Mischa Tuffield - TokenCard - Ethereum London #ethldn

[Music] so I'm going to talk the talk I'm gonna give today is called living a life on aetherium and I'm gonna go on a journey with you I might be a bit ranty apologies so I usually end with this slide this is I don't agree in with American politics normally but an American politician said this I just want to leave it here for a second it makes me happy to think about these things so hi I'm Misha I'm a computer geek I'm a privacy nerd I'm the reason why BBC doc code at UK has no social tracking on it and the NHS in the UK I used to do web standards I'm a web guy really boring Hey and yeah I have a PhD in computer science and all that boring stuff I've done quite a few businesses I've built I've been involved in for startups I've sold to one - an evil company which I quit the day they bought and I failed twice after raising the biggest seed round in London which is also quite fun and then about a year and a half ago a couple of people the founders of token cart approached me with a really crazy idea so I'm gonna kind of take you down this journey so hi hello hi I guess most importantly I'm an optimist and I love the future so I want to kind of just focus on the future a bit so the token card is an aetherium project we crowdfunded in early May 2017 were based in London we were part of the FC sandbox co-op for so I'm cording myself here so this quote in italics isn't of anyone important so token code is the first noncustodial direct-to-consumer experience that enables payment in the real world and I'll kind of explain what that means throughout the course of this I just want to reinforce allow you to hold your assets your aetherium tokens your eath without us having any access to it what's giving you a seamless experience to spend that in the real world and I think that's pretty cool so we're around 20 people so we've been around for about two years building stuff we haven't been speaking publicly about what we do we haven't been spending money on marketing we don't like talking about things before delivering things so we're just we're just starting to tell our story now so thanks Ethan London for letting us speak so I guess I believe we're building a viable alternative to consumer banking with no central entity which holds all of your money so something which mal tells me at times which I get kind of excited about is this idea that you spend all your life working you make money you give it to someone they choose how to invest that money how to spend it and I guess yeah why why not challenge these things so this is a little aside about decentralization anyone who tells you that as a company they're decentralized is fobbing you off and you can quote don't quote me on that um I think no company is truly decentralized I guess where we have maintained decentralization in a credible way is within our relationship with our users we have no access to our users funds and that's kind of cool and just to be clear there are other crypto cards out there in the market coin bases release one recently there's a couple other ones all of them have access to your funds they were all custodians of your funds they do imani in an unregulated space anyway we'll get to that I don't knock other people good on them so what have we achieved so far so we believe that the fundamental problems for making a theorem real and allowing people to use it in the real world is this usability of security and I think there's two main issues which needs to be solved and tackled by businesses or experiences one is if your key gets compromised that means of a bad actor getting hold of your key and we think we have some nice solutions around this and the next one is the loss of key which we don't have a solution place for at the moment but we think about these things and we hope that someone will have a nice solution for this we've also made tokens spendable in the real world which is kind of cool and we're very keen if we're going to be challenging banking I'm personally really keen on building experience which is participatory and are eluted this later on if you're going to disrupt the system which is incredibly centralized and build an alternative why do it in a way why not challenge where the growth goes or where the uplift goes from a new business model so this concept of participation is something which I'll touch on later so this is really boring and you guys will all know this but we're gonna go back Genesis block bless you so there's a Genesis block and it's mainly gobbledygook when I guess for the kenai or people would know what doing there was all this bits here people like what were all these bits and just to bring it home it was a fun cover of The Times on the 3rd of jambs my birthday which kind of talks about the Chancellor on the brink of second bailout so banking ajussi collapse 2008 subprime mortgages whatever it is got duped by auditors that money kind of kind of fell out in society again this is not fact this is opinion by me and you can beat me up about it afterwards so this technology which brought on and the predecessors of things like aetherium had this concept of challenging this status quo and this is something which we feel very strongly about as a project so again I said this is quite ranting and I'm gonna get to the tech later and I can actually show you all the tech and it's all immutable and publicly orders ball and chain which is kind of exciting so problem with banking from my perspective it's a profit so for the few and the losses are socialized and this does my head in there's some just some nice stats and again I'm rabbit holing and this is all conjecture and this is opinion so don't beat me up about it but we can talk about this in the pub don't focus on these things but there's more homeless listen around London is just full of it and young people just don't trust anyone anymore and why are these you know why does this exist so we're trying to build a consuming banking experience I can't say that we're building a consumer bank because we're not so from my perspective or from our perspective if you look at consumer banking they look after your money they make sure it's safe they make your money spendable when you need to spend it they grant you credit leverage from a fraction of your neighbours money for profit and they just gamble your money and given that the core use cases which affect users are looking after your money making a spend safe and making your money spendable I think these are two use cases which where we're going down a journey where we can give you a credible alternative to I guess my dream is to be able to sack off my bank account and put put hold all of my cash and in my aetherium wallet but I guess we're not there yet so not only do I think that consumer banking is in conflict with consumer interests I think these incentive models fundamentally misaligned and it's not really misaligned it's in direct conflicts any profit made by banks to go to their shareholders are taken away from money and profit which should be going to their consumers who are putting up their money this just seems fundamentally broken so why am I here I'm at East London and we've built something on aetherium and I guess the reason why I can stand here and say all of this stuff credibly and look you know it look myself in the mirror afterwards and kind of not die of shame it's because we have something like I think what I like people calling it the world computer the trust computer this new distributed decentralized platform of computation which is aetherium and some properties of this new computer allows me to say what I'm saying now I think credibly so our nature of the relationship between me and my users and the fact that I can't touch my users money is immutable and observable and auditable publicly on a chain and that means when I say stuff like you don't have to trust me when I say I can't touch your money that's true and that conceptually the affordances which theorem has given to the world and to application developers like me is novel and kind of gets me excited and also it's a platform so there's an economy out there there other people building staff there adapts there are other things there in this ecosystem is not just a chain for me which I've built for you to trust and all of these things are interesting and yeah someone put this picture of the world up and it made me smile so I guess this is what makes me excited worms if there's a shift how can we bring about that shift how do we make ownership real so hypothesis so if you think about the economy in this platform which we talk about etherium so we're on a door nervous new economy I think projects like digits and maker excite us maker is a system collateralized loan system which pecks of a dollar with no central entity having to do any management and that's kind of cool I think the properties which die have and maker maker Dow has is very exciting digits as a project where they're tokenizing gold and putting it on chain has made made a token which is backed by something real and has made gold for the first time fungible and divisible by you know you know you and you know into five sixes which has cooked quite a lot of diversity and has made gold instantly pinging all around the world I guess all these things are really cool so this this new economy which is built on low tech rather than implied trust so the trust is in the technology and sure with digits your test because there's a gap between the digital representation of gold and what's actually living in their vaults which they audit there is some trust there just like there's some trust in the relationship with between users and us and I'll talk about where that trust comes in so this tokenized future we believe in we hope that this economy will flourish over time [Music] yeah and we're trying to add some value to it so yeah my dad was really into Pink Floyd I think his cutoff and it came up in Google so token code has no access to your assets we you don't have to worry what happened if you know leadership changes or somebody buys this business I'll promise you aren't just more marketing slogans and they're baked into the blockchain immutably as a small contract you don't have to trust that we won't be naughty and this is only now possible because of aetherium and that's really cool it should the trust computer at the world computer right so about our product I've just been ran see up until now and I'm going to be a bit salesy now so I'm gonna come back to this non-custodial so it's jargon and gibberish for the most part but yeah I have no access rights so on the nice side it means kind of pro decentralization people people who love this space don't have to trust me and don't think I'm touching their money on the flip side it means that if someone's laundering money or doing something nefarious through my products I can't actually do anything so we've we've deployed a Visa card and if you come to the pub afterwards I'll buy you drinks with the only non-custodial card and I'll show you how that works non-alcoholic drinks two water's fine as well what this custody means here is the I can't twiddle I can't cheat the system I can't cheat the auditor I can't make up numbers actually it has other negative effects as well you can see how many users we have if you look on the chain right you can see how well we're doing as a business so it comes with flip signs we don't have many users right now we launched a couple of weeks ago and we're testing it's an alpha so for me when we were sat with the regulator and we were telling about this I guess the penny dropped for me that these guys knew what they were talking about when they went are so if you guys fall off the face of the planet nothing happens to your users funds you pose no risk to users phones thing and that's pretty cool I was like yeah that's pretty cool thanks I've never quitted I never thought I'd be quoting the FCA so why is this noncustodial thing important we all know about this and today we know about this and if you look at I think this is you guys - forty million dollars worth of Bitcoin was stolen last night from their exchange 7,000 Bitcoin the centralized entity custodial access to funds again in a regulated world in the old world these funds would have just been written off right by governments or whoever's issuing the money I don't know if something bad like that happened no okay no and you're ahead of nobody's things I was looking at someone who might know but thank you anyway these are reasons why you shouldn't trust centralized entities with your monies you shouldn't leave your money in an exchange print more money thank you anyway I don't know so this is some numbers should know I should cite where the source is maybe if these ever go online so what if I was okay yeah the yeah most of its opinion which i think is fine so if you look at the amount of hacks that happened last year the numbers are big I think the one which stands out is 2.7 million dollars a day if you average it out and I guess what I'm going to show you and what I hope people who are interested in this space when you ask me questions about is this aetherium native app so we've developed a smart contract which which we believe mimics what a consumer bank looks like your current account looks like has a list of pays it has a daily spend omit which you can interact with each of our users deploy an instance of this small contract which again governs the relationship between us and our users this this smart contract we have no access rights to this the experience which we've built which I'm going to show you allows users to go from this smart contract which they and they govern to fear please tell me time tell me talk okay and this this relationship with our users is 2500 lines of solidity code mostly comments and it's all live actually you can share links afterwards you can see the smoke contracts and this for me as a software guy is kind of weird right I'm building something which is immutable and I kind of if anyone came up to me when you know let's let's write two thousand five hundred lines of code and have nine hundred unit tests and do static analysis on it or you know play around with formal verification I'll be like you're mad especially in a small company like us but yeah this is the code I'll link you to it I'll show how that works so that isn't you can't fling ether that or you could fling ether that if you wanted if you have a QR reader that goes to the ether scan which is my kind of small contracts and you can see you can see it there I'll leave it I mean yeah show you off there's enough of you I can show all of you one by one afterwards so this concept of participation it's important to note we're cloud fund a business what we've built of what people what people bought into was this idea that if we build this new type of card and this new type of experience that everyone pays a 1% fee this 1% feed goes into backing or token or token becomes a back token of the spending of people on online so as people spend their backs our token so with this new banking experience its participatory from my point of view if you can get your hands on a computer and you can make an ethereal transaction yeah so don't put your financial destiny in control of other people so we believe in this concept of self sovereign finance then brought this concept of self southern identity to me which is really interesting that work is great there's some great projects they're really interested in it yeah we're delivering self sovereign finance and that's kind of cool yeah it is kind of cool so I'm just going to demo now and again Oh jumping the gun I have to use Quicktime and yeah so this is my phone this is all live I have to type in some numbers to get in so the users private key lives on their phone the private key is encrypted using the secure Enclave the secure element and the private key never leaves the users phone this is the bit where people get annoyed at me because I don't do justice third so this experience here is a small contract the users have some tokens within their small contract they have an owner address if you lose this address at the moment your funds are gone yeah bye-bye you can send and receive like a normal wallet this isn't a normal wallet this is a smart contract these are the security features at the bottom so one we kind of prompt you and make sure that you backup your seed this is this needs to be fixed as a user experience you have a set of white list of addresses which you can send infinite funds to you have a daily spend limit which we calculate using an Oracle using crypto compares api's to get kind of prices for so if in the case where someone compromises your private key all they can do is spend your daily spend omit or send funds to one of your whitelisted addresses and we think what we've done is kind of limited the damage of someone compromising your key and we're trying to get our head around what we can do to limit to help people recover from a situation whereby they've had their private key they've lost their private key so if you haven't backed up your private key your mnemonic phrase in this app and you lose your phone you're screwed yeah that's a technical term it's a technical term yeah so and then we have the card aspect of it and I mean it's really boring and it's non-branded but the branded ones are coming soon allows you to top up your cards so here I have some eighth and this is beer money so if I go to top-up my card I can select a token we let you use dye our token and eath or token means you don't pay any fees if you pay a fee I'm just paying a fee so I'm gonna top up one eath now yeah I mean I don't have much ether I'm very work very welcome to accept youth then I confirm with face ID so this is going to the secure element using operating system-level security so this is the OS level security and now what's happened is I've authored an etherium transaction to send an address which we have on chain which is our float one 'if we wait for some sort of finality so I'm going to go to this transaction screen and I'm going to go this is a pending card application top-up so if I go look at this on ether scan hopefully this will be in a pending state and at some point this will like be confirmed and once it's confirmed based on some probabilistic model depending on how much is hopping up we will put fear within your card and you can spend that so when I say we're non custodian at the moment we're piggybacking off someone's called Eve money license with an issuing Bank in the UK and we can we're kind of sending out cards in the UK and in the EEA at the moment we've sent out around it's about 150 wallets at the moment we're just laying people in nice and slow we'll show you how you can get your hands on one of these if you want one just to learn into tests and to perfect our or app experience really so when this goes through I will put money like there'll be money in my accounts this is this isn't my app this is a theory and being slow so I think there was like 89 not in there at some point I'll come back to this and we'll have some cash in there so that that is the the UX we have at the moment so in order to have a noncustodial relationship or an ability to move to fear in this current instance in this like a prepaid card model you have to send us eath once we're happy that we've got it and the probability of the reorg happening is low enough will give you based on the amount of money we'll give you that fear and you can spend it so basically as a business what we're doing is managing floats fear floats crypto floats and we're just moving monies around in order to build an experience it's worth noting that to get visa over the hump and to get the regulator over the hump that we're a non custodian of uses funds which allow them to spend in fear we had to be super hot thanks as to you super hot on all of the and all of the anti money laundering all the provisions all the checks and balances which we put in place to say that we can confidently no or kind of check where the source of funds are coming from so we don't sell crypto right now you have to bring crypts are to us the story which we went to the regulator was regulator because it's a blockchain and is immutable we know the provenance of all monies and as long as we're interacting with all the best service providers which label this graph with who the bad actors are you can always see through back propagation of this information on the graph where the bad money is so we've built a risk model we monitor people we have a kyc an AML bar higher than any kind of challenge bank out there we had needs to know who you are we need to know where you live we need to we have entire visibility of where you're bringing your funds from and again this is a story which a regulator kind of got the head round so it was three box confirmation I think for 1/8 so theoretically now if i refresh this there'll be some pounds yeah so we can spend beer and I guess for me that's quite cool I'm gonna leave this so there's a like the really boring stuff right there's you can see your transactions you can see that I just buy food and coffee because I live in East London expensive coffee two pounds seventeen thing it's not that expensive anyway right so you saw all the normal stuff hygiene stuff and I think in short we built on a theory and project and a challenge of Bank in two years and I think that's pretty bloody awesome to be honest and a challenge of Bank which actually challenges the status quo but yeah anyway so thank you all that's it for me I have some caveats so as much hundred Bank idea and some summaries so we've delivered on my white paper with no compromise we have a strong legal position within the UK and EU about building this participatory bank I can talk to you about why and how this works offline I think at the moment just to be clear your Fiat balance is as their some custody involved there there is a UK bank a regulated UK bank which holds that and then ultimately the government wonder write that I think an odd 5 min I'll be done before that we we people are telling us that they don't like this fiat exposure we have this thing called the zero balance card which we have a prototype for we we have to get the regulator and Vees are comfortable with this so this would mean that we would have a side ledger which we look at and we would tie it using like a cursor which you would to blocks and state of the blockchain and we if you put your bank into a cash machine it would always say zero but when you spent it we would be able to know whether you had enough funds and it will kind of work like an escrow so you'd have a small contract which you deposit some ethan you put some ethernet and both token card and the user will be able to pull from it with a time lock and we would be able to give you a swiping experience so you wouldn't even have to have that fiat exposure we're working on that now the next thing which we need to work on and just to be clear and I'm picking up the theorem here that wouldn't be possible without if they and that's kind of cool I'm sure there's other chains out there we could you can do it now but this is where we're at so we are custodians of your kyc data yeah we are looking at how we can do the self sovereign identity we're following the space I do see a vision where we can not proliferate PII data the key is getting law enforcement and the regulator on board but the stuff which we can do and we're thinking about a two-pronged approach where would make these at the stations and give a key to the decryption key for this PII data to the regulator and to the police essentially the cyber security team let them prove that they can use it when they need to use it so over time maybe we can start deleting the data which we hold both peer personally identifiable information personal data I think PII is the wrong term with gdpr now I like this stuff as well sad it's very sad and then finally how can I use zero knowledge tech to bring up credible privacy to a noncustodial world so Apple makes claims that with our Apple card they can't see your transactions Goldman Sachs can see your transactions which is fine I think I think there is a solution with zero knowledge person whereby the user the act of a user like topping up there's your knowledge kind of money's on aetherium will be a public transaction on chain and then everything under there would be private only to the user and to us because we need to appease the the regulator and there's some nice projects in London the Aztec guys are really interesting as take protocol really interesting ease Snorks is really interesting I love that but it would just be a premium service and just to be clear in this because I can't make money from your money we need to get paid everything we do we need to get paid and what we like is transparency ultimately I'd like to build a service and this is something which one of the male says in the same way as uber claims that they're the biggest cab company in the world without any cabs the air B&B are the biggest hotelier in the world without anything on inventory if we could build something which could be the bigger can we consume a banking experience with no consumer funds that'll be really cool and in the same way as people pay a subscription for Spotify to have music if we can give you banking services on a subscription then in the same way as me ranting about business models of centralized entities which horde money being in direct conflict with our users if users are paying us a fee for a service we're aligned that we have to build and deliver value to the users for them to pay to us and all of this stuff just blows my mind so yeah if you want to build this stuff with us where we're hiring I'm Misha that's token card we have a disc or channel which people talk yeah and then if you want to sign up you can live and sign up now on the Alpha Channel and it's not it's iOS only yeah no sorry when Android is the forever question so I'm it is yeah it's even about 60% of our market when we look today um people are starting next week so all of the infrastructures react native the only bits of the infrastructure which we built using native code are the things which touch the secure element and we do the signing so most of the app experience is already there and I'm hiring two people to just come in and bliss through the Android stuff so I'm not going to give you a timeline any other questions I don't know actually we don't have investors contributors I think we have a physical card man I'm going to buy you beer afterwards with a physical card yeah I mean so because on the web we would have to go into Ledger's and we would have to go into this space of hardware wallets what we're doing is we're trying to build a credible solution where your private key lives on your phone right and it's just yeah it doesn't seem right I don't want to walk around dangling with some kind of hardware wallet around trying to do that in software on a phone pardon yeah I'm don't do Android it there is a physical card yeah that's the whole point that's why we're called token card I mean all your boyfriend's - it doesn't matter yeah we're we're inclusive like that I think that's that's a risk to our business which is a very big risk and what we're trying to do is mitigate that by having as many relationships as possible so something which I do in other talks which I've given is we're crowdfunded company no UK bank has given us a bank account Yeah right just to be clear so we have European banking partners who risk appetite is different I think like none of the big guys HSBC RBS none of them given us a bank account they just look at us actually none of the big auditors the top four auditors would ordered us which is just ridiculous to be honest um and all we want them to do is like a look at our funds or you know look at our compliance dogs they wouldn't even order or compliance regime on how we do kyc because we're crowdfunded entity the regulator knows this we've uh pressure on them we tell the FCA well like come on guys come on guys what's going on all we have to do is show that we can be a credible company and that we can deliver value in a way which yeah isn't kind of I don't know abusing users trust basically that answer your question using our experience right now is that like 98% of their phones are certain their own control their wallet encryptor and then that they only have minimal fee exposure on the card so you only have like a hundred I guess the question is what does it do to our product yeah I mean it's not great for us yeah all we have to do is build relationships prove that we can be good actors prove that we are systems and the pitch which we've given them about how like basically you're an idiot to do fraud on the system because of the provenance of the data on chain is actually a credible argument and you know this is what we believe we're going to try and show this over time yeah and then there was one of the back ok so I'm the wrong person to answer this but he's our hardware guy which histology guy gone Yanis yeah there's another speaker talking about this actually if that's their specialism at the moment I trust and iOS so I trust lib crypto which ships with the SDK so I have no third-party libraries but I have an implicit trust on Apple and architecture the Intel architecture which they're providing which they call the secure Enclave Intel SG something you guys will know this I have some trust there which I'm outsourcing to basically Apple right now when I move to Android this is why we chose to go Apple first Android doesn't have a unified experience with iOS you can go back a few generations probably iPhone 6 ish the last two or three generations and they have some assurances around the trust maybe you can speak about this better than me so there is implicit trust there ya know that guy did you have a question yeah did you okay okay yeah now that's a great question so from a GDP our point of view when you apply for the card you become we would join and we're gonna argue about this a bit we're both joint data controllers of your data you are creating an account with an issuing bank in the UK I you do open banking stuff so the KYC requirement is both on us and on them so because they're our users and we're facilitating their it goes going to Fiat we have to hold this kyc information for six years after you leave our product but the issuing bank underneath gets that data too so on both US and the issuing bank and that depends on jurisdiction does that make sense crypto to fiat yeah so yeah with our product that's a good question so our product there is a wallet there with all of these small contract stuff which you can use and deploy and give yourself assurances around whether or not if someone compromises your key what presence you get some protection so all of that stuff you can have and use without ever going to the card or cryptic crypto behavior which is facilitated through our application is from our point of view we don't want us area we don't ask you for PII we don't ask you to identify who you are we don't know those customers soon as you want to go from crypto into Fiat we have to know who you are and we ask you lots of information and the only assurances we can give to people is at a legal level and in terms of service level saying that we're not going to profit from that in any other way I can't do anything on chain about that right now hence why we're looking at these soft sovereign identity solutions there was a question one behind I think and then I mean so we don't put any information about you on chain so lots of people asked about Ian s support and yeah like why can I add my ENS to this I don't want to force users to put their ANS but if someone wants to identify themselves on the chain to say that this is them that's fine if for example you use the app to send your friends some eath because they bought dinner or whatever they could socially engineer that that's who you are because the chain is immutable and the data lives there forever I mean that's that so I mean if you have lots of money you're probably not going to put all of it in the one place you're probably going to put it in different places or put some of it and cold storage or put some of it on a ledger or your astrology yeah but yeah this is why I'm interested in the zero knowledge side of things I think there is a world and I'm happy to talk about this offline where you can be more private on ethereum it's just costly and it's all new tech at the moment that said even with my imagines your knowledge implementation like I'm done the fact how much money you have and how much you put into the the dark bit of a theorem will always be public and yeah [Applause]