Hello everyone. Very happy to be here. My name is Brantley Milligan, and I'll be sharing lessons learned from 10 years of developing the Ethereum identity stack. Let's dive into identity. So, who am I?
This is my online who am I? This is my online profile. My ENS on-chain profile. My ENS on-chain name is brantley.eth.
How many people here have a .eth name? Raise your hand. I see there are several people. Okay, if you don't have a .
eth name, you have to go to ens.domains and get one. I'll tell you why this is important. This is my Ethereum on-chain profile. I'll tell you what it is I'll tell you what it is .
The history of the Ethereum identity stack dates back 50 years, to the 1970s, when we made one of the most important inventions in computer science of our generation— public key cryptography. How many people here know what public key cryptography is? Okay, raise your hand Okay, raise your hand . This is an extremely powerful technology. It allows one person to encrypt a message for another without exchanging a secret decryption key in advance.
You can simply exchange public keys, encrypt a message for that person, and only they can decrypt it without exchanging the private key beforehand. This has been impossible throughout human history. This was invented in the 1970s. It was considered so powerful that the US government classified the technology and declared its use in most public products illegal products illegal . So, it was invented in the 1970s, and for a while it was only used by the US government.
But in the 1990s, Phil Zimmermann and a group called the Cypherpunks pushed to make it legal for the public, and they succeeded. This was extremely important for the modern world. We would n't have e- commerce and many other things on the internet if it weren't for public-key cryptography. For example, in your browser, when you see HTTPS, the letter S stands for SSL. This is a type of cryptography that is allowed because of the work they did in the 1990s.
So, Cypherpunks realized that public-key cryptography could be the basis for many things, including digital identity. But they found it difficult to achieve mass adoption. Because many people believe in privacy and freedom, but most people, even believing in it, are not motivated enough to change their lives accordingly. They need some kind of financial incentive, entertainment, or something like that. So there was a version of public-key cryptography designed for people called PGP.
But, you know, it was only accepted by technical experts, and it never went beyond this community. Let's move on to 2008 . Then the creation of Bitcoin was created or proposed . And it used public-key cryptography for wallets. This was very important because it was another example of the use of public-key cryptography.
In 2011, Namecoin, the first altcoin, appeared. The essence of the idea behind Namecoin was that the blockchain technology invented for Bitcoin as money could be used for other purposes, including names and identification. So, Namecoin was a separate blockchain dedicated to names, specifically dot bit domain names. It was innovative and interesting, but it never caught on, but the seed of the idea was sown. In 2014, Vitalik published the Ethereum white paper.
He identified five areas of application for Ethereum, and one of them was identification. He directly says that we could use Ethereum to create a better blockchain-based naming system, perhaps even better than Namecoin. Of course, Ethereum was launched in 2015. It also used public-key cryptography for wallets. And Ethereum, of course, can execute any smart contracts.
So smart contracts. So , the key point in what Bitcoin, and then especially Ethereum, did was to give a large number of people private keys that they would never have otherwise obtained. Right? Crypto has managed to achieve what economic incentives among cypherpunks, with their calls for privacy and freedom, could not. The mass adoption of private keys and the flourishing of the industry for managing them, which we call wallets.
Wallets are simply private key management systems. They've been around for years, but they've always been terrible. They were really bad. Maybe you think that modern crypto wallets are also bad or could be better. But they are much better than anything we had just a few years ago.
Yes, they should get better, but that's because we have an economic incentive. It's not just an appeal to values or something like that that motivates some people but not a large enough number. So, Vitalik said: " Vitalik said: " Okay, with Ethereum we can do identification." There were many attempts to implement identification in Ethereum in the early stages, and most of them failed. I think many of them failed because they considered identity or even social media as a single application.
And, as it turns out, identity is not just one problem. This is one complex problem. That's like twenty difficult problems. And if you try to solve them all at once, you might be able to beat five if you're a very smart team, but you probably won't be able to solve them all. You'll start to fumble, you won't get what you really want, and your project will fail.
And this is the key conclusion I have drawn from 10 years of working in the Ethereum identity stack. Creating things decentralized is much harder than centralized. And yes centralized. And yes , there are many Web3 developers who would like to build Web2 because their lives would be much easier. Which is completely normal.
I have nothing against Web2. If you want to do Web2, please do . But if you're in crypto, the whole point is to do things decentralized. So, the next big breakthrough was the Ethereum Name Service, ENS. Development began in 2016.
It was launched in 2017. And it all started with .eth names for decentralized websites. This was modeled after DNS. Very soon after that, they said, "Well, we can use this for crypto payments too."
Interestingly, at launch, no one perceived this as an identity primitive. People didn't use that terminology. In fact, everything was based on the analogy with DNS. But in 2021, 4 years after launch, when I was already on the team, I realized that ENS is just your crypto just your crypto username and profile. People started saving profile data.
People started using them on their Twitter to represent themselves. And I remember writing a thread about this in early 2021, and for the first time formulating it: " the first time formulating it: " It's like your, you know, username for Web3." And it kind of dawned on me: "Oh my God, yes, this is exactly what we're doing here." And I think that username think that username is a meta-case for everything else. So, you want to send me money for crypto payments—well, send it to me.
Send to my username. You want to go to my decentralized website—just type in my name. You can see my page on the decentralized network. I must say that ENS has been very successful so far . And let's not take it for granted.
It's truly amazing how far he's come. There have been many, many attempts to create a naming system on the blockchain. Of course, I mentioned Namecoin, but there were dozens and dozens of other attempts, most of which you haven't even heard of because they tried and failed. It's really hard to succeed at things like this. And why did ENS succeed when others didn't?
There are several reasons. First, it doesn't try to compete directly with DNS. ENS sees itself as an additional protocol that can expand the namespace on the Internet. Other blockchain naming systems have tried to compete directly with DNS, which I think is a terrible mistake, because DNS is because DNS is too entrenched to be defeated . Another thing—ENS has a great engineering approach.
From the very beginning, excellent engineers worked on it . Don't take it for granted. Third, long-term horizons in protocol design. ENS is not just a scientific project. This is a true attempt to create a new internet new internet protocol, which means that from the very beginning, the developers made decisions in favor of long-term development, not for the sake of short-term hype or profit.
Yes, you can achieve some short-term success, but then it fades away and you are left with nothing. ENS has always been focused on the long term and has been around for over 9 years, making it extremely sustainable. This is one of the longest-running applications without any interruptions on Ethereum, and it is here to stay for a long time. So, in 2021, I realized that the Ethereum community had accidentally solved or created a viable solution to the single sign-on problem. The problem with single sign-on is that we have tons of apps we want to use, but each one has its own login system, and that's really annoying, right?
One solution was to use "Sign in with Google" everywhere, but that means Google now controls your life. You don't like it. It would be great, wouldn't it, if the internet had a decentralized, user-controlled single sign-on system, where you have your own account, username, and profile for the internet, and you use them across all your applications. So, you don't have to create a new username new username , create a new profile, or come up with a new password every time. You bring your own account to the app.
Well, this is already happening thanks to "Sign-in with Ethereum". "Sign-in with Ethereum" is EIP-4361. This is an authentication standard for Ethereum accounts that pairs nicely with ENS, so your Ethereum account can be your online account, and ENS can be your username and profile. This is supported in wallets like MetaMask and many others across the ecosystem. Another project I participated in is called the Ethereum Protocol (more precisely, the Lens Protocol or a similar social graph).
So, you know, " graph). So, you know, " Sign-in with Ethereum" allows you to sign in anywhere with your Ethereum account. ENS is your crypto username and profile. Ethereum photo protocol profile. Ethereum photo protocol is your on-chain is your on-chain social graph protocol for Ethereum accounts.
You can follow other Ethereum accounts on the network and, again the network and, again , use this in various applications. This works online. It is open to everyone, has tens of thousands of users, and is a great complement to ENS and "Sign-in with Ethereum." Speaking of the Ethereum identification stack, there are many other things I could talk about. You may have already heard of some of them .
Ethereum Attestation Service, XMTP, Ethereum Common Protocol and many others. I am not trying to be exhaustive in this presentation. But, you know, there are a lot of parts here that could be talked about. Another project my team created is the Ethereum Identity Kit, a React component library that makes it much easier to integrate ENS, "Sign-in with Ethereum", and other tools into your application. It is available at eth-identity-kit.
com. So, what is Ethereum identification? Here's what I think after working on this for about 10 years. Ethereum identification Ethereum identification is not a single application. Instead, it is a collection of information and connections stored in various decentralized protocols and open standards open standards , which I call the Ethereum identity stack.
The Ethereum identity stack itself is decentralized, not vertically integrated. And I think that's good. In other words, we have broken down the elements of identification into the smallest viable parts, and individual teams solve them individually using decentralized protocols and open standards open standards . This means that each part can exist separately on its own merits, rather than as an all-or- nothing proposition. For example, if you like ENS and fully support it, but don't like the Ethereum login standard EIP-4361 Ethereum login standard EIP-4361 , you can create your own authentication standard that won't affect ENS, or vice versa.
So, this means that at means that at any point, people can improve or replace part of the stack without abandoning the entire stack. This makes the Ethereum identification stack much more robust and, in my opinion, significantly better in the long run. That's what I want to emphasize in conclusion. To get to where we are now with ENS, with Ethereum login and other elements, you know? It was a long road, very difficult to overcome.
It's easy to take such things for granted. As I said about ENS, there have been many attempts to create naming systems, usernames, and all that , most of which have failed. ENS has achieved what we have through luck, the right people, and circumstances at the right time . And he had, you know, quite a bit of success. And it must continue to grow.
But even getting to this stage getting to this stage is truly a kind of miracle. And we shouldn't take it for granted. Same with logging in via Ethereum. It is very difficult to coordinate the many different people, wallets, and applications in the industry to use the same standard. We are not 100% done yet We are not 100% done yet , but we have made great progress and there is still a lot of work ahead.
But thanks to all this hard work over the last 10 years, we finally have these key parts of the stack. This concludes my presentation . If you have any questions, I am available to discuss them after this presentation. Thank you very much.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.