Why Decentralization Matters | Vyacheslav Shebanov | Chad Nehemiah | Evin McMullen | Maxwell Saal |

[Music] all right hello everyone thank you for sticking around for our last panel of the day it is one that is like near and dear to my heart I'm glad you're going to be here for it because it's going to be great it is called why decentralization matters and please welcome to the stage a great list of panelists being led and moderated by Brad C founder of drro Media [Applause] all right well you know they they do Save The Best For Last and uh I'm glad that you everyone who's here appreciates that uh but we do have some incredible panelists uh we're going to finish strong today I think this is actually the very last panel um and we have a pretty broad topic it's why decentralization matters and I guess we might be preaching to the choir here but I was just thinking you know in order for blockchain to get Mass adoption we're going to have to you know people are going to have to convince the normies that this is a way to go and also you know there may be some areas where decentralization may not be the solution so uh all right well let's just introduce folks here we've got Evan McMullan here on my right she's uh the co-founder and CSO of Privado ID formerly polygon ID we've got uh Maxwell Saul the head of Partnerships at Oxo uh we've got vaslav shebanov uh the chief technology officer drpc and we have Chad Nehemiah engineer at atonement Network and also who's also worked on the lib PTP project welcome all um all right well let's just start off you know I think I I actually had a little chat with v SL yesterday and just something in the news uh talking about the buit hack and what you know decentralization what what what how would you talk about decentralization in the context of the bit hack uh yeah so probably a lot of you know that you know one and a half 1.2 billion dollar were stolen recently it's kind of the biggest hack in history I think and uh yeah like what we were talking about is like you know they stole money on ethereum they stole basically eth and for some reason they decided to um move dat like all those money or part of this money to bitcoin and then probably a lot of you remember if you follow Twitter discussions that there were a lot of f about like roll back the chain uh which was uh unfortunately like no not from or not unfortunately like uh none from ethereum was talking about it like people from Solana Bitcoin uh were talking about it and then like it spread because uh they started moving money to ethereum from ethereum to bitcoin and this pressure to freeze roll back or do something um was put on the bridges and like a lot of bridges starting like some of them are like decentralized or permissionless and uh a lot of bridges also face this kind of question should we do something and that's a general question like if someone basically stole money should we do something and if we should or or maybe we shouldn't but if we should like what like and to what extent and what entities actually should do something for for example like ethereum probably shouldn't do anything but maybe Bridges should or if Bridges shouldn't maybe like RPC providers should or like I mean that's an interesting philosophical question which I personally do not have answer but uh I think it's important to discuss it because like yeah uh credible neutrality is super important but uh you know we don't want to North Korea to use this money to Nuke us anyone else uh want to weigh on this one what's that anybody else want to you want to weigh on this one absolutely so I work for a project called Oxo we um are doing like something of a privacy protocol right similar to some of the ones that I've done in the past but our whole thing is that we are essentially doing what we call Association sets trying to keep legitimate people from being associated with these Bad actors I wrote something like this on Twitter the other day and I think this was a pretty good take in response to I don't quite remember who it was but basically yeah I think of ethereum as infrastructure infrastructure has a responsibility to be neutral track the funds that's really all your responsibility as protocols on the other hand have no responsibility to accept those funds regardless of where they came from and in fact like I think that crypto is people right I think that that's the whole point of decentralization that's the whole reason that we're here so that we can have be people doing our financial business instead of just these big corporations that we rely on to handle everything from our data to our money right um but we as these people have a responsibility to curate who gets to play ball and I think it's absurd to think that we should be prioritizing decentralization to the point that we should just allow major Bad actors like Hackers from North Korea to profit $1.5 billion of Il illegitimately gotten money and that we would just assume that the rest of the infrastructure has to maintain neutrality on that I totally disagree with that I think that Protocols are built on top of ethereum and I think that those those um protocols definitely should do what they can to protect prot their users and just themselves from this association with crime Chad going to you on this next one another topic that's I mean I've seen several presentations uh just on this stage today about crypto agent AI agents and block the there's you know a lot on the intersection of blockchain and Ai and I'm curious that you know decentralization where does what what's the talking points on decentralization in the context of the the rise of of blockchain AI projects yeah I mean I think actually I would disagree with the last uh two sentiments in the sense that I think the whole reason why we created uh decentralized infrastructure was to facilitate some kind of credibility neutral transition of value and also so to even try and turn back on that to say that we can censor transactions in some sort of way um is not only a problem that has actively been worked on at the protocol level like for instance when you saw the ofac or the ofac um censorship attempts uh there was now the protocol Guild mve to pass um or work on proposals for uh transaction inclusion and that sort of things so I think it's not to say that bad actors should have a free reign but this is not something that is going to be solved at L1 level this is where again uh you have social political neg NE iations to figure out how do you come to some kind of agreement that countries don't get nuked but not everything needs to be solved with a blockchain But to answer your question specifically on how this uh plays into AI I think ironically even though there's strong Economic Security in terms of uh how crypto is actually um distributed amongst the number of investors if you look at the number of validators they're really controlled by probably two to three major entities I know that Lio um and Slava made a great point to me earlier that there are a number of other other um people running La valid data infrastructure within the Lio umbrella but nevertheless they're still under one organization run a substantial amount along with coinbase so if you look at Geographic decentralization I wouldn't say there's much most validate ethereum validators are kind of distributed across the global North and um I would even go further to say that there's a strong disincentive to run solar stakers most solar stakers who I even know personally are just checking out and just giving their money to Li because it's just too much of a burden to even run it to get the same kind of rewards and incentives that somebody else who just gives their rewards to Lio is and I know this is a little long waed but I'm getting to my point I think I'm a bit nihilistic in that that dream of geographic decentralization for validators is completely dead I think the New Frontier now is with llms and I see a particular use case around local AI so for instance what we're doing at atoma is creating privacy Centric uh AI through tees I know it's become a buzzword but so what we're actually doing you know executing these jobs on gpus in trusted execution environments and returning the the results uh of these AI service requests through an encrypted Channel back to users I think I see an opportunity for a lot of people in you know the global South indigenous communities who want to preserve their knowledge but can now actually be economically compensated for it by training these local llms and then setting up some kind of pay wall which could very much be through the existing crypto rails where if persons want API keys to actually query these models cuz let's be real I mean everybody knows who Shan Paul is I'm from Jamaica if you ask chat GPT to explain any song by Sha Paul other than temperature or or get busy it's going to be a complete disaster but people want to know about Jamaican culture imagine if we were the ones training these models and then people can actually get the best answers from us cuz we're the experts in those fields and we can have these llms now on some kind of marketplace in a decentralized way so I think that is the new frontier for how decentralization can really matter to actually get meaningful answers and now kind of create a level economic play playing Ground between the global North and the global South that's fasc yeah go there's a little bit of a spicy take there that I appreciate but I want to push back on in that you know you describe the the challenges of nation state interaction for example as a social and political coordination effort that is separate from the credible neutrality of the chain I actually think that the you know example of of perhaps all of our work here of having an opinionated protocol set of capabilities built on top of that neutral infrastructure is evidence of the benefit benefit we derive from decentralization in fact so was a quick question does anyone know why June 2015 is important that was June 2015 why is that important to us here at eth Denver that was when ethereum launched and it has not gone down since there are very few Protocols of the size scale and value that ethereum represents that can also make this claim um so I think that you know to Max this point ethereum is people right it is a human coordination tool that is enabled by human coordination and by virtue of its decentralized structure though there's much progress to be made C certainly on the staking front that minimum viable decentralization to enable opinionated takes on top of the protocol layer I think is evidence of why it matters not why it is failing us but Max I I imagine you probably have some thoughts there as well oh yeah I okay so quick question are you Pro crime do you think it's okay to steal people's money no I I'm okay that's not I don't want to get long-winded here but I think that no is the first answer that a lot of people would give to that right and I think that when we're trying to compare um you know traditional Finance cash for instance or moving gold or any store of store of value right like what we're doing here is preserving digital value and creating something that's open access that people can use but the idea that we have to be neutral to the point that we say when somebody runs off with somebody's funds that when somebody um cons somebody into giving up their life savings that the rest of us who interact with this technology on a daily basis have to look at that and say like yeah yeah that yeah we're we're neutral here that's that's cool I think that's ridiculous I really don't think that's okay I want to I want to step in because I think like we need to balance a little bit there's the idea like proc crime isn't are you proc crime or not proc crime is very interesting question but uh like with bybit is actually very like interesting example of it it's like super clear but it's not super clear all the time like who defines what's crime and what's not it's kind of you know for example uh okay if we talking about bybit hack probably a lot of like 99% of the people will tell yeah it's bad and yeah if I can stop it I will probably try to do it but like there are you can make a number of examples where it's not so clear and the thing is like for example what bothers me uh that for example FBI will be deciding what's crime and what's not and for example for us it's completely maybe reasonable yeah but uh blockchain is not you know us company it's like worldwide and things that bi consider crime in us may be not considered crime in different countries or cultures sure I guess sorry I I know that I didn't let you get a word in edgewise and I do apologize for that I guess I guess my point is this right like when we're talking about the difference between infrastructure and the things that people do like defi for instance somebody participating in an LP pool and getting some some returns on that I I really don't think that that it's in anyone's interest to participate in a in a liquidity pool and yes the jurisdiction question here is important right and I think that's up to the individual projects to decide if you want to build a project on ethereum that enables stolen money to like go through you you know it's neutral INF infrastructure go for it but I think the idea that you shouldn't get in any trouble for that is a different question entirely yeah I think I let me clarify my position it's about what is the right tools for the job I mean trying to now turn ethereum as a blockchain as a foundation for establishing Universal morality I think may not be the best use case for it and there is precedent for this right I mean look at the United Nations for instance you'll have a vast majority of countries vote on particular issues you know whether it's related to a genocide or not and the security Council will veto it right so this is a non-trivial problem but I think what is should be emphasized here is that this is not necessarily A technological problem and let's I mean just to concretize it let's be realistic about it let's say it is the North Korean hackers who have access to these funds it still has to go through some sort of exit rails right it's not as if to say at least to the best of my knowledge I'm not that well versed on North Korean uh you know Financial infrastructure but I don't think that they could just exit all of that crypto and then you know suddenly become like this Force without without going through some kind of kyc regulated Financial rails and I think that kind of speaks to the broader point I was making earlier is that this whole vision of you know banking the unbank hasn't really materialized it's really mostly the Western countries that are really using crypto in a meaningful way and it's really a minority of westerners on top of that who are doing it in a meaningful way so I think um there needs to be kind of a separation of okay what is the role of of blockchain infrastructure as Financial rails what are the roles of other institutions that may or may not need to be decentralized in terms of regulating sociopolitical uh issues and bilateral agreements and trying to come to this consensus around morality and uh who is who versus who and that sort of thing I just think there are different issues um separately than what happened in the babit hack just to Pivot a little bit which I think we're sort of moving goes right into question about identity which is your specialty um and I mean traditionally been kind of a function of government right uh and so what are what are you working on and how does that solve problems with decentralization or so just yesterday morning we announced billions. Network which is the first human an AI Network built with mobile first verification this means that you can prove that you are a person prove that you are from from a specific nation that you are part of a specific set or not such as kyc that you have certain assets certain interests all from your mobile device without any of your personal data being leaked or being presented to another party that you do not know and you do not trust this means no proprietary Hardware no databases full of body parts are required to allow you to assert yourself on chain and to empower other teams building on top exactly as we just discussed to make opinions their own opinions about how they choose to build and who they choose to serve so whether it's for localization age-based Access Control helping builders on places like R weave decide which content is legal and which is going to land them in jail if they overlaying it um so in order to provide a safe and logical path forward for Builders to make these informed decisions about who and how they serve we need this form of ZK identity but is that like who grants that identity if somebody says you are you who is making that call so I don't believe that any one party should tell you you are you I don't believe one private company should own the definition of who is allowed to be a person alive in this world and that's why with billions. network we combine multiple sources of data multiple proven authorities that are able to provide context about a particular person particular party and their their associated keys so whether that's a government entity whether that is an AI agent that's been identified as interacting with that party whether that is a peer we think that the combination of these authorities can provide the best way for an individual to choose how to represent themselves with sufficient complexity and specificity but without doxing themselves on the most permanent and public platform that the world has ever known but in order for your solution to does it have to become kind of the main solution or is it can it coexist with lots of different solutions this is why decentralization matters okay so as long as there is more than one company in the world as long as there is more than one country in the world as long as there is more than one way that a country signs with their public key the you know the data in your passport then necessarily we need flexible Frameworks such as billions Network that are able to incorporate these multiple authorities and enable both Builders and individuals to combine this data together I think that's a really good point actually and like this is what I think of when I think about decentralization mattering right it's the point is that you as the individual are able to derive some sort of autonomy and power with what you do with the network right but again this does kind of come back to the protocols themselves and and who they're trying to build for I think people's identities I totally agree this is like something that I don't think we should be controlling by you know think about Facebook Instagram all that kind of stuff that's generally like the most important Social Capital I mean crypto maybe Twitter um that we have in this space but that is very centrally controlled centrally controlled by people who by and large are subject to you know the nationalities regulations that they um exist within I think that part of being people on chain part of being a society is knowing where the like what the rules are right and and making those rules socially I think that's like the main point of all of this is like truly creating something digital like that is not just administrated but administered by the people who use it yeah all right I got something vas love when you and I were talking yesterday sorry we've all been there don't worry you were talking about some of the tradeoffs from a business perspective whe whether customers or whether the business necessarily works best with maximum decentralization in the context of of drpc and you were saying there's lots of trade-offs in that spectrum between centralization and decentralization I mean yeah like uh so we are building drpc it's uh decentralized RPC provider so like for us uh we talk a lot of with a lot of customers and uh what we faced is actually uh like potential customers protocols when you say them that you're building something decentralized they kind of become negative in the sense that if it's decentralized it means that doesn't work so like we don't have a lot of time so the idea my idea is that uh decentralization is very important but if you build something truly decentralized that's nobody will use uh you shouldn't be doing that because it's useless and like it's just you know uh spend time uh and the my my opinion is that in decentralization we should also understand what things we pursue for example when we talk about ethereum decentralization we pursue credible neutrality if we talk about like I don't know RPC decentralization we probably pursue censorship resistance and uh the my idea uh in our talk was that basically we should stop building product that is impossible to use that are decentralized and we should start building products that may be less decentralized and here for example like uh I totally don't understand people uh duning on base it's kind of a set of compromises and trade-offs uh yeah you can do an experiment that but if you make an like a set of uh tradeoffs that actually make your chain or like uh app usable um it's I think it's totally worse worse it because like again if we're building something that nobody wants to use it's just waste of time and uh yeah that that that was my that was my idea so it's like pragmatic decentralization we should understand like the values that we want to get or like properties we want to get decentralization most of the time is means to an end not like end goal that's it um thank you so much not a moment too soon but um this has been a strangely spicy panel uh thank you all for com go for quite a bit more time if we had the time to do it thank you guys this good run we'll see you on chain thank you thank you