and the hardest thing about this is the reality that Truly people don't understand that this like This string of characters these like random numbers and letters or these words like if they lose that or if it's stolen it's game over and Increasingly Especially with this last bull run. It's not just their ETH, right? It's their tokens. It's their NFTs. It's their collectibles It's their soulbound tokens It's access to communities and games. It's It's everything right it's like basically turning into their identity like we're getting dangerously close To turning that key that that that string characters that nobody really understands Into people's identity and I think that we think a lot about Education we think a lot about UX we think a lot about the UI We think a lot about the things that we can do to fix it. I've given probably like 15 talks Covering how you should educate people more and fix your UIs and it's had Some impact but not enough and the thing is is that the people in this ecosystem are creating real value And they're creating it so quickly That I'm not sure that just like You know updating some copy is gonna cut it Because again at the end of the day the whole entire ecosystem Is relying on these freaking characters right this this string this string. That's a private key Don't lose it That's you that's your identity and all your money and everything you have and your children's future Don't lose it It might look like this That's the secret recovery phrase it's it's it's the same right don't lose that either if That's everything It's kind of it's kind of absurd like when you really just like cut down to the core of it it's absurd and We have such big brains in the space like truly remarkable innovation happening every day We talk about game theory we talk about incentives. We talk about the economics. We talk about so many different things And yet somehow we haven't really been able to come to the conclusion that like hmm Maybe we should focus for a second On how do we actually improve? users lives on the whole at the core protocol layer right we're like solving scalability We're solving we have thousands of VIPs That are solving every single thing Can we do something for like the end user though? That's gonna directly impact their lives and save them hundreds of millions billions of dollars over the coming years Because right now migrating all of your assets from one account to the next is basically the best thing you've got Earlier this year MetaMask had 30 million monthly active users That's a lot of people There's a lot of private keys out there with Ethan them With some asset on any of the other 23 EVM compatible chains Tokens NFTs non-standard tokens standard tokens There's open positions there's open positions across chains there's synthetic assets and right now if you Get into space and start doing stuff and then something happens, right? Your computer is hacked You're physically attacked your entire infrastructure is taken over by North Korea your only path of recourse is To try to front-run the people who have stolen that that phrase And like move all your stuff really fast and that like not only is is absurd It also like it has a real cost like it's hard. It's stressful. It's time-consuming It punishes the people that are most engaged Right so like the people that we want in this ecosystem the most the ones that are like Total D gens right It's punishing those people because when something happens, which it will They are the ones who have to spend the most amount of time and the most amount of real money to move their assets and Frankly it should not be like this because we can do better because this entire ecosystem builds magical shit all day every day We literally create billions of dollars out of thin air like nothing We can do this It's like it's it's it's quite remarkable how limitless our imaginations are in some ways and How limited we seem to be in the other ways So this is the original sin We need to understand collectively Whether you're building wallets whether you're building Smart wallets dumb wallets Whether you're building daps Whatever you're doing whatever layer you're stuck your in We are responsible for what we create We're responsible For how that impacts people's lives Technology is incredibly incredibly powerful, but it is not like the end all be all solution We can't just like put technology or code like in a bubble and say like oh, that's just that thing over there It's a moral. It's a political ice. It's like just this thing what we're building is is not about I Don't know whatever is on your landing page, right like what we're building Is trying to Make people's lives better make society's lives better What we're trying to do is solve really messy problems social problems We're trying to improve how people can coordinate with one another we're trying to Allow people to take control over their lives and their futures and not be restricted by Some government some state some corporation and in order to do that like we really need to value people and we should be putting people and The problems that people are encountering every single day sort of front and center like what are we doing to fix that and Our products are a mechanism that we use the technology is is the tool But the choices Those are ours and those have to be about people and they cannot shy away from the hard things This book is really real guys. I highly recommend it all right, so New paradigms This is a new world. We are actually successfully creating a new world We have successfully onboarded a remarkable millions and millions and millions of millions of people into this new world We have successfully disintermediated a ton of things We've given people control full control. We're nothing himself them what we need to be heading towards is Saying that this stuff this key this whatever you want to call it right whatever it turns into tangibly This is mine Right when we talk about identity when we talk about our things. It's mine What we should be striving for is it cannot be hacked or stolen because it's mine I Have full control over it. I can use it. I can access it. I Can revoke it right if I think it might be compromised? I can be like, oh, let's just pause for a second and reevaluate the situation Let's not let those hackers take that thing and Then once I've secured the perimeter, I can recover it The things that I do They don't just happen on my behalf, but I'm giving my full consent That consent has to be informed like I have to know what I'm consenting to I have to have a choice in that right again choose to consent or to not consent because ultimately We all need to choose how we interact with the world and Also, how we impact the world because it's our choices that shape this world Every single choice that we make So there sorry there are there are a couple of ip's out there that are trying to tackle this problem. I am not Going to Say which one is best. I think that the solution is probably Not one of these it's probably A few more conversations some online debates and whatever evolves from that. I Trust the big brains to figure it out But these are the ones that'll get you started They're the most recent ones if you want to go down the rabbit hole There's like 10 other ones that that really did some deep research for these are the ones that are kind of out there right now ERC 4337 This is sort of operating It doesn't require a protocol change. It'll be Implemented probably by flash bots it gives some quote-unquote account abstraction stuff Then you have 30 74 this is the one that If you have an account right you have a private key right now You can delegate control That's like sort of one half of it right like when we talk about key rotation or key revocation or key recovery It's you know, you have to like assign that authority somewhere else and then the original thing you want to like revoke the authority 374 is the one where you can like it's the rules for how to delegate and Then EIP 503 is a new one. I think we're calling it off usurp This is a Basically, you're gonna deploy some like code We imagine that in the beginning it'll be some simple code But it'll basically take your current account your current private key and it'll give it some like smart contract abilities 503 really makes sense with 3074. It doesn't really There's better ways to do it without 3074 But most importantly, there's a lot of mechanisms and a lot of things we can learn From all the history and all the research that's been done the conversations that have happened around these And we can talk and discuss and put our big brains together to hopefully come up with a really strong powerful Solution that will actually serve real people Because that's the goal we can do anything we want and The most important thing that we do is Continue to dream Don't be limited by some I Don't know Stupid tweetable phrase like code is law don't have your imaginations limited by This ecosystems obsession with immutability or like trying to put technology and code over here and Pretending that's separate from the people over here Everything has to work together Right, the whole system is where the magic comes from and So we all have to work together. We have to use the tools available to us. We have to use each other We have to collaborate Right, we have to get really really creative and we can't be We can't be limited by anything Alright, so I encourage every single one of you To keep on dreaming because that's the only way that we're ever gonna build a better world And we're well on our way The amount of people that are actually using this this technology that we're building It's truly impressive. I never thought that we would get here But I do hope that we're gonna be able to make some real improvements Before the next wave because as of right now, we're simply not ready for a hundred million or a billion people To have their identities Tied to that single string of characters All right, I also have to show some stuff. Okay, so For you those that didn't know I'm a metamask metamask is part of consensus consensus has a ton of amazing things going on One of them is village now. So remember how we're talking about like, you know Incentives and getting people working together and collaborating so that like everyone can be better and more empowered Village now is one of our various attempts to do this. It's really really exciting whereas is village now in the house Make some noise Find them they're freaking cool. They'll explain everything to you. It's a really it's it's it's such a cool initiative and Yeah, I'm so I'm so excited. Okay. Next in fear You know that evil centralized thing that the whole ecosystem is relying on and it's gonna be our death. Yeah, no, it's Well on its way to being Decentralized we could not be more excited e.g. And the team have been working on this for God as long as I've known him and I've known him since like 2016. It's been crazy But we are actually making moves there. That's a QR code I don't know where that QR code goes to but I assume it'll give you more information or maybe Party favor, I don't know find out Is in fear in the house it's Patrick here. Oh, okay. Okay, they'll explain to you But all I want to say is that we are committed to building a decentralized world, right? We really are And last but not least where's snaps Okay, we got a lot of snaps people here metamask snaps. This is the future of metamask. I Know every single person in this room has some problem with metamask I have problems with metamask. I Sit there and I go like why do you do this to me metamask and I'm building metamask and then I tell people to fix it and then like I Yell at metamask more. I know that you've all been in this boat with me Metamask snaps is actually the solution though because we can't keep making metamask bigger. We can't keep running around like Doing whatever Taylor says to do and I think that's not scalable We are building for billions of people what snaps does is it enables every single person to extend the metamask functionality So instead of metamask having to like build and maintain Something for your custom thing and try to keep up with this ecosystem that moves so freaking fast What we're going to do is we're going to put the power in the builders hands to actually extend metamask to better Serve you as the builder and also better serve your users Because you actually know best, right? We can grow our team bigger and bigger and bigger and we still won't be able to keep up Because the innovation that is happening in this ecosystem is so so remarkable And that's what snaps aims to do it aims to give everyone The builders the smart big brains in the room the power to make metamask work better for you Like you heard earlier There's a bunch of snaps people here if you're a builder and you're frustrated with metamask talk to them They they will explain it all to you and that's all I've got just want to say. Thank you Amazing that was a excellent talk We have time for just one question if anybody has a quick question if so, please raise your hand and we'll get on my To ASAP Do I see a hand I? Saw one and then I went down there you go just I'm just blind Yeah, hello, just just a quick question. What would you what will be your perfect world for perfect users? perfect user system for you Like the accounts and the private keys and yes, yeah, for example On what thing can we back the user infos information? So right now we in the physical world we back up with the people's bodies I know that person because I see that person physically beside me So I will need something similar something based on the physicality of the person or something like a second like a second second second factor authentication, but then Yeah, so the reason why I kind of shy away from Saying like this one technology this one thing or this one thing that these one groups of people or this standards body is working on is like the solution is that I think Frankly, I think it's ignorant to think that like Anyone party or anyone group of people can serve like the entire world perfectly and especially at the pace of innovation that we're seeing I think that there's like a couple important factors And I think the conversation is often marred in this like Like account abstraction is the word if you want to Google it like a theorem account abstraction You can get the whole history. It's it's such a big thing It has so many goals at this point, but the thing that I'm most focused on is like I think we need to provide a migration path for users that is as cheap as possible So not migrating all their assets, but going from whatever this old way of doing things to the new way of doing things has of a low cost secondly, I think that People should be able to like revoke whether that's like permissions or their entire key or whatever it may be They should be able to say like no, that's not valid anymore. That's not me anymore and then I think that obviously there's In order to make those two happen there has to be some delegation some permissioning system something where Because like if you revoke all the permissions Then you don't have any you can't do anything. So you have to like give them somewhere else And there's there's a ton of people that have been doing a ton of work on this over the years The Ethereum account of traction research is in conversations like those that's one thing But if you look at decentralized identity, which has been a decades-long effort by some Remarkable organizations around the world that really focus on this That's like a whole Another rabbit hole that you can go down and I will not pretend to think that a like I I deeply understand the This design space as much as them. So if this is something that like really interests you and you want to start working on it I would definitely recommend like starting there and looking for the experts and the people who are talking about it because they are Way smarter than me Awesome. That's all the time we have please give Taylor. Thank you. Love you