Bridging Web2 – Web3: IPFS x Opera integration

so we're going to move on to our next panel we've got uh bridging web 2 web 3 ipfs and opera so opera is obviously a what we would know and i know it's like a you know analog browser innovative when it comes to looking at how to integrate this new technology so we've got an all-star panel going to be talking about how uh we've got susie who's gonna moderate igor dietrich and brad so you guys ready to go thanks john thanks uh jonathan backstage here um i'm susie batt and i'm global crypto community lead at opera i'd love to dive right in with introductions from the panel um who you are your role organization and what you're working on uh we'll start with igor yeah so i'm igger i'm from opera and i'm a lead crypto researcher i guess my position is called so basically i'm responsible for a little bit of project management and uh implementation of different crypto and blockchain related projects opera so great brad uh yes i'm brad cam co-founder at unstoppable domains and dietrich hey everybody my name is dietrich ayala i'm the ipfs ecosystem lead at protocol labs great well dietrich let's start with you um what is the interplanetary file system ipfs and what is the problem it's solving uh so i ipves is uh if you're familiar with http a protocol for our content distribution ipfs uh sol solves a couple of problems one one thing uh that that i like to to remind people that is interesting is that while people don't necessarily understand how the web works they know what a 404 is they know when something's gone they know when something they can't find something uh everybody knows uh what a a uh when a website's down um and and we also kind of know what it's like to not be able to find the data we're looking for anymore or to have lost lost files uh to have some stuff that maybe you've deleted that you didn't necessarily want to delete uh we we're familiar with when we get an ssl error and we also know what it's like to have our internet go out and that web page that you were just at you can't get back to anymore uh ipves solves a number of these different problems these are the type of paper cuts that we experience as humans using the internet like a lot of us do all day every day now uh i guess a collective many billions of times now probably a day and ipves provides a foundation and a framework for a more resilient internet that makes uh offline usage easy works out of the box uh there's encrypted by default when in transport uh and provides some of the primitives for more direct human communication online ways that you and i can interact more directly with each other instead of through a third party website great um it's so animated dietrich i love it it's like great storytelling um ipfs support igor ipfs support in opera is about a year old um ipfs features were enabled by default in opera browser upper mobile web browser was the first to ship ipfs features in a production release what are we celebrating today what's the news yeah so basically there are two uh like announcements as you told yes uh the first browser that got full enabled by default which is very important because we shouldn't underestimate the power of default so if you need to install an extension to browse whatever uh you need to browse you just lost like 80 of your users immediately so the first browser that had this support was opera for android i think it was something about in march of 2020 it was released and uh but that was basically it's a big platform it's a lot of users but it's not everything so today we're basically announcing that we are covering the rest of their popular platforms so there is an up support and opera i like opera attach for ios version 255 it's already in the app store it's also enabled by default there so you can just browse the apfs urls as you want and we also having like a special like promo web page we can where you can download the demo build of the desktop versions for uh windows mac and linux where also ipfs is enabled by default so that means that right now whether you're on any of the like create a popular major platforms you'll be able to use ipfs pretty much seamlessly without no setup no extensions and nothing whoa yay this partnership ipfs opera unstoppable domain seems seamless um can you describe how the user experience is enhanced by this partnership sure and i guess you know kind of where we fit in maybe just similar to uh what what dietrich gave just a real quick story on traditional dns so traditional dns domain names sit on these uh centralized dns servers it creates all kinds of weird attack problems like for example your registrar like godaddy or whatever can be convinced to give somebody else control of your domain name which uh happened in november for for a few uh for a few domains for a few domains and then they were able to uh update records and you know point people into directions steal money whatever there's also been been cases where a bunch of domain name systems are controlled and run by specific governments uh and then when those governments have a new leadership they might change the rules so for example uh a lot of people were using l-y because it sounds like this kind of cool ending for a website that's actually controlled by the libyan government and when a new libyan government came in and i think 2011 2012 they changed the rules and started policing morality on all dot ly domains and websites going on in canada and other places all around the world so super weird uh quirk of the internet that uh domain name systems have all of these random people who can uh who can control them uh and so we built uh blockchain domain names watching domain names live on blockchains uh we have dot crypto which is on ethereum uh domain names are stored by the user they're making their own updates uh one of the most popular use cases is to add your decentralized website uh your ipfs website so that's that's where that's where we fit in and you know this is the the goal here i think ultimately is to give users an experience in web 3 that's very similar to what they would get in web 2 just with these new features and i think the domain name kind of helps helps do that because it's a piece of the it's a piece of the puzzle that users are very familiar with they go and they get a domain or they type in a domain and then go find a website uh that's so cool i'm going to have you follow up on those use cases in just a minute but i wanted to ask igor can you describe the dev experience building on web 3 with opera ipfs and unstoppable yeah uh so basically uh like if you're building like your dap or something that's uh webster related obviously you need to have a user interface that works with users and then you have this kind of a last mile problem that's okay your app is like a smart contract that's distributed on the blockchain but then there's still a web page that hosted somewhere uh that's like basically it's not resistant to censorship or something like that again if the governments change or whatever and then uh basically what what you can do because most of the dapps they are basically single page applications written in fully in javascript so they don't have a server side because the i don't know the wallet serves as a server side basically that means uh that you can deploy its own ipfs both like html and javascript and css files and then have it ready so what opera offers there again it's uh you know you don't need to set up anything you can use your default browser browser like dev tools and stuff like this so you can build a smart contract of course you like need to build test it cover it and then audit it and then deploy to the mainnet which is like processed as usual but then the difference is that instead of like creating a domain name at one of the hosting companies and hosting something on like ipfs or on another aws s3 or something like this you just host it on ipfs so you can just let's say run a local node and then use like ipfs add to deploy to my ipfs and then you can for instance write your local like local host node as a gateway uh to opera and then like like locally tested that it works and then it will also you can switch back to the gateway and make sure that it's also loaded from the gateway as well and then as soon as you settle with the actual release version then you can create a crypto domain because even though i would say that technically the ipns system that ipfs provides is very impressive and it's readable and you can understand what parts they're in it's not very user friendly if you want to catch your name to to your project and that's where the crypto domains are coming into place so you can use the wallet that's also built in into like every major opera browser as of now so to buy yourself a crypto domain and then point it to this address and yes that's it and then your app is live i think there might be one other thing that the domain name is doing there um which is uh allowing you to use the security of the blockchain of like the ethereum blockchain in order to be able to sign the message to do the updates um so i think that's that's that's kind of one of the i think that's kind of one of the one of the magic powers here is is that you know when you have a you have a blockchain in general you get a you get a you get a public private key pair if it's a if it's a human readable name like a domain name then you can remember it and share it around and then it's allowing you to to sign messages with the private key to make updates um something and there's been a lot of other kind of versions of of naming out there but i think that the the superpower that you get with blockchains is that um the kind of named public private key pair yeah and i guess that's you and also like like it's composable so you could plug it into like multisig if it's like high stakes system so it's like you're sure that even even though you might lose your key or somebody might steal your personal like privacy somehow like there are like four other keys around and you won't be able to alone change the domain settings which is always like access control is always a pain in classical like security so it's also one good thing do dietrich what what issues or challenges have you encountered that our dev audience might be interested in hearing about to hack on or biddle on you know their their bounties out there check out ipfs opera unstoppable um but you know give us like your you know um sort of pain points yeah i think um there's a what actually the conversation that that igor browders is having is really interesting to me we now have some of these primitives of of a higher level application system we it's getting easier and easier especially with these browser integrations of ipfs to actually push your ipfs data out to the edges um and to be able to serve it from there uh eventually as well and now with distributed naming systems we start to ease the access in the ux around uh access to these services in a way that is human readable uh and people can easily bookmark and type in the address bar of their browser et cetera and with with these uh these the browsers the naming and the underlying protocol you start to have the uh the pieces but not necessarily like the multi-sig example talks uh talks about that gorgeous mentioned the workflow or the tooling so i think that's one of the one of the biggest challenges right now is we we're now getting a clear picture where these these pieces we have them we have these tools we have them now in our hands they are highly functional uh they do that one thing well but we need to close the tooling gap we need to be able to have it vs code integration we need to be able to have uh get github actions uh built-in support for a bunch of this stuff and uh we're starting to see a little bit of of that um companies like fleek are closing the gap in unifying these components in a way that makes it easy for new developers to be able to on board to the platform to be able to deploy services and systems uh pretty frictionlessly i think we're gonna see a lot more of that uh closing the developer workflow gap great thanks and and brad let's get back to you um you had that l-y um story was uh was was odd um but not surprising but can you give some interesting use cases at unstoppable domains like who are scooping up domains what's trending can you give us some tips or cool insights so i think what's trending is actually really similar to what's trending on twitter um so like we see this a bunch you know whenever there's something going on with wall street bets there's a bunch of domains associated with that or uh dogecoin uh over the past week or elections a few months ago um it basically tracks to what people are uh what people are talking about or or are trending on twitter um yeah especially today right with elon musk um you know gobbling up all that bitcoin um dietrich how can functionality be enhanced in the future well you touched upon this a little bit but um where do you see things evolving for devs to get excited about uh yeah so it was great i actually had a chance to talk with you a little bit in the uh ipfs booth in the virtual castle yesterday if you haven't been there come stop by we were hanging out usually uh a couple hours every day uh and and we're talking about what it means to get so the current i the current opera integration of ipfs is that you can use ipfs native addresses and it proxies that request over to a ipfs http gateway uh what we were talking about is how do we how do we push more and more of that decentralization all the way out to the edge and get that integrated more close more more tightly into browsers especially the challenge is is being able to run more ipfs functionality on the device on mobile that's going to be a very very important use case but right now it's pretty costly to be able to run uh uh to be able to do that imagine running a web server on your mobile device no not something that is so easy to do uh not something that a lot of people are doing um and and so i think there's a lot of uh innovation to happen there i'm also interested in how we ease publishing flows so right now uh you know one of the things that i do is i upload a photo onto ipfs and then i can share it with other people and share that address and as long as um i am as as long as i have uh my my node running then that that data is available uh but i want that that data to be available all the time so i want to be able to have the same diverse ecosystem of services that we have in the hp world where i can publish my data i know it's always going to be available all the time uh and uh i want to be able to make that process as easily easy as possible one of the things that if you are running an ipfsnote locally that allows you to do is to be able to publish that data directly and share it with other people without having to upload to a third party first so that really taking advantage of those types of features to ease the independent publishing flow is something that i'm really interested in browsers being a part of that story it's the tool we have every day it's the the lingua franca of how we interact with the web in general as opposed to through through verticalized native apps or services uh so i'm really interested in exploring that space working with creators to figure out how to make it easier for them to be able to share their own data directly to their own readers users viewers watchers great thank you and um my last question before i give you a moment to um to add whatever else you'd like to um add to the panel um what have you what have each of you used ipfs for personally um igor we'll start with you yeah uh so i'm still in process of trying to move my personal blog into something ipfs hosted because like the publishing platform that i'm using is is not really great and there and they're actually changing rules all the time all the time so sometimes i just my readers can't read my posts and it's very annoying and i want to also make sure that when when i link to something that i link to the exact version that i that i read when i uh like linked it uh there so yeah basically blogging and this is my primary example but it's it's not published anywhere yet but maybe within this year i'll i'll try to get to this turn around uh so i've got a i i have a blog up um at brad.crypto you can check it out on opera um so that's the thing i've done most uh i've done most most recently um but uh but have a have another idea in the works that i'm uh that i'm working on that i'll i'll hopefully be uh hopefully be sharing soon for me i've used it for a bunch of things uh obviously because that's what i do uh i use it to move data around sometimes uh which is which is pretty good i also share a lot of times like screenshots that i know i'm like okay it's gonna be so easy to be able to have this and everybody can load it from wherever um another one of things i do is the ipfs docs website so docs websites that are on uh ibfs mean that once you read them and then you open them again in your browser even if you're offline they still work so uh be able to like be able to and this is one of the things that that be able to have naming services and this support in the browser makes things so much better is that that use case is now going to become kind of i think it's going to become the expected and the norm uh like what why would you have information that you want people to have access to be unavailable in the worst circumstances where they might be able to use it most uh things like any time that you are someday we'll be able to do that again be on a plane uh you really want to be able to access that documentation well you don't have to do a whole bunch of round trips to be able to do that right so i think um offline websites is something that i'm increasingly like it feels right it feels right that they just work and that is something that i think yeah once you start once you get used to that you start to expect it yay maybe you don't go back to the websites that don't work the way that you that you need them to as a user yeah actually that reminded me one more usb that i did like way back when it was dependency management uh in go uh where like you you there is a tool that allows you to put like request dependencies from ipfs which i was super interested in the relatively big team and in the ci environment because as long as this dependencies hit one developer machine then even ci can take it locally which is like super efficient and uh there was a time when i didn't remember there was something with uh either rp or npm repo basically or something like this so it went down and then half of the internet ci stuff went down with it so yeah uh that's one more use case that i i didn't look at this for over a year but i might come back to that there's actually uh one of the folks on the ipfs team published an experiment uh called for i think it's for us that io i'll share the link in the in the discord uh it basically caches your npm modules uh locally and it's fantastic for doing things like you do an npm install and then you do an mp install in a container and it just pulls from the local cache as opposed to having to do network round trips it's incredible experience from a performance standpoint uh and and really just be able to make things work and you can do that kind of stuff without having to have that have a full connection or if you have a terrible connection having to do those module pools uh that npm is so famous for as is now much much more pleasurable experience oh yeah i wanted to point out that uh yeah we are here probably are very sort of uh used to good internet connections or at least decent ones but uh since uh opera is not on like the a lot of people who use opera they actually use it like in africa or in asian countries and then when you are there like and then like the local like locally cached content is like totally at the other level because i been i tried to download xcode there is developers you know i think it's like four gigs or something like this once uh in china and it took me a week like literally so that that's what like if you can look at this uh stream live like you can be like you're gonna feel very very like privileged that's you like you have a connection even if you're at a conference right and one person decides to download xcode and everything everybody else having to do that also can pull it from their local ips cache right at the block level at this much smaller bits like not an old thing so yeah yeah that's a good point um this panel is really indicative of the collaborative nature of the ethereum ecosystem so um you know opera ipfs unstoppable domains partner partners like you guys um make it feel like we're not really working but uh all fun it's all good thank you all for for being here are there any last remarks or anything you guys are really excited about here at east denver um uh that you want to share before we uh let the next guys on i just saw the list of uh all the projects that i've submitted and there's really a lot of them i'm super excited to spend the next couple days tripping around going through those yearly rooms and uh talking to those groups about what projects they're going to be building uh also would be remiss if i didn't say go install opera touch on ios today because it has ipfs support in for the addresses now yeah and uh go to is denver 2021 opera.com to request your desktop build if you want to try some preview on your linux micro windows machine and yeah i'm also super excited to see the hackathon results it looks like the activity and the discord was like that was a lot of activity and a lot of interesting things going on so can um hackers or biddlers uh see you guys at office hours um where can they get the link or um when do things kind of go live the ipfest channel in on discord on the 8th number discord uh there's a bunch of us hanging out in there and we've been doing office hours at at least once a day since starting friday and we'll run it through probably to the end of the event to make sure that we're available to folks there great i i also trying to join it uh the ipfs uh both there every now and then whenever i can like i'm in european time zone so i only can do that my evening cure morning once but yeah somebody somebody needs to wants to go to bed soon over there all right well thank you all so much fun love working with you guys um have fun here at youth denver put a spork in it thank you thanks for having us bye-bye thanks guys thanks susie and the whole panel this uh this discussion made me so excited because it just touches on so many elements that that are um that are really evolving fast and they're so necessary building out an entire stack and you know especially leveraging that um you know decentralized file storage and then it's definitely a shout out to opera because you guys have been have been flying that crypto flag for multiple years now you guys saw where things were headed and uh it's just fun to see what uh all the new iterations of what you guys are doing and how you're solving some of the ui ux issues so thanks everybody thank you thank you thank you