The Cypherpunk Paradox: Privacy, Network States, and Decentralized Growth (MODERATOR CHIARA M.)

Okay, amazing. Hello everyone. I hope you're really enjoying this this morning on the first day here at uh Naples and the lunch was amazing. So, I hope you all get the energy back for um this exciting panel. My name is Karto and I'll be the host of this uh afternoon as well as the moderator of a couple of conversation.

I'm the managing partner of Stablecoin Insider, the number one outlet taking care of anything stable coins related. And we are going to get started with quite of an interesting conversation about network state digital communities and what it really means to grow in a decentralized system in a centralized world. Please welcome our three amazing speakers. We have Marina Petrienko, gross lead at the Institute of Free Technology. Jier Zito, founder of Workers Bridge, workers badge and QJ, executive director at the Ethereum Community Fund and lead coordinator at Zuzalu.

I would say maybe let's just get started with some few um notes on your background and why you got interested into this topic.

Sure. Hi everybody. My name is Marina. I'm working in web3 full-time since 2017 as a marketing BD growth expert. Uh last four years I'm focusing specifically on the privacy preserving tech and currently I'm a growth lead of venture studio called free technology.

We are focused on the public goods and providing civil liberties to the people. We have lots of different companies under our umbrella uh which you can explore such as decentralized codex uh storage called Codex P2P censorship resistant messaging waku we had status and bunch of other companies and uh yeah it's an honor to share the stage here in Italy and let's make it happen

thank you we can do a round of applause [Applause]

hi guys I'm Jeierito founder and co of Mediterranean lab 4.0 Zero. It is the company develop workers based blockchain credential. work in blockchain industries and web three by 2017 and I have invented the patent now registered and software decentralized to blockchain and soon for different blockchain like Algorand, Ethereum and Polygon that manage verifiable credential for uh in skilled job industries and use blockchain to save in a mutable the credential. Thank you very much and see you soon for the other question.

Hello everyone, I'm QJ. Um I'm from Ethereum Community Fund. We are an organization that has eight years of history and the reason we um have relevance to today's topic um on one hand is because we lead the coordination of the building of the software um after the Zuzalu experiment. Anybody heard of Zuzaloo from the audience? Uh it is a network state crypto city experiment in um initiated by Vitalik in 2023 in Montenegro.

So it was one of the first real large gathering from uh cypher pong communities, etherum communities uh lasting for about two months um gathered more than thousand people for explor exploring the idea of a network state not necessarily become one but um gather people who are interested in the societal innovations to look at all possible aspects and um look at what tools we need and on the other hand our relevance also comes comes from um seven years of work at some matter coordination uh in uh decentralizing knowledge bases uh coordination of uh resources. We are the first grant program in the Ethereum space and among among that there's also uh carbon vote.com one of the tools that helped the the DAO attacks uh postmodm um coordination for forking Ethereum. So generally the tools that are um huge boost for privacy that uh originates um from the original uh cypher punk spirits is what our organization is pushing. Thank you very much uh Napole for inviting me for this panel.

Great. Thank you very much for this lovely introductions and I would say let's start directly trying to debunk really what this cyber funk uh paradox is. So I would say now we're looking at 2025. What does cyber funk mean to you personally?

Yeah, you can you can get started.

Well, for me being a cyber bank in 20125 means protecting the right which slowly disappearing in the digital world. It's like a right of the digital freedom. And it's not because we have something to hide or we're doing something wrong. because we have a right to exist without being constantly uh observed, constantly manipulated uh and sold. It is also about building with intention.

It's about choosing tools and protocols that hard code not only for convenience but also for resistance and censorship resistance. Original cyber punks didn't wait for code to be shipped. They just shipped it. And I think in the spirit of it, we have to be focused on building protocols, companies and products that makes privacy by default, not as a luxury feature. Yes, for it's a good question.

For me, cyber fun in 2025 is designing for dignity because we has we have uh try to balance the needs of people uh workers to share uh information without uh share sensitive data or identity. There are different industry in which these principle are more or less uh strong but uh in the our uh job industries and HR tech for example we try to balance this principle and try to solve this uh paradox uh separate the identity framework with the decentralized attribute of identities. ities for example we manage a software not decentralized that work with the centralized identity stack like dsme for example I don't know if you know and the other one at the end that is algoran blockchain in this way we guarantee I do an example that when I share my open page with specific credential. I suffered identity safe sensitive data behind this identity and in me in in the same time I shared the transactionity of blockchain. In this way in this type of architecture we try to balance the principle of top privacy with the need of stakeholder to know some attribute.

I don't know if I have answer to your question.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that like throughout this conversation in general, we are going to try to talk about all the different aspects of the network state or this new way of structuring society. So I think this is for sure like identity a big part of it.

Yes, I'm curious of your thoughts QJ as well.

Just to repeat the question, I I don't know whether I got it right. It's about what cyber punk means to me.

Yes, exactly. especially like nowadays compared maybe to when you got started like a couple of years ago.

Thank you. I I think many people are under the impression that uh cyber punk is about being anonymous being in the dark that um you know like when you could hide but I think in today's world where the world is largely even governed in by algorithms um by AIs in the future and by um the agents that we delegate a lot of resources and power to that have a lot of data of ours. It becomes even more important that this spirit um is in every solution by default where you could have the alternatives in all the systems we are using that allow the the choice of keeping your data to yourself always as a as a default. So what I think in today in 2025 it is even more specific to our mission in for for being cippher punk or upholding the cipher punk spirits when we want to build much more alternatives when the next generation would by default to use tools that ensure privacy. ensure your choice to disclose the parts of identity that or verify the part of identity or your track records just for specific needs to have ephemeral identities.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think all of you are like touching upon uh identity, privacy and and data. Um and I think there's this paradox indeed between the mass data surveillance and the willingness on the other hand to try to own our data and preserve our privacy as well. So can you try perhaps to elaborate a little bit more? How do you see this evolving and balancing between the community that wants more privacy and the government itself that still is implementing a lot of data surveillance mechanisms also coming with technologies like AI and so on?

You means the paradox between scaling and still being private?

Yes. between like the master billion society that we live in nowadays and the inner willingness of communities themselves like our talk today for example of trying to uh do something to preserve privacy. I think the the difference here that like we've shifting from personal encryption to collective encryption and currently it's uh already like an organizational structure becoming and uh of course it's much harder to scale a companies fighting the privacy and normal web three ones because we we have lots of moralities and vision that doesn't let us uh even for example do proper analytics or collect certain data and we focus mostly on education and educating people understanding of the needs of it. So if before like you know cyber punks were in '90s communicating that privacy is a power right now privacy is a it's weaponized. uh we are manipulated to uh have our choices, our social access, our credit scores and uh basically we just cannot find fight for financial freedom while we can leaking metadata on chain.

So this is a paradox. We have to uh make people like personally understand the importance of it and uh through the education and uh deep commitment of these values uh network states possibly could be built because again talking about how this topic connecting to the network stakes. The difference is not the borders. It's build it not because which country you're from but because which values you have and that's what make it tricky and complicated to scale and build.

So in this case do you think it's more like uh of a top down or bottom up approach?

Sorry

like this to build such network state or to try to uh preserve privacy. Do you think it's more of a bottom up approach? So really starting from the community itself getting educated or more of a top down. So starting from like large organizations the government that believes in these values in the first place

it's going like from from bottom yeah from the infrastructure to upf course everything starts in the beginning from like building uh truly commitment to the values through the education but of course it's impossible to scale it and make it to to put it on the level of the mass adoption without certain collaborations uh on the top. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe your thoughts on uh on indeed like scaling.

Yeah. I think that I have already answered in the first uh uh answer to the second question but I'm declar myself are not privacy orthodox and in my work also with for example European commission I try to develop standard international standard for example ISO TC37 in which we balance uh the application use blockchain with par p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p privacy and security paradigm in which for example Europe is a leader in the world but don't means that Europe balance in the right way privacy right with application right. I do another example. If I sh if I am an issuer credential for skill um I have an older credential. All the credential is the owner of the data and we introduce the concept of digital sovereignity.

This is uh different from privacy. But I have the issuer that is a stakeholder of this data because also this issuer has right to share in different way that he is sure real in the right way in a validation mode way this credential. So we try to balance in the future. This is a a task for regulatory uh standard body people who participated in the process. So building of a decentralized app for example to write the balance between the preset anonymation in encrypted way or the stakeholder of that has visible the right data without exposure sensitivity data of identity.

In this way we try to build different services by workers page. In the we in the next week we um deliver a new opensource license uh in which there is a software that take credential on native chain in this case Algoran and share the credential in NFTTS that will duplicate nor transfer because we use soulbound NFTs in our stock. duplicate this credential on another chain. In this way, in this interoperable way, we not only share the credential, but we share all right included identity in the credential like right to receive a discount, like to receive a reward. In this way we balance right to share attribute of identity with the right to uh protect sensitive data.

In fact in the our open page 3.0 there are certificate with one tech consortium we not exposure the data associated to the identity because it's managed in decentralized way. In this way we guar guarantee the balance by right to privacy of people and right to know specific attribute by stakeholder.

Yeah. Perfect. I think it would be nice just to like clarify the difference between digital sovereignity uh and privacy that you mentioned before so we are all on the same page also for the rest of the questions. since yeah.

Oh, sorry. Digital what?

Uh digital sovereignity like

because I think you introduced the topic so I think it would be nice to uh clarify that.

Oh for me to clarify.

No no for

yeah uh I think that digital sovereignity is in should be included in the privacy paradigma. So you see it as a umbrella term and then underneath there's privacy.

Yeah. Because I'm owner of the data there are stakeholder of this data. There are interest people organization in specific data. We protect this with uh encryption wallet and uh protected this with encryption also of credential because when I share open page I share information that are on software but this information are are registered on the chain. So if for example a user in the future uh would uh not be more on the platform like GDPR in Europe that is uh vision regulation actual regulation sorry we can sell it his profile on the platform guarantee immutable data on the chain but every people that go on the ledger see encrypter um people wallet So they cannot link that wallet to the people.

So we guarantee both privacy

and blockchain for for Europe regulator for example. I think no depend of architecture, depender, depend on um privacy by design approach and depend how do you balance the centraliz decentralization blockchain and other data that are storage on software or uh sorry or cloud or data center I don't know

I hope to answer to the question.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the overall concept also of uh zero knowledge proof and how can we uh use that technology to to achieve just what you just mentioned. Uh I think for you QJ perhaps it's interesting uh to dive a little bit deeper into the crypto community itself and how this movement and perceive uh perceiving of privacy has changed throughout the years as um web 3 itself has become more mainstream. Well, that's a that's going to be a long answer, but as as many of us know, like the idea of a truly completely decentralized sovereign financial system, a cash system like Bitcoin attracted many people who were very um explicit but anonymously against how the world was being run, especially in the financial sector.

And it's not coincidence that it was invented after the global financial crisis in 2008. Um so I would say there is a lot of um the cyber punk spirit from the very beginning the you know the rebel spirits from the bad boys. Um over over the years we could sense a little bit um more and more people are attracted by many aspects of uh this beautiful new invention that put the centralized consensus immutable ledger and then uh peer-to-peer messaging protocols together as this new way of inclusive financial technology. However, then a lot of the push become a bit more I would say out of convenience out of market expansion understandably. So with more people being attracted to this sector I sense personally a a bit of a dilusion of the original idea.

But at the same time there's also a quite I would say research of uh uh the cipher punk spirits coming back seeing how artificial intelligence is going to run the world seeing how black boxes even in Europe with the magical GDPR I've had experience when supposedly my account was closed and I went back to the website and I register with an email that I used before and I couldn't right so the server still knows that I was a user and then I wrote to them and say if you have not completely purged my data I would like to purchase them back I'm willing to pay for the service now they just gave me the data back after an assumed deletion of uh my account because it's a black box there's just no way even in good faith trust that we can audit and verify that our data are in safe hands and this is a long history in human history Right? Like a lesson in human history. If you entrust your assets to someone else, it is going to be a risk risking the possibility of leak and exploitation. This is a concentration of power. When new in a new year, a new era, what we have is that data are the new oil.

So this new surge of like a quieter new surge of ZK technology being tested in Zulu experiment in 2023. Our push for truly decentralized ZKP uh to prove um to to to be completely owned by users not in a server when you can prove your identity. All of those I see are very aligned efforts in our community to bring back uh not only bring back the spirit to a small group of people who are you know not so mainstream but but in a in a real time of potential threat um to bring this adoption from technology to people who crave for a change of pattern, a change of fashion and a change of doing things in a way that is completely trustlessly. So that there's lower cost for coordination. There is a possibility for new emerging communities to try new things and then push progress forward for their own individual needs.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, especially on your last point, I think when you just mentioned trustless uh adoption, I think this opens the conversation as well on uh Dows, right? So if we look at network states and we look at Dows, what makes them different? Why should we pursue one way the other or yeah what in general your thoughts?

Um you you can start back again. Yeah

sure. Um Dows have also evolved uh a lot from the concept we've had in the past years in the in in the early years. We used to define uh bitcoin as a dowo, right? Like it's completely autonomous and sovereign and the fact that it has a its own currency system and it can be run non-stopably makes it a decentralized autonomous organization. Over the years, it has become a little bit more blurred in marketing.

As you know, we we also call before chat GPT a lot of things AI. And um I would say the Dows today still have very limited uh functionalities usually over assets and it makes it much more of a digital solution that still needs to be explored. I'm I'm it was great and exciting to see how Aragon 2.0 has explored this further and make it much much more modularized for organizations to fit to their own needs. But what we can govern over are still very limited.

Um uh on the other hand a network state however it's defined in recent um uh popular publishings what we see is more of um grounded to local community kind of a kind of an attempt. So there's there's more social narrative to it than just technological solutions. Usually people are called together for a mission usually or ideally that's the case and then Dows or other tools on chain are used for coordination. um then it can be an embodiment on chain to to explore these um potential network states but at the same time there are there's much more nuances in in you know the social structure in a definition of a network state and how they want to further this um in collaboration with existing sovereign states. So there's a lot to a lot more to know about it but I would say the major difference would be one is more a technical solution.

The other uh is more of an experimentation for how communities, societies and countries can evolve into different things.

Yeah, thank you. I think an interesting follow-up question there as well and perhaps Marina you can expand on this as well. I was just in uh at ECC in Ken and I was listening to this panel and that they were saying that one of the hardest challenges for Dows is that everyone is very interested in the concept of it but no one actually puts the efforts and the contribute needed in order to run the Dow successfully. So when we expand the concept of Dow to network state as well, do you think that the same reasoning applies as well that there's still like an effort needed on the community side in order for uh these web three nation states to work well?

I mean in just like in the network says the basics are um kind of similar right because that majority people through the walls make some sort of decisions but again the question is here how you actually distribute the power of the decision. For example, if you're validating some network and you are not operator, uh it depends on how much you contribute. So people who contribute the most has the most voting power and like this was kind of makes it similar but also they're very different because Dallas mostly have a single purpose like measure uh like u uh controlling not sorry not controlling managing a treasury or uh a protocol while nation uh while network sts are multi-dimensional and they often uh offer like identity economy culture and coordination in these systems. And as I mentioned before they start from u same values uh not the borders but the catch is that the code does not eliminate the power it's reshapes it and uh if we don't have a a backbone layer such as decentralized storage or or protected communication uh there is also a risk that is going to become just another like surveillance uh web 3 city.

Yeah. So c can we say that the dao can be a technological structure that powers the network state

theoretically?

Theoretically. Okay. What are your thoughts on

um to share my vision? I would share again an example. If I um buy product uh I use my wallet and crypto. um other people the counterpart don't need to know who I I am and what is your my name because the value is is uh the value is on checks or text is fixed in that journey in that date when I share different date data sorry different attribute like talent for example it's impossible don't share something of myself thou for me are um should evolving in approach uh should reveal the identities without reveal they vote in the governance process I think it's difficult to explain But there is a mix by KYC of DA governance because I talking personally I would say who govern me but it can be useful and also more productive. don't say how these people are voting in some specific uh um teams because this I think increase also efficiency or uh productivity of the governance.

There are also other example of permissionless and public blockchain without exposed name that uh after three years are uh obliged um governance for stake with the KIC because also staking it's important know who are the people in some specific uh uh moment because if we consider that there are blockchain in which stake is allowing only specific people that have specific amount okay you in this way are reducing democratic approach of blockchain that is the the the principal motive that is born so we Try to balance the right principle of web three, the right principle of decentralize, the right principle of blockchain with the possibility to know who go um specifics like boat without exposure what the people these people are voting. So I think that should balance this uh this approach.

Thank you. Uh I love how you always like make very uh practical examples and we are now closing down the conversation and I think it would be nice to just closing down closing it down with something practical as well. So what is one thing that we could implement today to get as close as possible to the network state? If you can just like keep it brief just one uh concrete example. Thank you.

um improve UX, simplify on boarding. Actually, huge shout out uh to ESF for this. I just try out their platform and this is so nice when you can register basically in less than two minutes. We're all very busy and we cannot spend 15 minutes on registering. So yeah, make it easy to use basically that's the key all the to all the privacy tools.

Uh I'm according to Marina and I think that it's importable. It's important to set some specific feature without know some specific technology. So people who on boarding um should have a feature integrated in the dashboard for example smart contract for example wallet. We use this approach for our platform and uh bring um associate to the identity wallet without any action by the users. Obviously there is a term of services and uh in the same mood we uh transfer credential with technology without manage technology by users.

I think this is important because uh user not every users know technology. not have use uh uh every have users use technology every day and for uh increase the uh exploitation of some technology we try to use this approach about network state that I don't non Benion before I think that uh they should evolving uh we try to build a network stake in the future of work. We try to build a new internet.

Reminder to keep it short,

huh?

Just a reminder to keep it short.

One minute.

Ah, one minute. Sorry. Sorry.

Please finish your sentence.

No, only say that network set uh can be also um created in some vertical. For example, in which there are social contract, smart contract, verified identity but without exposure some data. In this way, we try to build a little network stake in specific vertical like internet of thank you very much.

Okay, I'm left with only 30 seconds now. I I think in order not for network stakes to become another let's say rebranded version of concentrated power and concentrated data we really need to have very decentralized technology where communities can coordinate how to fund how to store their knowledge collectively without burning books and this is my blowing my own horn now because I have a presentation after Jakob uh in 20 minutes about decentralized the social consensus I think blockchain solve the issue of financial decent centralization. Um, but how to spend your money? How can we as communities give rise to our own selected choice of legitimate great tools? Um, how to become the next community, next Bitcoin or Ethereum from our local community.

This relies on collective sovereign cognitive sovereignty to begin with before we have the sovereignty over our assets and then the sovereignty over coordination of how a nation a nation a state can be coordinated. We want to touch upon the most fundamental layer of the issue where we could remain independent and have access to knowledge without worrying about centralized institutions interpreting everything for us. Thank you very much. Please let's make a round of applause to our panelists. Thank you Marina, thank you Jere and thank you QJ.

I know it's a topic that we could probably talk for hours since it's basically involving all of us. Uh but I think this has been a great conversation and definitely we will hear more later as well. Uh QJ, thank you very much.