Powering Human Coordination Networks with Keys, Identity, and Wallets – San Francisco 2025

Hi everybody. Good morning. Really nice to see you today. It's great to be back at the internet archive. It kind of feels um definitely it's a very special place, right?

With a lot of energies and history providing context for the work that goes on. Um I'm one of the co-founders of Holland Foundation and today I want to talk a little bit about some of the work we've been putting in to create an open ecosystem for establishing a foundation for digital human rights. I believe uh a lot of us here today are would agree that there seems to be a bit of discomfort with how quickly technology seems to be moving and a sense of concern as well for the social frameworks that will either abandon or have to uh reconfigure to be able to adapt to a drastically new way of life. So, so I think one of the most important mantras or perspectives we can take is how do we really position ourselves for a future where humanity is flourishing? And what does that question even actually mean?

Does that mean uh humanity at large? Uh, does flourishing mean uh returning back to a more comfortable state or inventing new futures? A big part of this, I believe, has to do with a huge vacuum in popular discourse around um human rights and how they pertain to digital frameworks. So, uh, Madison was kind to mention that we just launched this new project called human tech about a month ago. It's an open framework for providing this firm foundation for digital human rights to take place.

And one of the areas we really see uh the most kind of impact that could be had immediately is through the introduction of cryptography into base operating uh protocols. So, human tech is this open framework and as a company Holland, we've contributed uh some uh what we would call essential libraries and services that allow us to take things like self-custodial keys, wallets and use those to create identity uh that could be portable that's not uh dependent on a single institution to grant you. That allows us to redefine what personhood means in digital settings. So the way that we provide this foundation for digital human rights is again taking this perspective that cryptography is going to be one of the most important ways to push this forward. Um so this idea of say for example taking uh natural rights that Thomas Lach or uh or I'm sorry John Lockach or Thomas Hobbes or some of the early thinkers that crafted much of the civic institutions or the thinking around them today.

And hey like maybe these rights aren't just self-evident because we have the wherewithal or the ability to reason about them. Um, but maybe these rights actually do depend on some form of of enforcement. And there's no better system currently that we can think of of enforcing commitments to say patterns uh, agreements or services than cryptography. Cryptography really I think um, it's fascinating. It kind of takes this raw attribute of the universe, this kind of ability to generate randomness and use that to uh obscure or kind of safeguard ways for us to prove authenticity or providence um or to be able to authorize say other internet services to know that it was you the one who uh say like allowed somebody to use your data.

Um and especially I think it is interesting too I think especially considering much of the concern around how humanity kind of seems to be cheaper right we've seen this long battle between labor and capital where labor seems to becoming more and more discounted as we progress through the arc of civilization as we continue to improve. And this this idea then of I think really firmly placing the individual and using cryptography as a root for that uh orientation is really important. So let me talk a little bit about uh some more concrete ideas of how cryptography can help us really instantiate natural rights into something that's a little harder, something that's a little uh more enforcable. One of the most important things I would propose out for the community here today is you really can't take any benefit from I think like uh any like distributed digital system if you don't have access to the keys like self-custodial access and ownership of the keys you use to sign your messages to uh prove things about yourself to send transactions with. So there's an organization called foresight institute and they have this uh prize every year called the norm hardy prize which really calls attention to the requirement or kind of like this big vacuum for making cryptographic keys as easy to use as possible so that there is it's really an afterthought right where if you're going to uh say like claim some direct aid or uh you know generate like credential that it's actually you in control of that and you don't have to go jump through any hoops.

Um, and one of the major issues with cryptographic keys is once you create them, you kind of, you know, you have to keep some record of that randomness somewhere so that they're always recoverable. They're not difficult to lose. This is why we built uh an open- source framework called the human network. Uh, the human network is you could think of it as a persistent key availability protocol, right? So it's uh basically these like magical fairies up in the atmosphere, right?

Passing information back and forth that at any point you can present yourself to that network and authenticate and prove that it was you who created a specific cryptographic key. So what it does is it takes human data. So things like what you have uh what you might know like uh say like a really good story from your childhood uh or what you are right things like biometrics or other attributes of yourself. And it takes that low entropy data, typically low entropy data, and transforms it in a way that makes it suitable for cryptographic key derivation. So, you know, just like kind of zooming out at a big picture, what we're doing here is uh basically providing people the ability to create these tools for digital rights or kind of like this root uh privilege or power uh for asserting digital rights in digital spaces through attributes derived from their humanity, not some arbitrary randomness.

And we think this is really important. So the idea here really is how do we take um how do we take kind of these abstract ideas of digital rights and give them this sort of configurable grounding where they can be instantiated in pluralistic contexts that best meet the constraints of the society or the situation. And some things are going to be invariant, right? like uh key key ownership uh and there's others too I'm sure we could talk about but once you have this framework right where it's not nation state dependent it's not company dependent it's not um you know it's resilient against perhaps even like environmental or geopolitical challenges then you kind of create this safety net for the future of humanity right where there does exist kind of this record of personhood or set membership or uh information that could be transferred down uh into the into the into the future. So this is really how we're thinking about human tech as this protocol to bring digital rights everywhere.

And we're doing this by bringing in different attributes of uh existing identity and and uh systems. So, for example, like being able to take actually I have my passport with me. Take a a passport and take the public key signature that's in the chip and use that to generate a privacy preserving proof that you are a unique living human being uh in combination with like livveness detection and other types of biometrics. So, this is a huge unlock for us. I think, you know, uh, being able to give anyone a cryptographic key in an account and then access distributed systems like blockchains for direct payments really opens up a whole new universe of possibilities for what we could do to places where infrastructure really isn't where it's supposed to be today, right?

Um, there's a lot of latent economic opportunity all throughout the world, especially in the global south. And we're really excited to be bringing this uh the possibility of this technology and crap like basically establishing this foundation for digital rights where they'll have the most impact. Um, we're really excited to be working with Refite in helping uh stand up their relay ID service, which will allow tribal leaders in Africa to uh help coordinates and uh help distribute aid to up to 150 million people that currently don't have exact access to say the same banking financial services that we can take advantage of. And the idea here is it's kind of um it's pretty simple, right? like you want to be able to give people the ability to transact freely.

You want to unlock this free capital flow that could allow for knock-on opportunities in terms of like all the economic good that that can generate. And you want to be able to do it in a way where uh it's like kind of low tech, right? But uh at the same time taking the most advantage of the tech that we do have. So, this ability for someone who might not even have say uh an email address or have the technological literacy to use an email um to be able to do a biometric face scan uh generate a key and through SMS uh send payments uh just simply through SMS texts and this is what people are doing in Africa already today. Uh also shout out to Akashik.

I think a lot of the work that we're doing with refite lends itself really nicely to uh what CC protocol is building and how we could build build better ways of just like capital allocation. I think that's probably the most one of the most difficult problems for anybody who's trying to solve big problems today in the world. It's how do you actually distribute or allocate capital at these really large scales, right? um capital is very very important for allowing people to uh once they've identified problems, right? Uh being able to allocate the proper resources for that.

And so creating these pluralistic protocols where you can stand up um you can stand up multiple efforts to say uh explore the wide search space right of of uh of of of uh what's possible with technology or public goods to uh really provide resilience in the future for for humanity. So I've spoken quite a bit about I think digital human rights and at a in a at a very very high level and how cryptography is really important for these things. I think you know there's only so much I could really scratch off the surface and absolutely there's going to be a conversation that's required in what do digital rights in the modern world mean to societies and specifically different types of societies. And so at the very least I believe that we need to be discussing more how humans can better align on the sets of ideas, values uh and cultural principles that'll allow us to create this uh these digital jurisdictions or these digital spaces that are aligned with how we imagine humanity to flourish. So, I invite you guys to come down to the workshop downstairs where we'll talk a little bit about how we're crowdsourcing this living artifact for creating a covenant between humans to help align on how humanistic technology really will push forward into the future.

Uh we already have some ideas about this starting with core cryptographic ideas or principles and how these can be instantiated into larger public service protocols that accomplished maybe some of the most important uh uh ideas or attributes right so like back at in in uh in in you know uh uh Thomas Paynees and uh uh uh John Lock's time I think there was a lot of concern with divine right and monarchies and you know is every Englishman really bound by blood to the king because of the Magna Carta and all the stuff that came out of that, you know, for generations, right? That's the stuff they were dealing with back then. I think we're dealing with completely different problems, especially in the context of like hyper accelerating technology. So, uh, I do believe it's really important for us all to take a pause and reflect on what values and principles we want to embed in that technology before we accelerate it even faster. And I think once we're aligned in this way, we can accelerate even faster.

Thank you. [Music]