Meta-Settlement: Manifesto for Open Source Builders | Robert Drost - Eigen Foundation

[Music] all right what a morning hello everyone I'm Daniel I'm the MC for the afternoon thanks for joining us over here the main stage next up we have an exciting talk by Robert D who is the CEO of the Igan Foundation um and it is going to be called meta settlement Manifesto for open source Builders please welcome to Stage Robert [Applause] hello hello everyone very happy to be here after lunch one of the nice times to be here in the day versus right before lunch okay well I'm very excited to talk about this only have about 14 minutes so let me just jump right into it so um I'm going to cover two main Concepts here which are crypto settlement and uh verifiable clouds and the subtitle of talk is Manifesto for open source Builders so no surprise what I'm going to go through is um some pretty clear reasons why open source Builders win in this space and uh in general I give this talk a little bit modified but to web two people people are working in AI a lot of them actually always kind of scratch their head should I be working in web 3 or not they hear a lot of token narratives and a lot of times they're not convinced by that alone uh because they have good funding sources and stuff so this talk kind of motivates some reasons that in my view have actually turned out to be a lot more valuable for open source Builders and then for all of us um I think web consumers win in massive ways from this shift and it's important to say that because it's a very clear road map for open source builders that over time similar to people wanting to use open uh software and seeing that there's better features that you get out of uh that Community than kind of being stuck in closed envir ments um things that are built and fully proprietary uh I think the web consumers are going to move away and you know if there's one thing that we know is that you're Building open source you're going to go to the consumers because you want someone to actually be using your stuff so um one thing that I step back a little bit in this talk is I want to unpack the word settlement okay um you know we're not talking about settling a lawsuit we're talking about settling transactions on chain so uh when you settle transactions on chain going back to the you know the goodie and the oldie Point what does a blockchain uh try to achieve what are its key values permissionless of course uh anybody should be able to run it anybody should be able to uh post transactions and then have them settle that's sort of the Unstoppable uh um aspect of blockchains liveness meaning that nobody can uh basically halt it from running eventually even if it's slowed down you're going to be able to build up to a finality consensus uh you know on ethereum on proof of stake change and of course even on proof of work chains eventually you probabilistically get there but security is the main thing around settlement so what does security mean um again this is not the common definition of security this is the Cs definition uh security means that there's one single finale history of the chain everybody globally agrees and there's no dispute about that anymore and finalized transactions don't revert vert they don't get replaced that's actually a little bit of a subtle statement to say in reality it's not like you can there's nobody putting a gun to everybody in the world's head and saying this is the final block on ethereum it's a uh something that kind of builds to a finality uh crypto Economic Security and there's a great uh paper written by the founders of igen lay which covers uh profit from corruption sorry profit from corruption versus cost of corruption and it's kind of elegant that um as long as the profit from corruption is less than the cost then there's no incentive to actually revert transactions and that's what the security really means so there's going to be three categories of it Financial moving assets around Tech which is actually providing services that complete and update the system they're not money moving around but they're actually data moving around and computations on that data that are moving around and we have to settle them and then social uh a lot of people have kind of moved away from thinking about social as much but uh you know know humans do arbitrate chains uh you know we do have Forks sometimes eth classic eth th Bitcoin has gone through Forks these are meaningful things and I would actually argue they underpin the decentralized trust that makes blockchains blockchain so uh just speeding it up a little bit um Financial sediment is both uh regular monetary assets plus of course nfts I'm not talking about jpegs here of course those fit in but identity reputation and data are the lifeblood of applications and um then Tech settlement is a whole bunch of computation networking co-processors and social sment has social settlement has two flavors onchain that's Dows that's governance that's voting and offchain very important to point out that's L1 forks and igen layer has introduced the new class of offchain uh forking which is really important here which is you can actually get the cost of corruption to be based on tokens that fork and Slash without forking ethereum it's actually a very beautiful result and it allows you to do a new class of cryptoeconomic games that are offchain but don't actually require the nuclear option of reverting you know which of course we know is entirely not possible to do anymore um and so that is a you know unique differentiation and there's a lot of great stuff that comes out of that and you know just thinking about it these are you know basically settlements aren't assets the second one actually uh gives you verifiable Cloud I'm going to go through that a bit more and social settlement is the ultimate back stop I mean you can always centralize people try to take control make profits but as long as you have the ability to Fork uh onchain which is weaker and then offchain which is Unstoppable then you're able to actually prevent having yourself locked into a system where you're not able to get your assets and your data out of it uh you know basically you're not able to be Sovereign uh unless you have the social siment layer so Hardware Tech stack I'm just going to run through this quick uh I you know I think a lot of people have seen this I will highlight at the very top you can actually see applications and data these two are in fact separate layers and so it is important that the data has this sort of ability to take it with you that you're Sovereign over it so um you know the hardware Tech stack of course has been massively changed over the last 20 years with the uh uh Cloud taking over infrastructures of service is deep pin uh it's the lower levels close to Hardware platform is a service is software that serves other software middleware and then software is a services and user facing all of these need to be verifiable and autonomous to have this verifiable cloud and so um there's a couple types of veril verifiability we have in blockchain we have of course redundant execution the granddaddy uh we have ZK uh hot new kid in the block very beautiful a little bit higher uh performance over head right now but I'm very optimistic between software cryptography improvements as well as Hardware improvements that we're seeing now we're going to make ZK the standard way that we show validity uh in the systems of uh basically all of computer tech optimistic fraud proofs are uh of course a more cost-effective way right now and they will always have a place as well um because sometimes you can actually build up that uh Assurance first and te hardware-based Trust you know I have a mixed bag view on this I think you can do low levels of Trust on it but really if you want to do high levels you have to work your way up to those top three in igen layer uh the verifiability has two flavors um which are both cryptoeconomic I just want to highlight the difference the onchain verifiable uh which we just covered before in the social settlement layers and then this offchain verifiable which is the original L1 forking plus the new invention of I layer the inter subjective token forking so Ian layer actually power Powers these autonomous verifiable Services which are essentially any kind of software um that is a protocol uh you know it could be onchain smart contracts it can also be any arbitrary decentralized peer-to-peer Network once I say that statement it should go off in your brain that that means I cover all of computer science I cover all possible Tech you would ever want to build and so it's a generalization of blockchain into the entire web two space so we now have the ability to put decentralized Trust on every single application that an open source developer would want to build and deploy abss are autonomous because staking is permissionless anyone can operate and run an operator node uh we actually have a Marketplace that makes it super easy for people to bootstrap get all operators they need get all the stake that they need um we give the ability to slash tokens like eth and actually any erc20 that anchors back to eth uh for onchain verifiable security and then we also offer offchain verifiable security by slashing uh critical token uh value offchain and reflecting it back on ethereum uh about a little over a year ago we actually put this thing out which was pretty much empty uh we just knew some people were coming we thought we'd have like a third of these filled out um by the end of 2024 in reality if you see now I'm just clicking through every single category is filled with uh you know great leaders uh some of them have two or three uh great protocols right at the top and across the space we're seeing you know well over a 100 and uh protocols building it when you think about it it's happening faster than we expected but it's not surprising because everything that you want to build in a faster bootstrapped way that's easier to raise money deploy it get the customers that you need of course Builders are going to want to build in that kind of space we've really made like the easy button for building into crypto and it's even easier for web 2 developers to come into this space as a result of that we actually got a kind of an award last year fastest growing developer ecosystem in crypto so we want to continue to that momentum um both because of course that's good to bring web 2 into web 3 but also because this brings everything into ethereum space I am you know very happy with the kind of maximal decentralization with the asteris that you have upgradeability and that we're really moving towards a 20 50-year type protocol for ethereum L1 that you can really run and depend on that um long times so why do open source Builders win because everything proprietary eventually go takes a short medium or long AR open I won't go through the slide I just want to make sure I get through everything here this is the one of the critical uh slides of the talk so I will take a little more time on this and I'll kind of speed through the rest um oh sorry the next one is this is just showing that there's a lot of centralization in Cloud platforms 2 trillion Revenue um a lot of people don't know there's that much money and Revenue there uh definitely it's a big goal of igen layer to bring all of that Revenue towards all of you who are building so it's going into your protocols and across blockchain instead of just shifting money around and taking bits Point uh bips fees on them Ian lay is actually going to be able to bring this Revenue into the uh into the ethereum space of software that settles back to it so we're going to have a massive you know real use case traction for crypto uh and for all of the technology that currently builds the web so uh just really quick uh I love giving people this uh this uh explanation of what's happened with open source over the long Arc the precl vision is that you built software you had an open core then you had sort of software that you sold on top that had extra security extra reliability extra performance and you ran it in private private data centers and people buil apps on it or you've had your own app that's what it meant during the public Cloud era there was like a luring thing the siren Call of um public clouds so this switched things up a little bit the open source core now had a fork that went to the open source Creator team and the open source Creator team deployed into the web 2 public clouds and then the apps were built on that and there was value from the open source Corp and the Creator teams put value back in by building code maintaining it improving it but a new Fork appeared and that was the web 2 Cloud's vendor SAS so those guys have started at large taking all success open source core projects wrapping up in their own SAS protocol and basically competing against the Creator team SAS and I draw the arrows here which are not that wrong here which is a lot less value is put in by the public clouds and in fact they take the majority of the value I would argue out of the open source core so Fork value capture and it makes open source creators fight Web Two clouds here's a critical point in the crypto cloud dpin and the lower layers uh all the layers of the cloud are run by a whole slew of protocols that are making money in crypto um they give a lot better uh strength and they also uh prevent you from having the capture that you had in public clouds in fact now that actually has been reverted open- Source software Builders are in the driver's seat and the infrastructure is not going to compete with them uh it doesn't have that same kind of capture effect so crypto monetized open source is a much better model to be building with so it's better for fundraising quicker it's better for building you've got dris platforms that aren't going to capture your value you get uh Global Gardens and you get web 3 Network effects that are available immediately versus uh having to build them yourself better for outcome more ways to monetize more ways to capture value and exit into decentralized markets consumers win because there's privacy by assault by default you get to bring your data and your work with you and you keep your hard-earned reputation and you get better permission L algorithms you're not stuck with what is profit focused for the vendors competition breeds Excellence probably one of the biggest things is that you don't end up Monopoly stagnating and doing competition rather than building new features improvements competition innovates monopolies stagnate that is probably one of the big takeaways from this you want to definitely work where things are happening so this uh just now we're in references valuable thinking behind this I'll uh you know be publishing these slides on Twitter um so feel free to go ahead and grab those and then follow the links to read more here's also some reading on the subject from us my Twitter handle so you can scan that and uh follow up with uh you know um uh uh the thread plus feel free to DM me my telegram is the exact same handle as well thank you very much find us this week in all sorts of places and uh look forward to talking with people okay thank you [Applause] found her at a buly h