The Off Chain Internet: Decentralized Identity & Verifiable Credentials | ETHDenver 2022

[Applause] hey friends how are you feeling thank you guys so much for being here with me today special shout out boys club always great to see you guys so i'm excited to share with you a little bit more about the web 3 beyond the chain as we know our public ledgers are the places where we hang out most of the time but the best of web 3 is yet to be because it hasn't yet been built and embraced fully by all of us um i am evan as you can see from my twitter there are a lot of facets to my identity and the way i present myself in the world but right now you don't know whether my association with those organizations with those traits is real or if i'm just saying it but you should follow me on twitter anyway um so i'm sure like many of you when i was a kid the jetsons defined my metaverse um flying cars robots sidekicks and seamless experiences everywhere you go but you never see the jetsons filling out forms or waiting in long lines for conferences um and that's because their definition of the metaverse is pretty similar to mine where you can show up to any physical or digital environment and receive a personalized experience as a result of the parts of yourself that you choose to present but to enable this metaverse in web 3 we are making a faustian bargain which means that we are trading our morals for material gain um in web 3 we are trading in the principles of consent and data privacy because that's what apps want apps care about data availability but we as humans care about autonomy which means privacy and consent control over our expression and how we show up in the world and we're trading those values in as we prioritize technologies unfit for their jobs simply because they're readily available to us and they prioritize the 24 7 availability of the data that feeds our web 3 apps the mechanism of this faustian bargain for web 3 is is using nfts for identity if we rely on nfts to express our identity then we can't leverage the full range of our human expression nfts offer a really weak assurance around identity it's often hard to tell whether someone's nft was homemade bought traded airdropped gifted or stolen nfts are public as we know immutable and globally available to everyone on earth and in space with an internet connection which is a pretty expensive overshare for most things if you ask me personal data private data data that changes and evolves like we do because we are humans is not a good use of the public chain there's no double spend problem there um nfts also have no signing keys and so they can't really prove anything other than your wallet has somehow attained a relationship with a given token id and you know i believe my team believes that identity is more of a fuzzy set of capabilities than a string of numbers or letters your identity is what you know what you can prove what you've accomplished before and you know you don't cease to have an identity every time you get locked out of an account and so the weak assurances that nfts provide us are not a great way for us to express ourselves in web3 if we want to be just as trustless as this technology promises non-transferable nfts immutably map a token id to your public address sometimes without your participation and without your consent that means that soul-bound nfts non-transferable nfts as they're described by vitalik are the opposite of the autonomy that web 3 has promised us do you want a public non-transferable attestation that you're the top spank chain community content consumer of the month what about you know unsolicited nudes mapped per you know permanently to your public address without your participation outside parties can't tell if your non-transferable nft was wanted or unwanted and if you have a non-transferable nft with illegal content you have to rely on the front ends of nft apps to hide that for you with non-transferable nfts you know if you if you really don't want to be associated with that nft you want to get away from it your only choice is to pay a bunch of gas to move all your assets out of that wallet and abandon your hard-won on-chain transaction history but um and additionally with non-transferable nfts you cannot rotate the private keys that control your public identifier that control your ethereum address while keeping that public identifier intact soul-bound nfts encourage really bad opsec if you want to rotate your keys you want to have complete control over your public expression you can't when you have non-transferable nfts you know associated with keys that you can't rotate they're stuck additionally i know there's a lot of a lot of people popping up about zk badges and the ability to prove ownership of assets in one wallet when using a different address but they are not a great assurance as well because they open the door for users to sell zk badges to others so if i have a board ape and you want a proof that you have a board ape i can sell you a zk badge that makes it look like you do but you can't reverse engineer that back to me and furthermore nfts as a whole have a non-zero cost associated with them and depending on the chain with all these costs can be you know astronomical for managing the entirety of our data which we need in order to express ourselves in web 3. but fortunately we have a solution we need to think beyond the chain to the trustless world of web 3 that lies beyond our public ledgers the good nerds of the world wide web consortium the w3c the guys who came up with like tcp https back in the day they got the band back together like 18 months ago because we have a bunch more atomic networks that aren't talking to each other and they have defined technical standards that enable public addresses to build up independently verifiable web3 ready reputation from the apps that we already use in web 2 and web 3 with our own self-attestations things that we say about ourselves and social attestations from our friends so a decentralized identifier or dids i know there are a lot of you in this room who have mad love for dids um they are a link between our data and our reputation and our public addresses so dids decentralized identifiers are like off-chain data backpacks that enable your ability to sign own control off-chain private data that's written about you dids are globally unique identifiers resolvable with high availability cryptographically verifiable and typically associated with cryptographic material like public keys and service endpoints and many kinds of identifiers can be used as dids including ethereum addresses bitcoin addresses solana addresses email addresses pgp keys if you're from the 70s ens addresses and more so web2 and web3 is now ready to own and control some private data dids are special because unlike public blockchain addresses you can rotate your keys anytime for regular opsec and if your did keys are compromised you can swap them out for new ones so if dids enable data backpacks for our public addresses then verifiable credentials are the digital version of our plastic identification cards tickets diplomas proofs issued to us by a specific issuer these units of private data called verifiable credentials are vcs also from the w3c are signed encrypted attestations written by one party about another or about itself and they can contain anything you want you could think of them kind of like off chain nfts they can include images texts tickets proof of attendance proof of friendship proof of chill whatever you want and these vcs are really special because they are non-transferable so they are in my estimation a better solution than a soul-bound nft for just about every use case they are tamper evident encrypted private by default they're revocable or can be set to expire so they're the perfect vessel for data about us humans that needs to change and they can be disclosed with our consent however we want in whatever level of granularity we're comfortable with so unlike a public blockchain this technology instead allows us to have more control over who we're sharing our information with and unlike nfts they are free to create and they are independently verifiable by anybody who has an internet connection on earth and in space um and they are also pretty magical because they are commonly legible to all dids regardless of base chain so that means a polka dot address can send a vc to a bitcoin address which can share it with an email address and everyone's on the same page right away no bridge needed no waiting for blocks no gas fees dids and vcs allow us to communicate between public blockchain addresses and web 2 identifiers at the speed of an api in a private way and so the magic of dids and vcs is that we can use our existing blockchain addresses but we don't have to use blockchains to communicate between them just leveraging our existing signing keys so what does this mean for the future of fun in the metaverse right now if all i know about you is your ethereum address your bitcoin address then the only thing i know about you is how much money you have what have you bought what are what are you spending your money on how are you moving things around and that doesn't give me a lot of information about who you are that means that the only kind of coordination problems we can solve together if the only thing i know about use your wealth is treasury at location we can become a group chat with a bank account or a dow but if daos want to do more interesting coordination problem solving if you and i want to create a product together throw a party together design a logo together we need to know more about one another than how much cash we have on hand or crypto we have on hand in a verifiable way that's trustless like the data that we get from a public chain so in the near future of music let's say ariana grande fans will receive uh or will receive vcs that attest to listening to thousands of hours of her music at home buying merchandise on her website showing up at her shows interacting with her social content so what this means is that if you listen to a thousand hours a month of ariana grande and when you then when you attend her show you'll be able to prove that you're in the top one percent of listeners and dance on the stage with her and other super fans if we think about this this example in the context of web 3 some of you guys might be familiar with rabbit hole a web 3 education platform that allows you to complete various modules and then receive now nfts to prove your aptitude imagine in the future you can go to rabbit hole complete a module learn how to do something like a swap rabbit hole can issue a credential to you a testing to that accomplishment and then when you show up at git coin they already know something about you so the intent of these capabilities is to make sure that you never fill out a form again that you never go to a concert of your favorite artist without receiving the vip treatment that you've earned at home that you never show up to a conference and have to wait in a line like the one outside the sports castle so i am really excited to share even more of this with all of you um i know we have i think i ended a little bit early here so please find me out in the hallway if you have any interest in finding out what's under the surface of the rest of this iceberg of the off-chain uh offchain internet enabled by dids and vcs i'm evan mcmullen i am the chief instigator at disco and i will see you all in the metaverse thank you thank you evan we do have some time for question