EthCC 2: Ben Livshits

good to go okay so it's going to be here thanks so much for having us so I'm here to tell you more about the problem of progress we've had a brief in the last several months and well we've been really busy so we now have close to hundred people 90 something employees we are shipping on four platforms Mac Windows iOS and Android and that alone can keep you busy you know blockchain aside as well so interesting things have been happening we have a few exciting updates coming down the pipe in the next couple of months as well related to brave ads I'll mention some of that also but I'm here to give you a little bit of perspective over what we've accomplished what we have accomplished over the last I don't know half a year to maybe 12 months or so so in many ways we are a bit of an outlier here as well because if you sort of look at the codebase well I mean brave is a sort of a traditional product right it's a user facing product it's in the category in the same category as other web browsers like Firefox and Chrome and edge so in many ways we are sort of there and from the standpoint of most kind of non cryptid users this is our competition and the other thing to point out is that well the cryptid versus non crypto breakdown with in brief is fairly different as well so crypto is a small portion of what happens within the browser of course is there as well we have a token for a bat for the basic retention token I'm sorry proof a reward for the basic retention talk in the browser but ultimately a lot of development that we do has to do with making the end product appealing and useful to users whether they want to use the wallet or not and this is a lot of kind of our focus and that determines our mindset as well so but to just give you again more perspective if you're curious about the progress of brave the project and the browser as well as what's been happening with the basic attention token a year after the crowd sail off to the ico we put together this timeline so you can go to this website and check it out and basically this is called starts back in 2017 we raised a fair bit of money in the brief period of time and that was the genesis of a lot of what happened after that and so just to give you more background on what this is about if you haven't seen this before it's a basic attention token this is what I call the Bermuda Triangle of advertising so you have users you have publishers and you have advertisers all around the same sort of triangle and the goal here is to bring some of these principles of transparency decentralization efficiency preventing fraud and so on and so forth and I'll highlight some of these things as we go through this but there is a real focus here on like real-world deliverables as well so if you go and look at the brave blog you'll see some of the things that I'm highlighting here on this slide and a lot of this is going to be things like partnerships partnerships with other companies or bodies some of them are in the advertising space as well as kind of other other themes other areas as well some of these are technical deliverables I don't know we're improving the quality of blogging or quite recently we had a blog post on there power savings battery savings in brave which tend to be quite significant on the order of 30 sometimes 50 percent depending of course on the website and the workload and we tend to basically be very public about it and our goal is to be sort of regular with these updates as well so in a given week you might see two or three of these news items coming out on the blog also and so some of these other things would be you know partnerships like this thing with coinbase earn and so on and so forth so we've been making progress on both the technical front as well as the business front and there is quite a lot more so if you interested in finding out more about the project go and check it out you'll find things depend think you know almost independently of your point of view there are things here that will appeal to privacy advocates as well as people who are kind of heavily into crypto and so on and so forth so I wanted to talk about several things I'll tell you a little bit about the browser and the sort of genesis of that and why we wanted to do a different browser and some of the problems we are trying to solve on the web today I'll tell you a little bit about the token and I'll give you some of the I don't know a preview of coming attractions that's all thing so our end goal here is to improve the interaction between the end user and the web and the web is changing and people are sometimes a little bit slow to realize that and so I'll highlight some of the problems that we are trying to solve here so we want to improve the privacy stance we want to improve the privacy of the end-user and we want the browser to help with that we want to reform the way that digital advertising is done online there are lots of problems that have to do with Eid fraud with having a lot of middlemen in the ecosystem creating a lot of sort of obscurity leading to a lot of the fraud that I mentioned but also extracting a lot of the value that doesn't reach for example the publishers and we also want to compensate users and we want to compensate users for their attention specifically and we do so with the help of the talking we have basic attention don't you sorry but just you kind of sorry about that what is going on here okay okay so just just to be on the same page here so let me just kind of formulate some of the basic problems we're trying to address here so the web as it is today is written with all sorts of you know privacy violating technology so this is sometimes called ed tech and has to do with tracking the end users you go to a page like this this is the Economist the popular news magazine and use an extension some kind to tell you what's going on behind the scenes you might be surprised to find out that there are dozens upon dozens of advertisers and trackers that are operating behind the scene they have nothing to do with the site itself have nothing to do with the contents of the site and these are the kind of entities you never invited to participate in your interactions between you and the first part your site that you are going to so these are third parties that are really quite dominant on the web as of today things are getting somewhat more cleaner in Europe at least since GDP are too cold but certainly in the US and other parts of the world things are probably just as messy as they were a year ago and users are paying quite a high price for this so some of the estimates show that a typical web site might be slower by as many as five seconds the tons of tons of these trackers so there are some of the websites like Team Z for example where the number of trackers present on the website is over a hundred for instance this can be quite expensive if you're paying for your network capacity if you don't have an unlimited plan or if you're traveling and roaming and this is one of the main vectors for ransomware and malware according to some of the reports at least for 2017 and so this is a reflection of the year and user response so in the past ten years we've seen a drastic increase in the number of percentage of people using ad blockers so let's do a show of hands how many of you have used some sort of an ad blocker pretty much all of you like a couple of kinds then go up but of course you're a technical audience so this is not quite representative but this picture alone shows you that this has been an ongoing trend the past decade and this is true of both desktop browsers and of course mobile browsers as well so many ways to brave you're just responding to that trend giving users what they want to get in the first place and as a result of this brave is also faster for regular browsing than most other browsers by as much as 30 to 40 percent that's quite significant so here's another problem that's a reflection of the changing landscape out there on the web which is these days you must have seen something like this right so paywalls we're not nearly as common about five six years ago but now they seem to be everywhere so at least for me just about any high quality news site I want to read has some sort of a paywall sometimes it's going to be soft paywalls so they let you use five articles read five articles first and then after that they'll ask you sometimes they have a limit within a month you can only read ten but ultimately the world is no longer free and that's kind of a problem kind of a problem because well I mean ultimately we're not really successfully creating an alternative monetization content monetization ecosystem because the number of people who actually have subscriptions to sites like this is really quite small I mean we can do another show of hands like how many of you subscribe to more than five sites or paywall sites like this more than five nobody five and more please you sir okay okay but three anymore three more one and more okay so for most people it's like one and two so I'm not okay so I should talk to you're flying because I'm curious what they are as well but like most people cannot just like you know manage that many subscriptions if they even if they can afford it financially they cannot keep track of the passwords and things like that so that's kind of a problem in reflection of the fact that the equation and the web is changing also the other thing to point out is that for advertisers the current landscape is no longer working if you look at click-through rates and this is is being shown over here on the right the abysmal alone and they're getting closer seemingly every passing month for most advertisers so there's small fractions of a single percentage point now the situation is quite a bit better if you look at the walled gardens such as Facebook and Twitter and a few others which is of course why these companies are making money and this determines their valuations and things of that sort so there are ways to do things differently just you know the way that's based on third-party tracking which is switches which which has been the model on the web for the past 15 years or so is really not working out anymore so there was a graph there was a chart that came out like last week I think from The Economist where they show the progression of their advertising revenue versus subscription revenue and lo and behold the advertising revenue and over the past two three years has dropped significantly where is their subscription revenue actually has remained steady or has gone up a little bit as well so the way that advertising sort of has been done is no longer working out for most participants and so this justifies our introduction of the basic attention token and what we're trying to do in the browser in terms of creating a better experience for the end user and this applies no matter I mean it doesn't really matter what the user wants to use a bad wallet within the browser what do they want to engage your crypto what do they want to use brave delivered ads they still get a better experience which comes from the fact that the browser is faster more nimble more responsive consumes less memory consumes less power if you're interested in those kind of characteristics I can tell you more about that offline as well yeah and this is the kind of thing that we basically prevents on the Left you have what is a team z.com with ranking con and then after brave enabled which shields up you basically have a much more reduced picture which is shown over here on the right and this is why some the savings in terms of performance are there so right so I talked about that so the goal is to create an ecosystem around bad by creating a different way to deliver advertising so we control how that's done this is done independently and differently from the way it has been done for the past 15 years or so using exchanges using options all of that at Tec machinery this is done within the browser by creating client-side privacy-preserving models of users interests that allow us to do precise much more accurate matching on the client while not violating the privacy of the end-user there are tons of advantages to that too well just about everybody involved right so essentially the user gets rewarded for this if they choose to opt into the ad ecosystem they're rewarded director will bad advertisers get better quality of matching and reduced kind of ad fraud situation as well and publishers also benefit from that and so because they can opt in to this also and receive that so I have some visualizations here but frankly if you are interested in what's going on I think you're better off downloading the dev branch of the browser and playing with some of this stuff as well just by yourself because this is where some of the exciting things are happening so we now have an initial version of brave ads that's now running in the dev version of the browser so if you were to download that you'll see that every once in a while there'll be an ad that pops up so typically you'd get maybe three sometimes four ads a day the goal here is not to barrage you with these things and they come up as an operating system modification we're not replacing ads that were taken out of the page they're not embedded in the page they're just a separate thing altogether and as time goes by the next arrow we you'll see other things like confirmation that results in payments that go into your brief ward within the browser there as well and a little bit about the phases of the rollout and this comes from the white paper so the first phase is so we're roughly at the end of the second phase over here so this is you know essentially this new advertising model that's delivered within the browser and our hope is to have that in operation sometime mid year and of course this involves you know moving a lot of somewhat disconnected pieces here so right so we have quite a lot of demand from advertisers but of course they're you know commercial entities and they're fairly conservative as well so when it comes to crypto they're not nearly as excited about crypto as most of you for example right so it takes a lot to you know a lot of effort in many cases to work with them and every time you cross the crypto to real world to fiat divided you know there is some activation energy that needs to be mastered to work things out as well so the last stage is integration with websites and this is something that will probably do well I don't know I don't have a fixed kind of timeline on that part for you but for complex web sites we are hoping to support more interesting scenarios in terms of providing micropayments on sites themselves so imagine the site like a social networking site like Twitter for example where every time you like a post or you retweet somebody's post or something of that sort there is a small micro payment that gets transmitted to the author of that that's the typical use case for the last stage so in the browser we have a system of anonymous contribution that's been around for a while and you know every I don't know monster DUI changes slightly so the DUI today is slightly different from what what I'm showing on the slides but again these are thing to I mean you can try this for yourself you'll see what this looks like for you oh yeah so there's a focus here on protecting the privacy of the end-users so we use this system called analyze for anonymous contributions and here's a little bit more by way of details in terms of kind of how the distribution of funds happens in the case I mean there are essentially two ad models embedded into this so in the case of the first model the user gets seventy percent share of the revenue really which is quite significant right so instead of basically their time and attention being taken away from them they're getting something from this system in return and so of course the hope is that this by itself will be enough to grow the user base and to create enough users so excited about using the platform because you know they can turn around and use the bad that they get out of this for something else as well and it comes to using this well the scenarios that we are working on our premium content such as video consumption or access to sites that might use a paywall right so imagine a page you go model where suppose you I don't know you go to work in the morning and then during the day you get I don't know three or four ad thrown at you and you click on two of them because they appeal to you and so you get say four baths in your wallet at the end of the day and then you go home and spend three of those four baths on watching a movie through a video site of some kind and that way you basically can play the crypto game if you will without having to I don't know go and figure out how to exchange how to get Bitcoin in the first place and then exchange Bitcoin for that and dealing with with all of those sort of details which is probably fine for you know crawl for the crowd sitting in this room but for a regular layperson this is quite a lot of trouble so this is a way to create a pace you grow model which basically does not depend on too many people figuring out how to enter the system essentially it comes batteries included a few well and this is about the second kind of the publisher at the deal there is a little different so in this case if these are as integrated with the publisher then the publisher gets the lion's share of the revenue but brave and the user gets something as well and so as I mentioned you know you'll see various parts of the ad sub system coming out in the next couple of months I mean we have something already operation on the browser as it ships today at least on the desktop but we've been trialing various things related with that sense what is it June mid-june or something like that 2018 improving the quality of our machine link models and so on and so forth and that process continues and will continue in the future as well so if you're interested in some of the machine learning work we've been doing here I'm happy to talk to you offline so there's a lot of interesting work happening in the space of privacy preserving machine learning and some of these things are practical enough to deploy as well not too many things but a few things in fact are so this is one of our major focus areas as well but I'm happy to talk about that offline lots of possibilities let me kind of skip that I don't think that's as important for this graph so here's something I wanted to highlight which is in terms of our growth some of the key numbers are shown here and actually some of these are lower bounds I think by now some of these are higher as well so as far as the number of monthly active users we are at about 5.8 million I believe I don't think about quite at 6 million we're hoping to well we'll see what happens by the end of the year they're hoping to experience quite a bit of growth because of the add ecosystem being deployed I think the breakdown is slightly different on mobile versus desktop we're a little bit more balanced for a while we were really really hype heavy on mobile but not as much in the desktop I think this situation will get three balanced as we progress some some numbers in terms of the bad boy let's hear something interesting so the number of verified publishers so publishers that is to say websites generally speaking that have gone through this brave verification process and have gone through a kyc process associated with that is something like 23,000 the number of YouTube channels that have gone through our verification process is something like 15,000 in addition to that which is what I'm a guest not showing in this slide there is also some number of twitch channels right so twitch is another popular sort of site for creators slightly different content slightly different monetization model compared to YouTube but this kind of highlights the need for different models for continent is Asian here as well so what happens of course on YouTube is that in recent months and years it's become quite a lot more difficult for YouTube channel creators and maintain yrs to earn money to keep themselves afloat quite frankly right and so as a result they're looking for other ways to earn and this is why the model 2 we're providing can brave it's quite appealing to many of the channel creators so within think about I don't know about 10 days or so after we announced support for YouTube channels and team to youtube channel sweet and brave we got something like 10,000 of these people coming coming on board so this is really quite significant and highlights all of these themes of the monetization around content creation that I've been sort of alluding to before and of course also there are traditional partnerships with sort of major media groups like the doubt Jon media's group Media Group partnership and several others as well so I wanted to leave you with this kind of I don't know maybe mixed message especially for this kind of conference which is building a product that combines crypto and a lot of traditional stuff of your world right being in traditional product category that's no not always not always particularly easy specifically right I already alluded to the some of the challenges that come up if you try to you know cross the Fiat to creep to divide right if you some of them are related you kyc but some of them are related to sort of other factors and there are some fairly significant problems that might come up there but some perhaps more of those challenges of course apply to us as well so the transparent nature of most you know of public blockchains doesn't really mesh particularly well with the data privacy stance that we take it brave right so you wouldn't be able to take say transaction confirmations even if you're able to afford them from the standpoint of fees and scalability generally speaking because it's so easy to do anonymize users based on their behavior we cannot really afford to put too much user-generated data on on a blockchain so that's kind of a problem we need to figure out what to derive from that data that actually might be safe to put in a blockchain full decentralization from the get-go is hard and so I approach there often times as we start with a system that's working and then decentralize it over time and I think this is actually not such a terrible thing generally speaking working is better than you know and getting real users and understanding what their problems are I mean there's a lot of merit there this third problem here I mean people here I'm sure you wise that right so getting curricular person an average browser user to understand the nuts and bolt of crypt well that's really pretty hard and the question is how do you design a product that hides a lot of that complexity and only exposes what is absolutely necessary and creates UI flows around that that are accessible to end-users well that's definitely something you really need to do if you want your product to grow and have lots of millions and millions of people using it and yes I mean integrating real-world business where the world of crypto is not such an easy thing right so we talk to publishers and in the doctor advertisers and well most of these are fairly conservatively sounding traditional businesses right some of these publishers have been in business for decades right especially the bigger ones some of the some of the advertisers have been around for over ten years as well so to dam crypt is kind of interesting but in many ways a gimmick they don't always trust it they need to I mean they worry about things like volatility perhaps more so than many of you do in this room and we have to address their challenges because ultimately if you want to upgrade cross operate with these real world entities we have to come up with some sort of a solution so for example just to throw out one problem kind of at you I mean how do you do pricing right so you want to price something you want to I don't know by a thousand ad impressions or something like that I mean what pricing should pricing here be different from what it is in London to what it is in New York and you know a whole bunch of other places how do you even solve that problem so in some cases there are no particularly obvious solutions through challenges like that so you have to work pretty hard to figure out a way to address these kinds of challenges in a way that appeals to the participants which are in our case end users publishers and advertisers so I think this is all the slides I have so thank you for your attention I'm happy to take whatever questions you have [Applause] thank you for the dog so you explain how the privacy is going to be preserved with client-side machine Moyles machine learning models but what happens if I am if the machine learning model determines that some ad is to be shown to me and then the content for this ad has to be downloaded it doesn't that fact that this ad is shown to me reveal some information about me to the public yeah so that would be a slight channel we don't do things that way so we have a catalogue that applies to specific region so for example there might be an ad catalog for the country of France that would be downloaded to your machine and updated say daily and then the matching could be done entirely locally doesn't solve the problem of accounting so that there is a solution to that as well which we use minded tokens for so there's a way to basically count the number of impressions that people have engaged with without revealing who it was that was engaging with these ads but we cannot download things on demand we cannot do it for reasons of privacy but also performance actually because then it's gonna be a lot more difficult to scale this up blind the tokens so you read about privacy paths and tack am i I can we can take this offline so there's there is a solution there so we used analyzed for a while we are so that's large-scale know in most surveys so that has some advantages we are moving to slightly different system but it's roughly the same set of principles I may have missed this in the beginning but is there a way of in effect users selling their own data on their own browsing habits from within or without brow brave there is no way to do that and I think there are disadvantages to allowing people to do that I can name at least several I think people will be I mean they'll be all sorts of tricky behaviors where if this functionality is exposed and there will be malicious players will try to trick users into doing that or say blackmail them into doing that I think there are also supply I mean on top of that most people don't know how to value that data and arguably very few people know how to do it properly right so no they're using cereal we don't necessarily want to expose that as a piece of functionality so the data remains local we don't expand so that we don't create we don't provide solutions for you - I don't know send it somewhere else if there is another one can I ask a follow-up which is that is it collected in the first place is it what is it collected that information rich information as in my own so I type with something into the search you you know or the search bar or the I changed my url is that information collected somewhere so the data for machine learning models is kept locally on the device right so within the browser we don't the browser doesn't share it with anybody and it's enough to build models and the model quality is often times higher than what you get because the browser sees everything and it can provide a very rich interpretation of that interaction between you and the site's you interact with so the quality of information can be really high Thanks [Applause]