The Road to Data Self Sovereignty David Sneider

hello everybody east denver all right excellent um so as mentioned my name is david i am with lit protocol lit is a decentralized access control protocol which enables you to grant access to an off-chain resource based on an on-chain condition so some of the uses of our protocol today have been like hooking nfts up to teslas creating decentralized encrypted applications creating token gated spaces inside of metaverse uh worlds like gather town and mona gallery but today for the next couple minutes i'm going to tell you about one particular use case of this protocol as well with the rest of the d5 or excuse me the d web stack that we are consent and storage and what we'll do is we'll look at what this looks like in the web 2 world as well as in the web 3 world so on the identity side in web 3 of course we have sign in with ethereum and then in web 2 you will obviously have things like sign in with facebook sign in with google uh signing with ethereum of course you're saying here's my on-chain identity and that's associated with all of the on-chain data but in our view this doesn't go far enough what we're missing in web 3 is the user consent or the data consent so this is a screenshot from signing with google and as you've probably encountered this before when you've signed into an application that application has said hey we would also like to access your contacts and your calendars and when you click accept you are telling google yes you can send that data from google to that third-party app but what we'd want to explore is what that looks like in the context of web3 where that data is sovereign with the individual and then finally the last component is storage and so you can see that i've kind of set up a dichotomy here around what it means to own your data on the left whether you're renting a server from amazon or digitalocean there's projects like solid that tim berners-lee has been up to where to get started you have to go rent a server but the promise of data self sovereignty in web 3 is doing this entirely browser-based basically treating the world of dweb storage essentially as one gigantic data lake whereby you own your data and you own your little shard of that data lake through encryption and we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment so those are the three components of data sovereignty and now let's talk a little bit as i mentioned about what is ownership so on the digital ocean side you can either have a contractual relationship with one of these giant cloud vendors or just like you own an nft through encryption and the blockchain you can also own data stored on the d web by encrypting it and then having the rights over who can decrypt it kind of we call these kind of a hub and i'll get to that in a second but again here's the stack as we see it in the context of web3 and the promise here is really for individuals to have hubs to have data that is theirs it is encrypted and then as it relates to uh what these layers are at the storage layer is things like ipfs and rweave at the identity layer up top is the ethereum wallet but then what do we mean by the consent layer and so there's two projects that i want to kind of draw your attention to here thinking about read writes and write rights so tools like tableland and ceramic essentially can control writing to a specific data stream and what we're doing at lit protocol is providing those read writes in a decentralized way so if you can see this diagram the way that our network works is that a user can be provisioned a decryption key based on some on-chain credential so what you're seeing on the left is a blockchain and a user agent whether it's an individual or a third-party app can say i would like to request this data they send up a signed message to the nodes of the lit protocol these nodes individually then call down to the blockchain to validate the credential and then using threshold signing each of the individual nodes creates a decryption share associated with that resource and each individual node you can kind of think about it like bittorrent where you get a bunch of parts in from a variety of nodes it's the user who aggregates all of those parts and then they're able to reproduce that initial decryption key and access the data and this is the same protocol that's powering like the nfts that are hooked up to teslas and the token gated metaverse spaces and all of that kind of stuff but this would be using that same capacity in the context of having a self-sovereign data hub and i for me this really begs a question here around what is privacy and just to kind of share this lens i think there's this cultural notion that privacy is really around building walls and saying this is my data nobody else can get to it but in this lens uh what i would implore you to think about is privacy is really about building bridges it's who are the parties that can access my data it's about consent in this context and so with this stack of decentralized storage right access and read access this is now possible to do an entirely browser-based way where individual users don't have to go rent a server from a third party and can just start having private user data um and and basically universal profiles and this is super exciting we see this as an immense opportunity for humanity as you can tell this is the world of having one login for the entire internet and you know basically moving away from this paradigm of surveillance capitalism that we have with web 2 platforms like facebook and google and this all sounds super exciting and really great but there's one really big issue people don't really care about this stuff and that's the hard truth here so in thinking really deeply about this what is the route to really bring this to the real world and our hypothesis is that there's a very very exciting momentum happening in the world of exit to community so as you know if you have a startup venture today essentially you have three paths to liquidity three paths to exit you can either take your company public you can be acquired or you can become profitable and just exist in perpetuity in that way but there's this new momentum that's very much a big part of the ethereum community around exit to community what does it look like to basically take an application and remove the central servers turn this thing into a piece of public infrastructure that ultimately will become tokenized and in doing that and in a lot of the conversations that we've been having with people who are pursuing this a big piece of that is giving users the right to exit so basically having the data exists with the user who then consents the decryption rights to the third party application rather than having uh the third party application storing all the personal identifiable information and we really think it's up to the builders there's this is the opportunity for people who are building the new internet is to be principled around thinking about exit to community thinking about how we can give users data self sovereignty and it's really a collective effort amongst all of the folks who are building in this space to have agreed upon open standards where vendors are interchangeable and for me this is one of the massive opportunities of web3 and and one of the reasons i'm excited to be building on this so there was a quick presentation here happy to kind of take a few questions but that is what we see as the road to data self sovereignty using the decentralized web3 stack thanks so much [Applause]