Welcome to Eth Dam. To Eth Dam. To Eth Dam. To Eth Dam. To Eth Dam.
Okay, welcome back to the the post-lunch session. Next up we have QJ with ECF Pensive. Thank you very much. Thank you. Wait, let me also time myself uh with this.
Okay. And accidentally put exit there. Anyone heard of the word pensive? No. No Harry Potter fan?
All right. Um Anyway, we named this mechanism pensive because I love it. Uh and everyone else Thank you so much, James. Um also loved it. And um today we're talking about it in a little bit of details, but I also found out that we actually only have 15 minutes.
So I'm going to run through it a little bit faster, um but we do need to first get into the context, which is about info defense in the whole Diac movement in our Ethereum community. And um um it is about protecting societies, organization, and individuals against the threats related to manipulation, theft, and disruption of information. And um the threats that we do know that exist are disinformation, social media manipulations, syops, synthetic media and deep fakes, cyber attacks, uh intelligence gathering, insider threats, data breach and leak, all all those. And just so that we are on same page. And um surprise, we're taking it on uh centralization again.
Appropriately uh in this particular uh Eth Dam event. Um obviously our fingers go to what's wrong? It's wrong because it is too centralized. And um actually, if we do look deeper into the flaws of our primitives of information and data handling, this is the source of a lot of problems. Because when control of data uh communication and thus empower decision-making is actually concentrated in the few entities, you have a lot of issues such as you know, the already very celebrated songs um our decentralization communities like to sing, single points of failure, reduced resilience because you just don't know whether there is manipulation.
It's a black box to everyone who cannot access it. It's asymmetrical in terms of power because some actors see just much more than you do, and then they can influence much more than you do as well. And obviously, there is the uh very discussed issue with surveillance and privacy. Of course, we also have more info um infrastructure challenges such as broken links, how the web now is organized based more on locations than the content verifications or the ownership of the of the content. And then, if we look deeper, the flaws in uh the socio-technical systems are these that we identified.
Number one, we have a lot of data, but they do not necessarily have uh contextualization to be meaningful data. And um collectively, it's even worse, right? And then, there is also no native guarantee of ownership or provenance. So, we do not know where data come from and who controls it natively. And the our our usual uh web three songs, the central the central trust uh assumptions and ownership.
So, many systems assume a trusted third party by default. We discussed this yesterday actually. It's one-to-many. And then the thing is we do deal with data and knowledge a lot in our society in order to coordinate. There is the privacy dilemma you have to come out to disclose more in order to win trust.
It's not today's topic. It was yesterday's web 3 privacy event. Um but in today's context it is about that we are missing one thing in the DIKW hierarchy. Where fact which can be considered as verified verified information is lacking. And it's not just verified information.
It's actually we are lacking verifiable information to begin with on the internet. And why do we care about this? Oh sorry, one more step. And now we're playing with a fire. We're looking for truth which is a forever human task collectively.
And this is what Dumbledore said. The truth it is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with caution. Not on the screen. Um what is missing in the picture is the data work is actually a lot of coordination, collaboration, interpretation. And these are separate cross-cutting concerns that can influence every level in real world.
In our particular context as ECF was founded in 2018 in Tokyo with all the early Ethereum community pioneers we had the idea of coming together to coordinate resources in order to get more adoption for Ethereum decentralized applications. And it wasn't easy start when a lot of the projects at the time were well funded, we could pull together and then just give grants so that people can have less hesitation to jump start. And then we realized that on the way of course after I took the job that there are many challenges even today, especially today's grant programs now everywhere and various with various purposes are facing. Where is the money? Where the projects?
Are they good? When they say they're good, is the information real? Can we trust information? Can we trust that they will deliver? And ultimately grant programs struggle with um accountability.
It is very difficult to track performance and it's very costly to do that. But when you That's why grants cannot be very high and that's why it takes a long process for you to get one and usually it's about kind of checking faces, right? Like you need to know someone in order for information to be somewhat more trustworthy um to the grant programs. But underneath, you also have grant programs having their own internal issues such as how to govern the money. You can say it's multi-sig, but who are the stakeholders, right?
Now we need to ask those questions. Um and then this is what what I I had asked ourselves. And how to stand out as a grant org. We were the first, so it was easy. But in order to coordinate the communities and guide resources beyond the grant pool of the vote that we have, we need to really stand out as a good guide as someone who can interpret what is good for our collective initiatives, for our missions.
And then then we also have the information verification issue that is above I mentioned as well. And then to coordinate all the funds in the space, um it was also conflicts of interest um and a lot of other issues that are commonly seen in any human coordination. As far as ourselves as an organization um it goes that we need to be more transparent and that's challenging. We are collecting applications and then we asking questions to these applicants and all of the programs that are today are also doing it. And most important of all and most difficult of all, how do we hold ourselves accountable?
How do people check whether we have done a good job? How do we get that so that more funders would come to us? And it all seemed actually quite backward because we already have the technology to have direct funding since the invention of Bitcoin. Why do we have to put money together? So, once I got the election and became the executive director, the first reform that I promoted, which is the work that followed after those after the first year and now already five more than five, six years, lost count, is to make it an open program that anyone, anybody, any grant program could access the same database and then fund directly based on what they need.
But we do need to coordinate information. Um because our job to guide and coordinate community is still there. We just don't need to reinvent Bitcoin. We just don't need to pull all the funding together and have the risk of hacking and then stakeholders to be much more worried about how you spending money and then we could hold ourselves accountable more on the level of information and the being good at interpretation of what is good than um arguing how much how much should we charge as management fees. And we are not necessarily better than any other fund programs in that as well.
We should just allow everyone to participate openly just like what blockchain has enabled us. Um so, the job kind of change a little bit from deciding who should get grants to how do we help communities give uh resources and support much more efficiently. And um this is our answer. Um in order to collectively discover legitimate blockchain and web three projects and contribute. Sometimes people donate what is actually even more precious than money, their time.
We need to make sure the projects we recommend are with verifiable information and have have updated information constantly and and that they do fit certain standards that we could say that they are legitimately web three projects or Ethereum projects to be specific. And this is our answer. In order to answer to to answer the question what are good projects and where to find them, we have spent years to have R&D this particular mechanism paper called ECF Pensive. And this is not just for a directory or index for crypto projects. It is usable for let's say decentralized Wikipedia or dictionary or any knowledge base, even the community to come together to agree on their mission.
Have you checked whether all your members in the community does agree with what is put as the collective mission there? And what are facts and what is in history books? And so you can look at it as a indexing of project pages, but no one owns it. So we consider this Pensive paper as a layer one of consensus mechanism and ECF, the original organization, will turn into a platform that has some interpretation of the data. But if you don't agree with what we think are good projects, you are very free to take the same data and have different prioritizations such as if you believe projects that are taking the issues of climate change issues should be more important.
Projects that are already open source should be more important. At the minimum, we have a collective open access to a database that everyone can access and everyone can contribute to. So the problem is solved kind of was solved backward when we were trying to technology can already solve the problem, let's just all use it. Uh when we try to discover what is really good and what is actually true for us to base our evaluation or interpretation on. Now we are tackling from the core of the issue, uh starting from there.
Let's check out how we could, without a central party, own data together when it when it concerns our collective social consensus. So this is a sneak peek. After years, we are finally launching very soon. Um and this is the updated light mode light model of it that I put in the slides. Um so it is a little bit neater than actually the previous version, in my opinion, and more scalable when we ask more items uh to be added to the projects with enhanced the secret technology where people do not necessarily have to be more be cautious of whether or not they can share because of security reasons.
Um so so right now with the POC launch, we would have all of these um relatively important but less sensitive or security concerning items required of the projects. And there is no penalization if you don't want to provide. It's all optional for anybody who wants to show more accountability to gain support. Um this would be a little bit of highlight to that it is an identity irrelevant um mechanism that you don't have to really actually let me go through the next pages in order to get to the few highlights. One is that one important aspect to look at it is that it's identity agnostic.
The entire system doesn't care whether you are one person, a hundred people, an AI agent, or not. I know that's a dangerous place to go to, but uh you have to take a look at the paper to see whether it really works. And we wish for the next stage, uh we would have more users to come together to test with us because eventually and ultimately blockchain is a social technology. It only can be proven good or bad or effe- effective or not when people engage with it. Um And then but we do have ways to direct our users to see whether information provided or voted by the users are legit or not in their own opinion, such as looking at data of whether these accounts are actually recently um created or uh are they only interacting with certain project pages, stuff like that, instead of asking people to give us data that we don't want.
And then we tried to simplify the entire user experience in the mechanism as well where you could propose uh any item of a project page then get verification from the community when other people vote for you. Oversimplification um as a as a side note. And then the project page is is published. What is And then you gain reputation in the further knowledge contribution. What we believe is that legitimacy is not transferable.
If you contribute to the knowledge base, then your weight or reputation should stay in that knowledge base versus you probably um I don't know get access to invest earlier, stuff like that. Uh when you have uh expertise um we have looked at a lot of ways to uh leverage reputation system. I think what is difficult is to try to transfer to somewhere else. And we want to keep it very strictly inside. Uh is James trying to tell me that I need to go or yes, okay.
Um very gentlemanly standing there. And what is challenging in the mechanism that is very interesting is that it's an ongoing governance, meaning um whoever gather enough reputational contribution points would be able to change the data anytime they want. And all the versions that have ever happened in uh the competition will always be there dynamically competing with each other. And it is interesting to look with this you have it's interesting to look at a snapshot of when the size of the audience is with certain number as things start to change and the evolution of perception in the immutable ledger. And um just two more highlights that we also include a lot of the collective wisdom in terms of the sentiment because we do not claim to know everything about accountability of a project so we have to have ways to reflect that.
And it is an info finance mechanism bounty mechanism to be more simple. When you contribute to the content that is asked of for different prices you are actually rewarded for that contribution. And um these are dependent on whether this item of information is important because it's a sensitive information, it is hard to acquire, and it's never on the internet, things like that. Um and it is also a gauge of importance when more people start to contribute to the this particular item putting their weight there, it increases the threshold of the next change which makes controversial and sensitive information much more gauged gated and also much more debated before it gets to the public. And a few other highlights that I would just leave on the video.
We're launching soon. So if you are interested in mechanism design, UX design, and you are a curator of projects you love. And if you are community builder you should come work with us. And next page will be a scannable QR code but you could also just sign up for testing the MVP because I'm pretty sure everyone is building cool stuff that needs to be seen. If you could be able to prove your legitimacy without disclosing too much of your privacy by an organization that has been long standing by projects that are accountable and legitimate.
Um it is an ideal thing that you don't have to spend the marketing budget on uh pumping your token. So, thank you so much and this uh we we also do a few other things on the organization and this is the scannable QR code where you get to I guess just join a Discord that is recently rekindled for new discussion because we're launching soon and coming out of stealth. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. 17 minutes, not too bad.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.