Web3 identity off-chain, on-chain, and both with Kelvin Fichter, Masha Healy & Evin McMullen

everyone hydrated thriving not so hydrated close I'm going to kick this off since I'm officially the moderator but Evan you're probably a little bit better than I am so as was mentioned this is about identity so on the stage I'll let uh introduce but this is I think going to be all about where decentralized identity is today maybe a little bit of History uh we're going to talk about on chain off chain and we have optimism uh disco and then impact Network impact cards um so we're going to kick it off I want to give everybody a chance to talk about uh your company and then you know where you sit in the spectrum of on chain and off chain and then we'll dive in a little bit more so Evan if you want to go ahead and kick it off thank you so much cames truly an honor to have the opportunity to sit on stage with you here my friend after many years of asking card identity questions together so my name is Evan McMullen and I'm the chief instigator at the Disco you can visit us always at disco.xyz and we are the purveyors of fine data backpacks we make it easy for you to own and control all kinds of data with your keys not just your tokens because right now according to web3 all of you were just piles of tokens to me but I want you to be your full selves your full friends with your favorite colors and preferences the things that you like to do being able to show up in your entirety to web3 at disco we care about all the data that's not fit for the chain so data that is that describes human beings data that does not require Global public immutability data that is portable and needs to change and evolve like we do because we are humans great thank you hello I'm Masha and I'm a co-founder of impact cards which is a project that kind of sits in the middle of on-chain and off chain and it's bringing together your identity in a unified way with on-chain actions off-chain credentials and then cross-chain actions as well cool um hi I'm Kelvin I work on the optimism Collective and uh optimism is kind of on-chain Maxi we think everything is actually a blockchain uh you know in some abstract sense and in the future everything is going to live on chain and we need to figure out how to make it work so I don't know thank you uh so I want to you know dive down in a little bit what decentralized identity is you know I think normally people think about it as like a Facebook login or Google auth in terms of um did internet identity but I think both spaces have landed on attest stations and I just kind of want to dig in why have attest stations uh been so core to Identity so I'm going to let you kick it off Calvin and then uh disco you can follow up as well or Evan cool yeah I mean attestations are very easy to think about right an attestation at a high level is just one address or one account making a statement about another account and that's such a it's such a simple primitive but it's it's just really yeah it's really easy to wrap your head around and I think it's it's also clear how you know if you think about identity for more than like two minutes you realize that it's this very complicated thing that evolves from the relationships that you have with other people and institutions and all these different things and so it seems natural that uh you know that identities would also evolve out of these attestations which are really describing relationships between different entities Evan you want to get a chance so at disco we think of your identity as what you Who You Are you are what you can prove what memory you leave behind when you leave the room but persists in the minds of the people around you so your identity changes and evolves because you are a human being right if you are held to uh if you were made to apply to jobs with your 2008 Myspace profile how would that go for you right our identities are not fixed and public and permanent and so a blockchain is not an appropriate or legal place to store data about them um so you know when we think about the context of attestations actually to take a little step back here let's talk about gossip when you hear a really juicy piece of Gossip the amount that you believe in it depends on how much you trust the person who told you and that is the deal with attestations right you will trust a statement as much as you trust the party who said it to be a subject or a subject matter expert on that particular topic and so in web 3 when we bring qualitative data in when we bring observed data that does not come from a machine necessarily or is not um you know settled in a on a public Ledger setting someone needs to make an utterance and testation a statement about someone else in order for us to capture this kind of data so when we think about trust at disco we think about it as signatures all the way down how much do you trust the people who are giving you the good gossip the hot tea that your smart contract interactions are predicated upon cool thank you um so as we dive into this a little bit I think you know the question is why decentralized identity at all you know we have these web 2 solution providers you know the traditional ones being Google Facebook you log in with them so I think the question is always why so why you know we have crypto Twitter a lot of people have their identity there and this is a lot of friction to move to a new system uh so I think the question is what's going to make this better why is decentralized identity uh why is the time now so I'll go ahead and kick it off uh Masha if you want to take that one yeah so obviously we have seen some problems with Twitter we can't control our followers go and who they where they go every time we go to a new platform we have to restart we have to gain our following again and so what's great about finding more web 3 Solutions is that these can be more modular Solutions you know we can take our followers with us we can take our attestations our credentials with us whether that's on chain or off chain not something that we're really looking forward to yeah cool and then uh yeah do Kelvin or Evan would you like to take that question as well oh hell yeah when we think about um you know how we start to accrue data around ourselves how we start to discern what we trust what we do not trust right we need a lot of context there we need the capability to move beyond the only data we can carry with us from app to app right now which are our tokens and we need the context of our accomplishments our knowledge our expertise our qualifications and memberships and so in order for us to carry more than just our money from app to app we need decentralized identity we need identity where we can logically centralize data around ourselves because we are the world's expert in being us it is weird if someone else knows more about you than you do right that's not very uh not very effective or efficient but we can physically decentralize the storage of where that data lives where it goes to sleep at night um Fred ursum very famous investors is known for saying that you have fragments of yourself scattered across the apps that you use a little bit of yourself on Twitter a little on Instagram a little on Google but at disco we do not believe that you are just a pile of shattered fragments you are a disco ball you are the same person who shows up to your Bitcoin account to your ethereum account to your Gmail address and so that is why we should logically centralize and physically decentralize the data that we uh that we carry with us cool thank you uh so Calvin I'm gonna uh point this one to you because I think you know optimism has been doing a lot of work recently with with public goods and there's a lot of Need for uh simple resistance there and so you know I think as you said you see everything as blockchain so I just want to ask the question of of why a blockchain what makes this a good fit for what you're trying to do as opposed to some of the other Solutions uh and is that the way forward completely or do you see a world and where there's a balance between on-chain and off chain as well yeah I mean well okay there's a lot of different things there um blockchains are very you know like we're gonna get to this point relatively soon probably within the next you know five years ten years where where we where we really scale to the point that blockchains are just like they're just better straight up like if you have built an app and and you've thought about okay am I gonna go on AWS and spin up a server and a database and then I'm gonna expose it to the internet and do all this like it's like at a base level blockchains are just better ways to build software and we don't really think about it that way right now because it's so expensive to use these systems but at the point where these systems get really really cheap it's it just makes sense to use them for pretty much everything because why not um and and I think that this is going to just expand to the point where most compute happens on chain and so there's this I I think that there's intuitively I think that there's a there's gonna happen that this thing is going to happen where it becomes unclear where the boundary of like off chain and on chain even is I think everything's gonna kind of run in this like you're you'll run a chain and then you'll sort of be able to choose whether you you connect it on chain or not or to like you connect it to the rest of the network but if you start thinking about everything as a blockchain and things get things get much easier um I think I do think that realistically people are are going to want to run you know data storage and compute systems where they are in control and they're running it and they control who gets to see the data that seems like a very reasonable thing to want to have um but ultimately I think that this boundary between off chain and on-chain is going to become much more fluid as time goes on and it's really just going to become a question of what is the access control look like how do people pick what they CH what they share and what they don't share and so I think from the optimism perspective it's kind of just been like we don't know what the off chain thing is going to look like we think it's all going to look like blockchains all the way down and so we've started with just aggressively putting things on chain uh you know on chain in the way that people currently think of on-chain and you know I I think it'll lead to what we call off-chain eventually so to uh to answer one of the questions that you posed what you know let's put everything on a blockchain why not I have a question for the audience imagine your future grandchildren do you want them looking at the timestamps of your porn consumption raise of hands who wants that who's excited about that future that is why we don't put everything on chain let's imagine the Tinder of web3 right you're right swiping through all of these cute people that you want to see later at these parties do you want your right swipes to be saved on chain for future generations to see at 11 30 at night this is the person my grandfather was willing to go on a date with you know so I think public persistence consent is imperative as we are sorry consent is imperative as we contemplate the superpower of public persistence so as we think about you know our sort of human context right consent is the core principle of civilized society privacy is a core tenet of our freedom of assembly of our freedom of religion blockchain's public ledgers are consent free environments if I have your public key I can map anything to it that I want and you can't stop me um so in order to introduce consent to bring the you know privacy enablement and the active informed choice to share oneself with others from physical space into web 3 we cannot rely on public immutability alone we must introduce consent and autonomy along with financial capabilities that was a a great segue there so I think you know we had the opportunity to work in the past Evan on Newport and decentralized identity and I think a lot of what we realized is there are laws outside of blockchain there's gdpr there's a few others I want to see if you could just dive into a little bit of the thinking or what you've been exposed to recently and what kind of drives why we shouldn't have that on blockchains and why everything shouldn't uh be there a little bit further in relation to laws we have today so I am so sad to be the one to tell all of you that despite our best efforts here at East Denver we still do live in a society with rules and so some of those rules include in the state of California for example if you handle more than 25 million dollars worth of data your company is obligated to tell its customers if they ask what data you have how you are using it and to delete it if they request if you put data about a human being on a blockchain of course you know that you cannot delete that and so inherently if your business is in a simple manner putting clear Text data about human beings on a blockchain if your customers your users live in the state of California and make that request you are in for a world of hurt this is very similar to the global data protection resolution in Europe many data privacies and data sovereignty's laws across the world leveler you know very significant financial fines for abusing the data of users for uh for turning people into Data exhibitionists without their informed consent and so at disco we think a lot about how we can assist businesses to be compliant with these laws how we can honor and prioritize the active consent of individuals but still enjoy the fluidity and personalization of web 2 style apps that we have today so all of the personalization and Delight of your news feed none of the creepy Big Brothers selling your data or you know or someone over publicizing your life without your consent um another interesting challenge about the way that data assets and sort of law are treated here um is that in the United States data is treated as a business asset in Europe it is treated as a part of the body part of a function of your existence a a unit of work product the result of dignified labor and so as we think about the legal consequences of our data we can have a lot of fun experimenting when we are are beneath the threshold of you know legal compliance but we must also remember that when we publicize data we can inadvertently harm marginalized communities let us think when was the last time we had a public registry of ethnic minorities and how did that go even if I even let's say you know for college diplomas something that feels inoffensive let's say you send a zero knowledge attestation to someone's public key that they're a graduate of Bennett College there's a high likelihood that person is a black woman because that is a historically black University for women so when we play with tools on chain we must remember are we publicizing the data that we already use to marginalize people what are the consequences of our choices as we practice this design and so I want to invite everyone here to contemplate design Justice in your own practice when you ship features do you have a good handle on how they will affect the lives of the people who will use them and if they are immutable features have you thought about what that means 25 years from now cool thank you Evan uh I want to just give a chance to Kelvin to respond to that and then Masha I'd like to give you a question as well but uh you know I got the chance to see your your talk this morning Kelvin about uh identity and you mentioned you know zero knowledge proofs and these other Technical Solutions that can kind of maybe overcome some of these problems uh so to be unbiased I want to give you a chance to really talk about is there a way forward using change and using some of those Technologies in the future where things can live on chain but we can still protect people uh in the ways that Evan's just described and what does that look like for you in terms of scalability and usability for these users yeah I mean I'm I'm not going to disagree that there's there is information that needs to be private I'm also not going to disagree that there is there is um public information that if publicized more widely and made permanent becomes becomes uh harmful right there's like uh you know in New York they have this thing called akris and it's a database of everyone who who has bought a home so you can just like look people's names up and you can see where they live and you can see how much their mortgage is it's like that's that seems dangerous you know but it's but it's completely public and you could put attestations about it on chain and be a big problem um yeah so clearly this information is useful we need to figure out a way to make this information accessible on chain if we want to for instance give an application the ability to provide a service to an address that is tied to a unique identity and so there I mean there has to be some system by which we can you know at least in a privacy preserving way prove convincingly to an application that I'm a unique person I'm not pretending to be somebody else this is my address and and I want to be able to use this service so you know I don't it's this is It's Complicated because we want to be able to use the information on chain but we don't want all the information to be publicly accessible on chain and then so naturally the you know zero knowledge proofs are sort of the the construct that allow you to do things like this and so it seems like an appropriate fit but you know we without this it's very hard to do the sort of decentralized governance uh you know civil resistant decentralized governance that we want to do or we fall back on plutocracy so I think that fundamentally there has to be a middle ground we have to make this information accessible on chain in some form but you know this we there's definitely a too far in either direction where we go too far in the Privacy preserving way where it's not useful or we go too far in the public Direction where it's where it's you know clearly dangerous so um you know maybe my real answer is that I sit somewhere in the middle and I don't know how to get there great answer thank you uh so Masha I want to give you a chance to speak up as well so to bring this a little closer to home and or more uh yeah what's kind of next you know I think there's decentralized identity for a lot of different things um you can use civil resistance incentives you know wanting privacy consent I just want to ask what are you most excited about decentralized identity moving forward in these next couple of months or years uh and yeah what gets you excited about the space and problems you want to solve right now the SE identity obviously sitting between two real real leaders in the space both optimism and disco it's going to be really interesting to see how both of these Technologies scale and become easier to use so with impact cards it's a dynamic nft that shows your on-chain off chain and cross-chain actions but with the off chain actions it's a visual representation a change based on those off-chain actions so the off-chain data never comes on chain so there are ways for us to show you know the things that we're doing the communities that we're participating in without getting too specific without getting too granular and so what I'm really excited about is to find pieces of Technologies and use cases that mold both of these Technologies together and so impact cards is a great first example of this and I'm really excited to see more of these instances um I think you know Bitcoin passport is working on civil resistance a project like impact cards could plug into a coin passport could further um you know civil resistance you know initiatives and that I think is going to make the space as a whole a lot better and a lot more easy to use and scale some off-chain credential use cases especially with more sensitive information and things that we want to keep on chain and then I'm also really excited to have better more complex and dynamic experiences overall and I think that is something that off chain offers us uh on chain is so far pretty limited it's pretty transactional and you know off-chain allows for more of those qualitative data points to be brought into our experience speaking to the ux and the usability of crypto I think that will be absolutely essential for how we move forward in the space could I just jump in for a quick second game amazing thank you so Kelvin posed a fantastic question but I want to make sure that we address how might we rely on verifiable off-chain data to inform or gate access to on-chain actions how can we keep data private yet still resolvable to inform our on-chain settlement so I'll tell you about how we do it at disco thanks to our help from our collaborators at District labs and cames so leveraging the delegatable framework with metamask we're able to generate a signature at the app layer basically like a thumbs up or a green light that you have the private or off-chain requirements that are that will allow you to interact with this on-chain contract so if you go to think it's disco.districtlabs.xyz you are going to be able to connect your wallet if you have a disco data backpack already set up if you have a disco credential in your data backpack off chain you will be permitted to Mint that nft on a chain this does not carry that information from your credential on chain it's simply that green light that plus sign that thumbs up to allow you in similarly this is the same motion by which we could use an off-chain kyc credential to Grant access to an on-chain permissioned kyc only D5 pool so everywhere that you can use a token for access control on-chain Smart contracts physical spaces Google Drive telegram chats and channels Shopify Ecommerce you can also use off-chain credentials there is no reason that you can't preserve the privacy of off-chain data and and you know not be able to still leverage it in your smart contract interactions throughout evm and Beyond thank you and I also want to you know Calvin give you a chance to answer this as well just in the next three to six months I know you know optimism Collective is very active with civil resistance and public goods is attestation is going to play a big part in that or is that still an experiment how does that play out for you guys in the short term and what value do you want to provide to your community using these attestations yeah I mean fundamentally the way that the optimism Collective is set up is that that there's this and I think we would all agree that plutocracy is not a long-term uh mechanism for making good decisions and so you need an identity layer and so there's like we have to build the things so the the attestation system that we're building is is our attempt at creating um the the data set that will allow us to then extract identities that we can use for the rest of the system so I mean I think it's going to take a little while to develop I think a big part of of this the the the the challenge or the problem space is you need an enormous amount of information to be able to to extract things like identity in a decentralized way right something like like kyc like a kyc attestation that a centralized company is making could be a signal and it might might even be a strong signal but relying on it as like the primary signal is just back to centralized identity and so if you really want to have decentralized identity you need an enormous amount of information you know on-chain and off chain that you can you can sort of capture and and Define algorithms over and then use to create a score that says are you a person or are you not um and so yeah the Big Challenge right now for optimism is not you know the attestations themselves are not particularly complicated it's like actually it's the first version of this the contract was like 10 lines of code um but it's the complicated thing is actually getting the data in and making it accessible for other people to see what sort of data is available that they can then analyze and derive conclusions from so that's sort of the main focus of what optimism is working on right now thank you uh so we just have a few a few minutes left so I want to level set and you know kind of remind or not remind but you know we're all on the same team we're all trying to get you know to a better world arguably so I want to just take a step back and you know if we all do collectively win and these experiments succeed and we we gain knowledge what does that look like in 10 years what are we unlocking for us what are we unlocking talking for our users what do we get that we don't have today and we can just start with you Evan and I'll we'll work our way down so diverse is you show up in any digital or physical environment and to receive a personalized experience based on the parts of yourself that you choose to share that is why at disco we believe that you are the multi-faceted center of the party just like this disco ball you should reflect your data and your identity to the world however you decide so what the future looks like is pretty bright for us it's an awesome dance floor where everyone is welcome and invited regardless of the level of technical literacy or the background that they have it looks like us being able to seamlessly move through the doors of our building through Rideshare airport security border screenings all the way to this conference without filling out forms and standing in lines like the 11 billion hours we spent filling out eventbrites this week it looks like personalized experiences everywhere you go from ride shares to doctors offices to shopping it looks like never filling out a form again yeah for us at impact cards uh future would look like being able to share and signal to what you care about and what you uh spend your time doing and how you show up in the world whether that's off chain or on chain and then I think a really big part of it too is right now our ecosystem is exceptionally fragmented and so that's why the cross chain aspect of our project matters a lot as well we want to be able to bring users together in one place and be able to show all of your interactions in one place and so for us right now that's an impact card and it's around centered around the design of impact or regenerative projects as well so we see that on a metascale whether that's with impact or other important uh aspects of your life yeah cool and yeah at optimism you know the future that we want to see is that all this work that we've been doing to build these digital collaborative systems put Power into people's hands and not into Whoever has the most money in the most tokens because that's not an act like if we're crazy if we all we've built is the way for the people with the most money to have the most power that seems nonsensical and so we want to see a future where real people real human beings are in control of their systems rather than the systems being in control of the people so we'll get there one day just trying to get unplugged from The Matrix y'all well uh we're almost at time but we have a few more seconds um if I know Kelvin he conceded a little bit that you know we don't want everything unchanged certainly some private things uh Evan is there a place that you see that are useful on-chain attestations where you know this Hardline vision of disco is obviously off chain but do you see any value in some of these on-chain things as well and identity living oh absolutely I love Unchained assets in fact I love them so much I have ERC 721 tattooed on the back of my neck in the EIP font and I convinced 42 other adults to get matching tattoos with me represent ink Dao but um my love for on-chain data is specific to data that is appropriate for that form it makes me really sad to see people using sub-optimal data containers when there are better options or or more optimal options for our use cases so I think data on chain is super awesome when it is uh benefited by being globally available public accessible to everyone on Earth and in space with an internet connection and when we need consensus around the transfer of one asset to another I think that's a super awesome way for us to use on-chain data I also think that accountability and transparency for non-human entities organizations governments businesses and communities I think that's also a really fantastic use case for financial settlement that involves this sort of global transparency I think blockchains are fantastic but for human beings who change and evolve I think there is a more optimal data primitive a way for us to show that we are humans who exist not bound to a single protocol right you are not an ethereum person unable to use Instagram unable to use Bitcoin you are a person not a token not an address and so uh so in instances where that's the case let's keep this party off the chain well I just want to say thank you I hope this was useful for everyone here and obviously these are very smart people who have thought about this problem deeply and they'd probably be open to answering your questions so I recommend it they're a wealth of knowledge thank you cames thank you guys so much we'll see you in the metaverse I'm Evan McMullen oh [Applause]