 Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. Welcome to Signing with Ethereum. So my name is Lang. I am an investor with Strat Crypto. We are based out of LA, a crypto native VC fund focused on the seed stage, joined by an amazing group of panelists today. Why don't we do a quick round of intros? Let's learn how what you guys are building and let's kick off. Awesome. Hi, everyone. It's really great to be here. My name is Justina, and I am a developer success lead at Threebox Labs. Threebox Labs is a company behind a project called Ceramic. Ceramic is a decentralized data layer that is bringing composable data to the three applications. And we are basically trying to build out the infrastructure and APIs that developers can use to easily store, access, modify their data. And the key concept that they are trying to bring to up three is composable data, which means that data that is stored on a ceramic network can easily be repurposed, reused for different applications. So yeah, specifically about me, I lead developer success at Threebox Labs. Before joining the team, I spent most of my career in data science, machine learning, and AI applications, basically helping open source companies to build tools that enable developers to build AI and machine learning systems without sacrificing their data ownership. So super excited to be part of this panel. Hi. I think we're going to, no, we're good with that. I thought we were going to cause a lot of feedback there. It's going to go off in everyone's ears. So I'm Sheve Malik. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Poole. I used to be an investigative journalist for The Guardian for about half a decade. So weird sort of intro, in a sense, route into Web 3, but been around since about 2017. So I guess I, do I get to be an OG now, Nick? I think so, yeah. Oh, wow, okay. So I'll tell you a little bit about Poole. What we're doing is we're building out a stack for these things called data unions, which help people aggregate and share data. There's a good number of them around now including Demo and Swash, Ozone. I mean, I could just list about 120 of them. So, and specifically we're also building out an application, is that Paris? It is. An application that can help store your data in a data wallet. If you want, I think sort of EOA wallets as they exist at the moment are, you know, sort of level 1.0. They're a bit, they're a bit dumb as applications. Can we make them more intelligent? And obviously, signing in with Ethereum becomes that gateway to opening out information sharing. Hi, I'm Nick Johnson, founder and lead developer of the Ethereum name service, ENS, which helped fund sign in with Ethereum and started the whole process going. So ENS has been evolving from purely a name lookup service into your decentralized Web 3 profiles. We're very, very interested in pushing that forward with things like sign in with Ethereum. Perfect, thank you. All right, so why don't we kick off with some, you know, history behind signing in with Ethereum and maybe compare and contrast with our Web 2 counterparts and signing in with Google and Facebook and the like. I'll start with Nick. Yeah, so signing in with Ethereum started as an effort between ENS and the Ethereum Foundation. We sort of identified the need for a native sign-in protocol. There were dozens of different implementations of signing in, using, signing a message with your wallet. They were all different. Many had security issues, many had usability issues. And we sort of thought, you know, this would be an awful lot better if it was consistent and identical across all systems. Wallets would be able to build in support for it with better UX for users. Sites would be able to use reusable components. And so we got together with the Ethereum Foundation to get that going. We put out an RFP, got a number of submissions and spruced with the ones who won the RFP and they've done an outstanding job of building the standard and getting it out there. Perfect, perfect. Let's make a double click on that a little bit more in terms of compare and contrasting like, you know, the back end with, you know, the data analytics and what happens behind the scenes. Shiv, do you want to take that one? Well, actually it was going to come at a slightly different angle, which is from the, in fact, the exact opposite end, the UX side of things. And it's worth remembering, obviously, a lot of people here have signed in with Google, signed in with Facebook. I don't think it's kind of a pleasurable experience because you're sort of wary of the fact that, yeah, you know, someone else is a centralized party in all of this, someone you might not appreciate, but yeah, it's so convenient, right? It's so much more convenient than signing in with your email and then trying to remember that damn password for that specific application. And if, obviously, you want to have any sort of security over passwords, it's you then left with like 15, 20, 50 passwords, right? And that becomes a massive problem in and of itself. So I remember this moment when I could sign in with Ethereum with Uniswap. I think that was my first time when I really appreciated what was going on. And I was like, my God, this is exactly what I've always wanted, right? It's this really happy moment where you're like, it's my wallet and someone else is recognizing my wallet address. And somehow now I've kind of been onboarded in this decentralized fashion and it's brilliant. It's just brilliant. And I just thought, God, this is definitely the future. And this is really in a sense underrated protocol. Where can it go next? In terms of maybe interoperability and multi-chain and kind of carrying that, you know, ENS name across multiple domains and you know, wrapping your identity and kind of self sovereignty with that. Could you talk to maybe what are the possibilities here in terms of use cases and just, you know, what are we building towards right now? Let's start with that, just, you know. Yeah, overall we do see a lot of interest in terms of building more secure applications in general. So any kind of, I would say data layer provider, including ceramic, I think they should definitely consider using sign in with Ethereum as one of the options that they can provide for the users of the applications that are built on these projects. Because if we are, I think we're still in quite early stages of where web three data is, especially if we go beyond just like financial transactions. So if we are building this layer right now, we really have to think about how that relates to decentralized identity, security and things like that and sign in with Ethereum has a lot of advantages in that area, I think we'll cover that a little bit more as well. But we do see a lot of interest and use cases from verifiable credentials and reputation side of things. For example, Githcoin, they just quite recently released Githcoin Passport and they're also leveraging sign in with Ethereum to allow users to sign in. What I'm specifically quite excited about is sign in with Ethereum overall, the way it handles this generation and identity overall, it can be paired with additional tools that enable session management. And I believe that that opens so many opportunities for a bit more mature and more interactive applications to be built out there. So I really hope that we will see some really interesting use cases in web three gaming, also web three social that require a little bit more user interaction and we sign in with Ethereum, you don't really have to, and session management, you don't have to approve every single action that you run on while interacting with the application. So I think that will be super interesting to see. And another thing that is really nice to see as well is that we see some web two native applications adopting sign in with Ethereum as well. For example, discourse forums, they already have a plugin that users can use basically to sign in with their Ethereum wallet, which is great. And I just really hope that we will see more these web two native applications as well using it because it's a great standard to adopt. Should have anything to add to that? Oh, I mean, so many things. It's worth picking up on that point about session management. It's so important when it's worth going back maybe in history to kind of Netscape and then creating the cookie in order to get some kind of user convenience in regards to session management. And if you think about it, cookies have been terrible. As a piece of technology, they are awful. They don't actually really do the job that they've also been employed to do, which is basically kind of spying by proxy. And of course now third party cookies are being shut down by Chrome in, well, they've been delayed it twice now. So web two's got this problem too. And in fact, just generally speaking, in terms of the internet at large, not just web three, we've had this issue of what is my identity on the internet? Is it my email? Is it my mobile number? Or is it some centralized identity via Google and Facebook? And I think this is really the perfect solution, which is via sign in with Ethereum, here's my wallet address. It's something I own, it's something I port with me, and it actually works on both sides of that relationship because obviously publishers and websites want to know, well, who are you? Are you the same person that showed up before? In which case, at least in the very least, this is gonna make this convenient for you because we can pull up all that session management stuff from before, right? Here are your preferences, great. So I think there's just so much opportunity as well with cookies disappearing, right? This is the replacement in that sense for that identity aspect of cookies and session management. It's very exciting. There can be anything else? I guess it's worth drilling down a little bit on why we need something like sign in with Ethereum in the first place because Ethereum, serverless apps, your typical smart contract interaction, you don't need to authenticate yourself to the app because you're authenticating yourself with the transactions you make. So it's only when things with backend services that aren't the chain become important that you start to need the sign in thing. And so I think this wasn't a part of the core Ethereum layer simply because initially apps were very focused on directly there on chain backends, and as apps have become more sophisticated, they've wanted to have integrate other systems, authenticate legacy systems and so on to become more and more important to do this. But because it wasn't built in, the initial solution was very ad hoc and so forth. And so we needed a sort of a standardization moment to help move that forward. I guess talking about the cross chain thing too, you know, that the ENS is well suited to the integration here, and obviously when a shell ENS, but because ENS supports multi-chain identities and so forth. So you can authenticate using sign with Ethereum and you import your profile, which has addresses for whatever chain you're using or none at all. So why don't we talk through some of the additional traction currently and maybe some barriers to adoption? You know, why hasn't some things picked up? You know, what are some major hurdles we have to work through? Let's start with just, you know. Yeah, so in general, it's fairly newish concept. So obviously, I think we will see more adoption and more traction in web three first. I also think that, especially for, let's say bigger institutions, to adopt something like sign in with Ethereum, there are quite a few things. They in general, I think still need a little bit more conviction that these kind of protocols are reliable and scalable and safe, especially. I'm just thinking what would it take for a big, let's say healthcare company or insurance company to adopt something like that to allow users to log into their systems. And there are a few things, yeah, I think they still need a little bit more conviction that these systems are secure, reliable and also, I think there is still an unsolved problem of users managing their keys. So we obviously shift so much responsibility to the user and then not to do some silly things with their private keys. So having good solutions there and having reliable experience for both, let's say, companies and the users is important. And yeah, overall, that also boils down to, in general, I think education for people to understand, let's say, if we speak about mass adoption, understanding why they should care, what happens with your data when they sign into application using their Facebook or Google account, like what does it mean for their identity, their data that they share online. And the last thing that I think I would like to mention is user experience. This is super important and as Shiv mentioned, that's one of the biggest advantages that VEP2 single sign-on methods have. It's so simple, so easy. You just click a few buttons and you're in and it's great. So we have to make sure that for VEP3 solutions, we strive for at least similar experience or even better. So I think overall, the standardized message that sign-in with theorem produces, it's already a really great step towards that direction. It's easy to understand for the user. They know what kind of things they are signing up for, what permissions they're giving to the application. So yeah, we just really have to make sure that overall UX improves and is as good as VEP2 or even better as well. Shiv, anything else? Yeah, obviously the title of this talk is the most powerful protocol in VEP3 question mark because I think it's obviously really underrated in terms of use cases right now. Lang, it's worth asking the audience who's signed in with Ethereum in the last, I don't know, a week or ever. Who's a frequent daily user? Wow, that's pretty good. Okay, that's good. I guess it's how it should be for a conference where everyone presumably has got an Ethereum address. I mean, in terms of usage right now, I mean, this morning, just taking today for me, I signed into Aave in a sense and I was able to realize that my health factor was really low and I might need to borrow some money to prop up my margin call. And then the second thing I did was sign in to the app for this conference, which was great. And obviously now it remembers and I'm able to personalize that experience, right? So that's sort of brilliant. And I do various things like that on a regular basis. But where this goes, I mean, Justina mentioned key management. I was listening to a podcast and I think there were, there's still eight addresses which have never pulled out their Ethereum from the original crowd sale. And that's because they lost their keys. So if Ethereum devs right back in whenever it was 2015, can't manage their keys, how do we expect ordering people to do it? So that's a huge problem. But I think I'd like to see the stage where, people are signing into let's say the Wall Street Journal and they're able to make micro payments because they're on an L2 for paying for an article. And I want that to be on that list of options, right? Sign in with Google, Facebook and Ceewe, right? Sign in with Ethereum. I just want it to be there. That's, I think, and in a sense, I don't see why we're not too far off of that. Once you've got the ability to make micro payments then the other side have got an incentive to start installing the SDKs that kind of make this happen, in a sense. Yeah, I think I just want to echo that. Like the getting more integration of web 2 apps is going to be a huge step forward. But also just the browser UX. Sign in with Ethereum's protocol was specifically designed so that the message you sign would mean something to a human, you'd be able to read it and tell exactly what's going on. But also that it would be formatted so it would be easy for a machine to pass. And so there's a lot of opportunity for wallets, you know, Metamask, Rainbow, everyone else to identify, sign in with Ethereum messages and show a nice user-friendly dialogue that says, you know, this is what you need to know. We've checked it's a real message. You know, here's what you're signing in with. Here's what permissions you're giving them. Same as you would see with, like, an OAuth dialogue for GitHub or Google or whatnot. And I think that will, that's a big step forward from the text-based, you know, sign this message window. Great, I wanted to touch point on the institutional partnership side, maybe the short-term, medium-term. Is there a way that, you know, we work together with a lot of the large, you know, tech companies or, you know, FinTech, TradFi? Or is this more kind of our siloed, you know, bottoms-up kind of way of starting a new movement here? Start with Justina. Yeah, no, I really hope that it's not gonna be siloed and that we can collaborate with them. And yeah, I really do think it's really about understanding the challenges. Like, again, as I mentioned about, like, for example, even healthcare, which I think would be massive thing to potentially adopt these kind of methods, we would be dealing with extremely sensitive data. So these kind of institutions, they have another set of challenges that they have to solve. Also, we have data regulations that we have to take into account and, like, what does it mean then that users use their, let's say, with three wallets and then these kind of protocols and so on. So yeah, I hope that we can collaborate on understanding what kind of issues we have to address and find solutions on that end and implement them. And yeah, I think that's really the only way how we can see more adoption on the institutional level. So actually, we're working with Ceramic. So our vision is, so the wallet is just, in a sense, the application, right? The private key and then the mechanism for signing are the protocol. And that's really where the, I think, the power lies. How good can you make the application, though? So as I said at the moment, I think wallets are, actually, it wouldn't be crude, but they're pretty dumb at the moment. Smart contract wallets take you a step up, right? Because then you kind of, yes, you can get subscriptions and things like direct debits, right, more kind of refined modes of payment, not just single transactions. But now imagine, and this is why we're working with Ceramic, being able to port data into, effectively, a storage vault, if you want, where you're also using the same private key as you would for your wallet to permission reeds for that vault. So now you're entering a world in which you've basically got a big digital backpack. So your wallet's now a data wallet, it's a digital backpack, so you can take that anywhere. And then people go, look, well, who are you? Have you turned up before? I want to help you with session management, or maybe I want to read your data because I want to serve you ads, and you can go yes or no, right? Now you've created this entirely different way of doing the same things, but it's decentralized, right? You're, as the user in control, because you have that private key to say yes or no, right? To people's requests out there, which is sort of in a sense what Apple are trying to do, saying, oh, I do want to be tracked, but of course they're managing all of those permissions, and it's not interoperable, right? And they've kind of locking out everyone else, right? It's centralized. Question is then how do you fill up those data vaults? And that's the question that we've been working on at pool with a lot of other data unions. How do you structure that data? Because you can't just expect people to dump stuff into there. And then of course that becomes an even more valuable propositions for huge enterprises out there who go, oh, right, now you're turning, now you're creating humans who we think are verified. We're turning up with data. We can tell a story from them, right? They can also pay from the same application. We're jumping into web three, right? It's not just this is crypto, we could make some money off some speculation, or NFTs, that's nice. This is, it's like a 10x proposition, right? When you come to a data wallet. Nick, anything else there? Yeah, I think you asked originally about like, do we, is this a silo thing? Is this just us? And I think we only really succeed if it's not. You know, E&S's vision is a web three identity for everything. And I think that works best, and sign-in with Ethereum works best if it's everywhere. You know, ideally the UX improves and the number of users using web three wallets improves to the point where this is people's preferential sign-in compared to Google or Twitter or whatnot, because it's actually, you have control of your data, you have control of your identity, you're not relying on a third party identity provider to do it for you, and to decide that you're allowed to continue to have an identity. Makes sense. So I wanted to touch on the privacy piece a little bit. You mentioned a little bit about that. You know, we have a lot of sensitive data, a lot of kind of identity and credentials to think through here as well, especially with use cases in, you know, supply chain in hospitals, things like that. Could you talk to maybe some of the techniques we're using currently, including maybe zero-knowledge proofs and other techniques that, you know, how are we working towards that right now? Yeah, so overall, like sign-in with Ethereum overall is, offers a much more secure way to sign, to message, sorry, to applications because they have a standardized message that it produces and overall it makes it much harder to run phishing attacks. So that's definitely a big improvement. And yeah, we really have to think about how we can pair that with other options like zero-knowledge proof where users don't really have to prove that they, like who they really are, but we can only use, for example, their address or details that are stored in their decentralized identifier. So I think overall the advantage of sign-in with Ethereum is that every single user that owns a wallet, they have a did, which then can be used to build out these kind of systems. So maybe you can add a little bit more as well on the technicalities. Yeah, I think you covered it pretty thoroughly, really. I have a dealt with DKPs and so on. They seem like a good application here, but I don't have deep experience, so I won't embarrass myself. Just briefly for me, then I would say, look, if you're gonna carry a data wallet around, let's say, the middle of us, then you can start to see how zero-knowledge proofs protect users' privacy. So for one short example, let's say you've managed to port all of your financial transaction data, but actually most people on the other side just wanna know how much you earn in a year. They don't wanna know every single transaction you've made. And actually, they don't wanna even keep that data anymore. It's just so much of a hassle from a GDPR perspective or CCPA. So zero-knowledge proof simply says, look, what is that number at the end of the day? Is it 70K, is it 20K, whatever it is? I just wanna know. And that's one application. I think we're starting to, I know Vitalik's very enthusiastic about zero-knowledge proofs and their applications, but we're still at the beginnings of this. I think we're still building out actually the raw layer for a data wallet in this example, for example. Chivay, I also wanted to ask you about the idea of data unions and kind of zero-party data. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that and what you guys are working on there? Yeah, so in a sense, again, I mentioned data unions very briefly before. Zero-party data is, in a sense, it very much aligns with all sorts of web-three notions. So if you want the nomenclature goes, first-party data is data that a website has about you. It's their data, you turn up at their website, they know who you are, and they have, again, an identification about you, and then they're like, oh, look, they spent this much time on a website, this is what they read, this is what they did, et cetera, et cetera. Third-party data is basically people spying on you. No one is proud of what's been created, but it's a huge ecosystem, but it's been closed down literally as we speak. So, for example, if anyone with an iPhone will have seen the update, iOS 14.5, where they said, do you want this app to track you? And I'm pretty certain that, I mean, can I ask the audience? Like, who said yes to that? Who said yes to being tracked? Okay, literally no one, good. One person. Oh, that one guy, that one guy. Always a contrarian. Found it out of this conference. So, you know, that turned out that cost Facebook, for example, $10 billion, because they're being locked out by Apple, and Apple is like rubbing their hands with Glee going, privacy's great, because now we can increase our advertising revenue from $5 billion to $30 billion. So, it's just a big play, right? But that's what they're using. So, that's a state of third-party. Zero-party, it says this, which is why don't we just work in conjunction with people who actually wanna share and be pragmatic about sharing and monetizing their information? So, as I said, there were about 120 data unions, probably about 30 to 40 of them are a position where they're monetizing their data now. So, they've got, I mean, I'll give you one example, like Sweatcoin is kind of interesting. They're actually doing it in inverse, and they're about to start monetizing their data of their users. They've got 120 million downloads, 25 million sort of active users. Pogo is another really great example. They're in the web two, most of them traverse web two and web three. I know Linden, one of the founders of Ozone is around. You know, so they're collecting all sorts of data, wellness data, clickstream data, and actually that whole space is about to open up massively. In 2024, March 2024, put it in your diary, the EU is about to give real-time portability rights to everyone, that's 450 million people in Europe, so you can port your Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple data and more, and LinkedIn, because it's Microsoft, ha-ha. And that's just about to explode that ecosystem. So people can now say, this is my data, I'm porting it to a data union, that data union's gonna be a fiduciary for me, this is zero-party data now, it's coming direct from source, let's monetize it. Could you talk to some of what you're working on as well at Ceramic around this front? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, so as I mentioned, Ceramic is a decentralized data network, and we really try to build out the infrastructure that developers can use to store, manage user data, so just like Shiv mentioned, it's like becomes your data backpack, so I think this is probably where I would definitely put Ceramic. We definitely spend a lot of time thinking about how we can build it in a secure way so that a user is the owner and has the ownership of their data, they can manage it, so decentralized identifiers are at the core of how Ceramic works, and then when users interact with applications that are built on Ceramic, then that is really the linking point that connects user to the data streams that they are generating while interacting with the applications. Right now we are making some quite exciting updates to Ceramic, so I will just quickly mention, we just released a developer preview of ComposeDB, so we're expanding the capabilities of what Ceramic offers in terms of building applications in an easier way, so now users can, developers can, define their application schemas using GraphQL that also opens more opportunities to actually interact with their data by curing the data using GraphQL APIs. We are adding indexing and relation so that you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of how developers can interact with the data that is stored on Ceramic, and yeah, we're also doubling down on making sure that data that is stored on Ceramic is composable, so what that means for a developer, like if you build on Ceramic and you build a data model, so basically define the scheme of the model, you can share the model on what we call model discovery, so that other developers that are potentially building similar application or something that they just simply need a specific feature or the model that already exists, they don't have to build it from scratch, they can take something that exists on a model discovery platform and use it for their application or if they need some additional functionality there, they can update the models and then also share with the community, so we really try to make more, that development more community driven and allow developers to help each other to build faster and better applications and yeah, also data interoperability as well as something that we really take seriously and make sure that data, for example, if user created a profile on an application that was built on Ceramic because their data is linked to their decentralized identifier, that means that they can take their profile or let's say, I don't know, if it's a Web3 social application, their followers and bring it to a different application that runs on Ceramic as well, so those are the things that we're working on, some of them are early stages, we love developers to try it out, share feedback and help us build it better. Exciting stuff. I was gonna say, if people don't know, the secret source of Ceramic really is, certainly from our perspective, is that you can deal in real time data, so like IPFS is great for static stuff, one off, I'm gonna store this, that's great, if you want a persistent stream, then you've got a different problem, because you're gonna have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and that's gonna cost a lot and it's horribly inefficient obviously, so that's for us at least, that's like the basic thing for why Ceramic is really a huge way forward in all of this. Perfect, let's talk about on the consumer end with monetization of data and after sign in and kind of that whole user experience from end to end. I like the grand origin, I know you guys talked about this a little bit, but with ENS let's say and cross-chain and monetization with brands, let's say, how do you think about that, kind of like blue sky vision? I guess monetization is kind of further from our minds in some respects, we've always built ENS with sort of building a public good in mind and so we're aware that people monetize things, but we try and keep it as decentralized and independent as possible, so it's more a platform that people can build monetizable ideas on than something monetizable in and of itself. I think when it comes to sign in with Ethereum it provides access to all these platforms as well, but it hasn't been our core focus historically. Can I ask Nick a question? Yes, yes. I was just gonna say, obviously you were one of the original authors of, what is it, EIP, is it 3165? Possibly, there's so many of them. You can't remember. No, as in this original sort of CWE protocol, right? Yes, yes. As it stands at the moment, how, where do you see it going in terms of it needing, updating, refreshing, coming back to it, and what are those flaws? I think like it was built with extensibility in mind reasonably well, the format of the message you sign allows optional fields, allows apps to specify individual things, wallets can then support those as time goes on, so I'm hopeful that the way it will be updated is by publishing additional specs that add functionality through those mechanisms we already have, rather than needing changes to the base protocol, at least if we did our job, that will be the goal. There's always the possibility of CWE too, but maintaining backward compatibility, I think is really important, because in some sense, whenever you don't, you start from scratch. It's never quite as hard as the first time, but you spend an awful lot of effort just getting back to where you were in terms of adoption and so on, whenever you release something new that everyone has to support. So I want to pivot slightly towards the idea of soulbound tokens and kind of how we can compare and contrast between sign of the Ethereum and Vitalik's SB token approach. Do you want to talk about that, Malak? God, yeah, this is, so soulbound tokens is obviously, is put forward by Vitalik and Glenn Weil and one other author, Priyanka, I think it's Priyanka, I forget her name, this is really terrible. It's always the third person who drops off that list in terms of you remembering. And I don't know, I don't know if it's a very, so the idea is basically have tokens that are inherently bound, soulbound, to someone's address, right? So in a sense, in essence, can't really be transferred, become meaningless after that. I don't know, Nick, if you want to kind of elaborate more on a technical perspective. And that is, in essence, wrapped up with your identities. And I think, Malak, if you take a kind of, you know, a much higher perspective, just sort of step out, it's good at recording moments, in a sense it's not too different from Po-Apps, if people know the value of that, where you're like taking a, from a storytelling perspective, you're like, you're capturing a photo and you're like, here's this moment, it's perfectly captured, great. And it says something about you at that moment. What it isn't really doing, it's sort of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for other people to then put together a story. And in a sense, it's not too different from, I mean, it's got other applications, but this is from a kind of data perspective, or from an identity perspective. People's identities are far more fluid and actually involve a good many more things. And you know, so if you just told your story, if you want through photographs to carry on that metaphor, you'd end up with kind of an Instagram-ish world. But that doesn't really tell the richness in terms of digital storytelling perspective of everything that's going on. All the stuff that you wouldn't, in fact, actually really capture. And the humdrum of data that's produced about people is sometimes incredibly useful, not just to external parties, but to you, right? It very few, I won't go down that route, but I think that's the difference between this kind of soulbound token approach, which has crossovers with Po-Ups, NFTs, et cetera, and something maybe a bit richer, which is let's take real-time continuous information from the applications that people use and then store that in a ceramic-style data vault, right? I think that's for me a much more holistic approach to that. I don't know anything. Yeah, I guess the most basic version, the most basic view of the soulbound token is just, it's an NFT that can't be transferred. But that falls for the, you know, a couple of common misapprehensions that an Ethereum address uniquely represents a user and that it ever changes, and neither of those is true. You know, all of us here probably have multiple wallets. Probably most or all of us here have the experience of moving from one main wallet to another. And if you have a truly like non-transferable token, then you leave your identity behind when you do that. And from a security point of view, the last thing we want to do is discourage people from making advisable updates and moving to more secure wallets and key storage and stuff. But I think the more sophisticated view of the soulbound token is that it is effectively non-separable. So if you have one that represents your national identity and one that represents your membership of an association and so forth, you can't transfer one to one place and another to another place. You can move, but you have to move as a whole. You know, you can't split your identity into pieces. And a different approach to that, which I'm quite fond of, is attestations. And particularly if you tie them to an identity such as an ENS name, because you can transfer the ENS name to a new account. And all of your attestations come with you because they're pointing at, you know, that this name is over 18. This name is a citizen of New Zealand and so on and so forth. And the attestations are cheaper too because you don't need to put them on chain. You can put revocations on chain, but you just need to sign a message that says this authority asserted that this fact is true about this ENS name. And you can collect them and you can hand them out and you can have privacy over them as well. In a sense, you know, again, it comes down to the fundamentals of what identity is, how we not only want to build it, but like, what is it? Like going back to like, who are people? People are complicated things. And to kind of, you know, are we taking this kind of almost stochastic approach? Or are we going to have continuous streams where we realize, yes, these things are sort of fluid and but we can tell a kind of more interesting story. And obviously people, yeah, do want to shift. People's identities inherently do change. We're not static beings in that sense. And I guess, you know, it's a good, I felt like the whole, Solvante tokens are incredibly good theoretical exercise, but from a UX perspective, just like the worst in a sense to implement because humans are complicated in that sense. Right, right. Justine, could you talk to maybe some of the use cases with let's say AI or advertisers and, you know, just different ways to kind of combine, you know, sign in and artificial intelligence? Yeah, I mean, overall, that's a massive topic. Yes, that's a big example. It's just a tiny question. It would take an entire hour to talk about that. Like overall, I'll try to make this quick and short. I think most of people here are familiar with problems with AI and driving insights from data in VEP2. I'm speaking about users giving up their data ownership, these big companies that have algorithms that are being trained on their data, do most of their work in a closed source so there's no way to really tell what is happening behind that. And then again, like if you use traditional sign in methods, you give out like entire network of your interactions with different applications. Then on the other side, there is another challenge for developers specifically in VEP2 that I've seen so many times, like if you are a smaller company and you don't have massive user base, like for example, Google or Facebook, you have two main problems. One of them, you might not have a big enough team to build out these advanced systems. And another problem is that most of the data is extremely siloed. So if you don't have access to these massive data pools, you are quite limited in terms of how good those ML or AI systems can be. But at the same time, let's be honest, these algorithms that we interact with on a daily basis, like for example, YouTube recommendation algorithm that gives you suggestions for the next video to watch, they are pretty good and I'm sure that everyone appreciates the experience that they provide. So overall, I think looking at VEP3 and like for example, these sign in methods from Ethereum side, I think that is a really great opportunity to do these kind of things a little bit better, although at the same time, I feel like it's really early days because applications that are currently on VEP3, they are not very feature rich. And to train those kind of systems, obviously you need data. But what I'm really hopeful with signing with Ethereum about again, I mentioned that session management, which should open up the doors for more feature rich applications. Again, I mentioned gaming applications, VEP3 social, and that should allow more VEP3 apps to potentially have some kind of sprinkle of machine learning systems there to improve user experience. And then at the same time, there is a massive interest right now in decentralized finance, decentralized machine learning as well, and there are some methods there already that should allow users to interact with these machine learning systems based, built on a blockchain without giving out their data. And instead, for example, sharing the weights of the model that is being trained, I will not go too much into technical details there. But basically, I think that our opportunity is there to hopefully get to at least similar user experience in VEP3 as well compared to VEP2 or maybe even better, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to enable developers to build these quite advanced and feature rich applications on VEP3. But signing with Ethereum is, I think, getting us there. I won't add much. I know we're gonna ask the audience a bunch of questions or they might have questions for us, I should say. I just add this. I think I don't really think you get AI and something like the metaverse serving humanity unless you have, if you want, decentralized session management and sign in with Ethereum. I think that vision just goes into a really dark place unless you have that base layer sorted in terms of protocol. Perfect. Anything to add? No, okay. Is there any questions from the audience? Just wanted to check we have about five minutes remaining. Yes, right there. We bring the mic. I have a quick question for Nick. Are we going to support automatic renewal for ANS or no? Sorry, automatic? Renewal of a specific ANS. The problems with that are in terms of getting user authorization and payment from the wallet. It's possible, but a bit awkward. I'd be happy to chat with you about it out of band though. Yes, sure. Thanks. Anyone else have a question? Right here. Quick question about I think the legal side. Have any of you spoken to governments discussed, I guess, legislation that could help. I would say release this data and information so that we can bring it on to Ethereum. I can take that briefly. We just say this is how sad I am during the pandemic. So right at the start of May 2020, I was just talking to a lot of people from Brussels because their worries were, they realized basically GDPR didn't do the other bit, which they hoped it would do, which is to break the back of kind of Google and Facebook monopoly. Because from their perspective, these are Silicon Valley companies and it's not really their vision either of a bit more of a decentralized or kind of where the power is spread, at least to some European companies. So the rules that are now coming out in March 2024 were kind of a result of that. Lots of other people, actually, even a few people from Web three were involved in those discussions. So that's now resulted in real time data portability being a right. So at the moment it's just portability rather than retail real time portability. So people can now, instead of sending an email saying, I want to get all my data and then it comes back 30 days later in a JSON file, it's like signing to a third party, use OAuth in a sense, in fact use their tools against them, it's great. And then you'll be able to port your data to a third party to whomever you nominate. And so that's at least what's come as a result of that, which is bloody fantastic. It means the silos for Google and Facebook are about to be, in a sense, ripped down. We're about to witness a vast experiment, certainly in Europe. And then they can't imagine Americans standing by going, oh yeah, these Europeans can do all this stuff with their data and we just have to lump it. At least I'm not American. So I don't know how, let's see how that goes down. Do you have anything to add there? Yeah, that's a great question. I think overall, we didn't speak too much about technical details of sign-in with Ethereum, but I think it does make it easier to follow certain legislations and think about what will be happening with user data. Because again, user becomes the owner of their decentralized identifier, which then when linked with let's say data storage systems, still allows them to manage their data in a way and it's not being shared with anyone online. So I think these kind of methods that we have being implemented should make it easier and the same applies to for example, NFTs are quite often also used for as decentralized identifiers, but the problem is that they are public, they are on chain. So with options like sign-in with Ethereum, we can now leverage more of off-chain, applications as well for data storage and so on. So that makes it, I think in general easier to be compliant with legislations and rules out there. Makes sense. Excuse me if you don't start. Yeah, I guess things like GDPR are all about how companies that have your data can share it with third parties and things like sign-in with Ethereum and decentralized profiles give you that control. So in a way, they obsolete it and they're a very good way to be compliant with it. Like the zero-party data you were talking about, Shiv. Anything else from the audience? Yes, one more. Hi, oh cool, two questions. First one, for people who want to contribute to sign-in with Ethereum, what is a good hub to reach out and help build it? And second question, is the word Ethereum a limiting factor for adoption and maybe like sign-in with a private key or self-sovereign identity, a more appealing button to add next to sign-in with Google or something? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. In terms of contributing, Spruce are good people to talk to and the sign-in with Ethereum site, which I think is seaweed.eth as well as there's a non-decentralized version, has a lot of information about how to contribute and get involved. I agree, it's like it's a difficult thing because technically you're not signing in with Ethereum, you're signing in with your crypto identity, which happens to be the one that we use for Ethereum and so forth. But I guess it's difficult to compress that into a four-letter acronym and we're kind of stuck with it for now, but you're right, it's much broader than just Ethereum. I think we should be like super proud of that fact, right? Like, and we can call it seaweed and we haven't been calling it seaweed on stage. Maybe we should have done that a bit more. But no, I'm like, you know, I want to know from websites, as soon as I had that Uniswap experience and the Aave experience, I was like, why isn't every other website like that? Like I want to know, like, and prod them and go why can't I just sign in with my wallet? I don't want you to make me use Google, right? That sucks, it really sucks. I feel bad, it's a bad experience and I get nothing out of it. Totally agreed. All right, looks like we're out of time today. Thank you so much for coming out and let's give it up for our panel.