User Experience and Identity in Web3 by JP Bedoya

technology products and now coming back into crypto so let me share some of this with you so how do we onboard people today on web3 I think most of you have an idea right if you lose your seed phrase you're done be careful of scams you can lose your money if you aren't careful do your own research and by the way don't forget to say GM how great is that it's not really that great right so who can tell me that that's a great way to onboard someone anywhere okay so no matter what we do really you guys if that's what we're doing we can't improve that user experience we can do everything that we want but we are scaring people away right we always find oh make sure that you save your seed phrase make sure you try this make sure that you're writing it that's not going to help because you're still putting so much in on the user to try to come and play and do something with us please don't airdrop me stuff um I'm not gonna accept it so then once we get past that this is what happens it's an amazing beautiful screen which Phantom by the way they have phenomenal ux but that's what you see a big fat nothing and a big fat cereal cereal cereal how cool is that for your first time experience when you finally got on board it not who like that okay so can we make this better I think we can right I think we have a lot of smart creative people here so let me tell you a little story whenever I want to try something on eth on Paulie on Solana what do I need to do well before I had to get random wallets now thankfully there's multi-chain wallets that are pretty decent and pretty good but at the end of the day right I want to have one one profile but then I had to get multiple wallets and as part of that then for each wallet I'm getting nfts I'm getting passes I'm creating profiles I'm getting credentials that's kind of painful and not very very fun right so what that can't what what else could we do we'd need a proper identity layer and it's already there we really need to use that identity layer so identity does not mean your public key okay it doesn't mean kyc and please remember this part everybody always thinks about identity oh kyc we have to kyc everybody no we don't have to kyc everybody that's the last thing you want to do actually some cases you want to do it to enable certain use cases but that's not what we need to do for everything and of course your identity is not flexing that big bag of tokens that you have right so identity really is All That You Are all that you have and all that you do that is your identity that represents you so how does an identity layer help well we have a lot of tools at our disposal you may have heard of topics or concepts like self-sovereign identity which is a way to have that portable digital identity that doesn't depend on a centralized system right that you own and you control we have Concepts like decentralized identifiers right and all these things are becoming standards finally it took us like five years to get there but we're finally there right so what are the IDS you probably have heard these concepts of abstractions and account abstraction well we could have a great abstraction layer based off decentralized identifiers that then can start bridging us across chains right start with a vid on Solana go over to adidon polygon which those guys thankfully um built a poly did method and just release it open source this week so that's awesome from polygon we have one for ether so there's just dozens and dozens of did methods that you can use no matter what chain you are on then we have verifiable credentials right that's the underlying piece that will enable multiple use cases can enable CK proofs can enable passes can enable at stations and all of this can be completely private and you can selectively disclose what information you are going to share with that dab with that smart contract and of course last but not least how many have you have heard of Soul bound tokens maybe who hasn't heard of it that will be a better question okay right so Solomon tokens I think metallic did a great great job letting people understand the concept of non-transferability the ability to put data into nfts and whatnot but there's also so many other implementations of that right and um if you haven't read the paper super interesting so go and check that out so we have tons of tools you guys right so so what's What's missing so what if that previous um diagram I'd show you started thinking about decentralized identifiers and using them so instead of having that mess of Wireless on that spaghetti we can super simplify it where I can just have one did that has control over all my different wallets that's a different way of thinking about a account abstraction and everybody talks about identity so they my wallet didn't have all my nfts or my svts of course they have my passes which are attestations too there's a lot of people out there also talking about attestations I heard the optimism guy talking about attestations and how that can become another way to uh to Identity now you need some form of store right you need to store information where is that going to be stored well you can store it on decentralized Services you can use ipfs to pin it to some other storage solution there's so many things we can do and ultimately of course all your credentials get associated with this ultimate did all right so now we have that let's go about to how do we onboard people so what if we focus on use cases that don't rely on wallet transactions and entry points that are not money right I come to a wallet and then I see that big fat zero remember that how do we cut down the number of steps for users and we've done a really nice job some people just hide the private keys and all of that seed phrases but how about we start using identity and Biometrics to secure those keys what if self-custody doesn't become front and center we still want to enable self-custody and I think it's amazing but self-custity is really scary for most people I think even for me right I have been doing this for a while and I have still to worry where's my ledger I want to make sure that that's secure now I got a saga phone okay now I have a new place to store my Hardware wallet which is amazing but okay now I have to worry about that then I have seed phrases that are attached to my ledger and to my Saga phone and to my Phantom wallet and I'm of you know quite Advanced person how do we think that that's going to work with the next 100 200 billion users that we want to onboard it to web3 so why don't we start with some different type of use cases like messaging like entertainment and of course gaming right so I want to chat with my friends I want to play uh I want to play a game or I want to watch a movie I want to watch a piece of content all these things are already being thought and are being built by tons of different amazing projects right but still there's always this onboarding into you need a wall that you need to do this we need to forget about that and then take advantage of all these blockchain mechanics that we have and create amazing experiences so pretty simple you come in you pick a username or maybe not and then you go why can't we do that you guys is it that difficult to do that the designers over there wouldn't you love to do that and if this is your first experience you can now have a wallet you now have an identity all that is done for you and it can be selectively disclosed later don't overwhelm the user for any of that and by the way you can also let the user use their existing wallet let's just there's there's a few million of us that already have wallets that already get it let's not forget us so tarika and I'm going I think I went a little fast but I wanted to have some time for questions we need to stop scaring people we have to keep it simple we need to focus an engaging experiences we have to evolve the wallets to be primarily for signing messages and transactions and storing private Keys that's what a wallet should be for right it's a place for a private Keys our private keys are what enable us to do what we want to do and let's use identity and Biometrics to secure those private keys and now questions anybody yes I think they're going to get your microphone thank you so I came I became I came a bit late to this conference so sorry if I if I'm asking a question that has already been processed do you know of the of the authentication um the open source protocol web auth n or not do I know of it I know of it yes yeah or is is Civic using it no we're not usually today Civic is using um in order to build profiles we're using the sold the ID method that we created and then as part of that we create a did document on chain where the data gets stored we can do the same thing for the eth method for the poly method then it's now new but then the idea is that all that information gets stored on chain and you link to ipfs records you can you can link wallets and you can do multiple things like that gotcha and and about like cost efficiency speed etc etc um any concerns there any shortcomings well it really depends on on what you're trying to do the thing about speed at the end of the day is what are you enabling and what is that use case so at the time of creating the identity it can be a little bit slower right because at that point in time you're not trying to complete the specific task that is going to require you to do it in like sub second um speeds so once you have that then your identity needs to be used to enable you to access uh service or a smart contract and that's where for example Civic issues what we call the Civic pass which is ultimately an attestation on chain that a specific type of verification has been issued and that then makes the transaction basically be as fast as a chain because then the smart contract is only just looking at the wallet and for the presence of that specific token or nft or whatnot so it does not get in the way at all for the for the execution that's a great question thank you yes sir over there foreign do you try to prevent one person with multiple dids so it's the question how do we do it okay so at Civic um in order to do uniqueness we use um we use Biometrics in order for do that um it not it that would mean that you would do a video selfie from what we then create a 3D face map and that's what Dennis associated with that wallet and then if you come back and try to add another wallet to that same uh 3D face representation of yourself we would not allow you to do that you would then you would need to revoke it then wait a cooldown period and then you can re-issue that uniqueness to a separate wallet if you do it to the div right you would be able to then just transfer it over and enable a specific wallet but this is where a lot needs to change where instead of going to just a public key you go to the did right and you query the did if you are now talking to the did you can then look for whatever then you can just say okay I'm coming in with this wallet that is associated with this dit if you come back with a different wallet it doesn't matter because you're always going to be checking that did in order to make sure that it's Unique do that answer your question yes so you basically try to enforce one person one did foreign ultimately yes that's the sorry no so you have one main did and then from that the ID you could create other dids that are associated with that parent did but that's something that's easily verifiable yeah that can be verifiable on chain okay exactly on our protocol we don't want anyone to use multiple accounts so we try to prevent the watch trading right now we don't have the best way to do that besides you know verify with Twitter and let people community people to report cheating yeah 100 love it I think there's one over here uh great talk by the way a lot of good context so I think in the ethereum community in the last couple of years we've had you know did ether did three ID and a lot of the people work in this space kind of realize that there is a ceiling for onboarding millions of users using blockchains I'm wondering if there's a world you see and where there's like did pkh and did Soul or if you guys are betting solely on on dead Soul or if you see some balance between the between those two yeah that's a great question so if I go back to um my diagram this guy so the world that we see is a cross chain world right that in some shape or form the user doesn't need to worry about it um and behind the scenes we will take care of that so there's there is room for uh for all those dids and those dids are going to be native to where the application is being developed so that I think it's it's kind of like the way forward where all those the IDS are going to be interoperable too that's why it's great that they're all based on a standard and our goal at Civic is to enable that interoperability between the dids across chains hi my name is Felix from blockchain at USC thank you so much for speaking today I think we're doing is super cool um I'm kind of interested like how exactly when you create a new wallet how do you make that connection from that new wallet to like did let's say I have like a coinbase wallet and a metamask wallet how do you like make that connection yes um so there's two ways that you could do it um there are libraries that enable that account abstraction directly we've built one and open source one in son Solana it's called cryptic right we have our non-profit arm identity.com that publishes lots of um really cool open source um libraries that you can check out so that's one way but the the more General way is using the did document and signing um signing messages using the wallets that you want to link to the did so what you do is you start with one of the wallets that wallet becomes becomes your primary key management for your did and then once you create that did then there's a document that gets created on chain where you can then link all different wallets by asking the user to prove that they own that wallet by different methods that is usually signing ad message so once they sign a message then the did method allows you to write that on the document and that's all Unchained that then that user also owns that wallet got you thank you yeah you're welcome hi uh it's uh Dom from Walter ID so we've been working on soft Sovereign identity since 2018 and over the last year you're partnered with most major layer ones to also build on-chain identity and so we've seen use cases in the public sector working with governments and banking Financial Services increasingly also web3 I'd be curious which the first use or the most important use cases you see at the moment for either self-sovereign Identity or Also let's say on-chin approaches with nfts or expertise like do you see any burning hair problems or still mostly Pilots so so there's a lot I think um we're seeing that the EU is adopting self-sovereign identity Concepts digital identity so I think that's going to be a huge driver for the rest of the world to start to follow so that I think it's it's uh it's one I think the other one if we want to grow defy we're gonna have to start using identity in some shape or form if we want the real players outside of crypto to come in and join the fun we're gonna have to start playing by their rules in some share perform um and then of course um some governments like California they just started issuing um car titles as nfts so that pretty quickly is going to require to have some form of digital identity to own that nft right and then you can then transfer it transfer it and whatnot so I think those are the use cases that already starting to see out there you're seeing that atrification is another interesting use case that starts um gating specific type of content right it also enables gambling the right way so I think there's there's a lot of use cases that this year I think this is a year of identity based on everything that I'm hearing everything that everybody's talking about for some reason everybody cares about identity this year any other questions I think we have a few more moments so hi uh Raul dokume from nebula so I'm wondering if uh for the top level did if you're looking closer yeah better okay for top level did if you're looking at uh having that be a illegal person incorporation or something like that and have the sub the subdivids for say the employees how yes yeah yeah so a did can represent any kind of entity right it's an identifier it can be an iot device it can be an institution it can be a person it can be an animal it can be a tree for all for all that matters right so I think what you're trying to do is how do you prove that someone has a relationship with that with that other institution right so that's where you that's where all these concepts are verifiable credentials of issuers everything that comes with self-sovereign identity comes to play where that institution would be the verifier and ultimately issue attestations that this other entity is related to them we can talk a little bit about that we did a proof of concept about that a few years ago that we can share I can share some of the learnings about that all right um any other questions you guys oh my God um so I have a question about how you store the facial recognition on chain because I know a lot of people are worried about that so we are not storing any of that information on chain and thank you that's a great question I think I should mention never ever ever store any kind of pii information on chain don't do that if you think that you know in some teacher told you that encryption is the best thing in the world and this and that and you can store it wherever you want don't do it please we ask you I beg you not to store any kind of Pi on chain so what we do for um the the facial map the 3D map is that's stored on a traditional web 2 type of database that also we have full control of nobody else it's not we it all that software is on premise on our servers so everything can be deleted whenever you want with that enables us to also be gdpr compliant and that's one of the big problems with storage today and decentralized storage to be more specific right how do you you enable deleting the data when the user wants it to that's a big requirement for gdpr and that's kind of trick thank you Kurt what's that well it is well it is a it's a 3D face man that 3D face mount has all different data points so it's kind of like a hash but more than the hash because it has uh a 3D map representation of your face that then every time that you authenticate we recreate it and then we compare it to the one that we have from the database so that enables uniqueness and also re-authentication so that you can also make sure that that person that white listed or or um got that token on that wallet is that same person the next time that you see them because otherwise they can just sell those private keys to somebody else right and you also want to enable um that verification are we good all right well you guys check out Civic civic.com go to Civic dot me create your own profile our documents are also ready docs.civic.com everything is online would love to get your thoughts so thank you so much [Music]