Inco Workshop - ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024

so today I'll be talking about Ino uh what we're building is what we call the universal confidential Computing Network so today all the L1 l2s have one thing in common is that they're complete transparent databases uh we do believe that there needs to be a minimum confidentiality in order to drive Mass adoption so if you think about using crypto as your bank account today for payroll or just you know your savings account everything is transparent and this is quite inconvenient because this is not how web2 works right what if you need to be able to you know um hide your wealth this is something that you just cannot do to the in crypto and then institutions Enterprises are still having a hard time entering the space they have Trade Secrets they have essentially um information that they have to keep confidential and then lastly they're just a lot of use cases that wouldn't make sense uh without any confidentiality so you can think of the car games uh PRI V blood auction so we utilize a cryptography called FH uh that stands for fully homomorphic encryption by show hands how many people have heard of this term before okay great um so for folks who are non-technical the idea is that you can encrypt data but also compute on top of it without having to decrypts so when you apply FH to the evbm what this really means is that you get to have encrypted data types but also encrypted operations such as additions multiplications divisions and we recently released a uh research paper with with uh with circle on this topic of confidential erc20 framework and so the finding here really is on three points one is on the flexibility of the decryption rules the second one is on composability which I'll mention a little bit more talk a little bit more uh after and then lastly it's around this idea of programmable transfer rules so the idea of composability here is with this basic primitive a confidential erc20 you are essentially able to build other things on top so imagine being able to Leverage The confidential amount and then cast the priv vote or use it for private payments or use it for lending we are actually utilizing a couple different cryptography to achieve this so you know inco really is a combination of MPC ZK and FHA uh these three cryptography are utilized for very different purposes so NPC here is usually only used for decryption and so essentially there is a private key and public key pair uh that is essentially encrypting this entire system uh but this private key never exists because what's happening is this NPC network uh generates this key through distribut key generation and so you can think of this having as its own network it's essentially if you need to decrypt something every single node needs to do partial decryptions and then to recreate the plain text right um and then on the compute side we're utilizing FH which allows you to do state transitions over encrypted data without having to to decrypts and then lastly the ZK part is to make sure that every Seer text is not mal formed and then that the user also knows what the plane text is because else someone can just copy paste your Seer text deploy somewhere else and then you know decrypt it right um so with this we actually believe this is next Frontier uh it's the next Frontier because you are now able to enable new use cases that weren't possible before uh so you you think about gaming uh there just a lot of new types of games that you could be uh enabling with confidential computes uh Asset Management defy and also infra so just a couple examples right so uh in terms of confidential erc20 this is probably the most basic example um just to explain what you can do here uh today your balance is completely transparent uh it's just a mapping of address to a PL Tex integer what if you want a high your balance right so this is where having a encrypted data type like EU allows you to hide your balance so here you know um I can directly encrypt uh the the amount of money that I have and when Bob sends money to Alice what you're sending essentially is a inced amount right so this you can see here there the E64 uh what's interesting about this is you know the flow of fonts is is actually visible it's only the amount that's being hidden uh so it's very similar to venol or revolute that experience that you know some folks might be familiar with in web 2 uh and how does this work right how so how are you able to transfer a confidential amounts without actually knowing you know what it is um so this is where you can actually write um conditionals over encrypted data without actually uh using like a typical eile statement so you know the first line of code here you're checking if the amount you're transferring is less the than the user balance and so you do this over FH where by doing tf. Le standing for less than or equal uh you get an encrypted Boolean that basically could be true or false and this is what you get is uh you know this variable can transfer that you pass it into this uh conditional multiplexer so what this is really is uh you can think of a alternative to to like eile statements if the condition is true you return the encrypted amount if it's false you will return the encrypted zero but from the outside perspective transfer value is going to be encrypted right so uh now what you do is you add this transfer value to uh the recipient uh total amounts and then you also subtract it from the uh the sender so if the value is zero essentially nothing happens you just end up transferring zero uh if the value is uh correct then you end up transferring the actual amounts uh so another big use case here is also in gaming if you think about today uh there's no fully on poker game the reason why you can do this game is because poker is a bluffing game without confidentiality this game would basically make no sense and so with f you can actually generate a stream of Randomness uh over you know inced bits and so this is where you can call a simple function generates uh additional uh basically integers are hidden by default right so this is something that chain link would not be able to provide because you know your typical VF is PL Tex but here you need to have a confidential uh integer here uh we actually built this game uh roughly a year ago in New York uh actually at e Global as well and uh you know this is a fully onchain Mafia game so you know another name for this game is werewolf uh the idea of this game is that you can have a secret killer detective doctor and um uh and villager and and it's a bluffing game basically if you're the Secret Killer you have to pretend that you're not the killer throughout the entire game and try to last as long as possible and the role of the other players are to basically figure out who who this you know impos imposter is right um so here again because you can generate the hidden roles uh fully on chain using the randomness you can also hide the roles this becomes super easy to build and also this is a multiplayer game so you know using FH and you know it becomes a lot easier because you can use the blocking layer as the coordination layer if you're to try to build this game using something that's more op based maybe like ZK would become a lot more complicated because then you have to build op tooling uh you have to think about State coordination across multiple players but here because everything happens on chain we build this you know in less than 30 hours so yeah if you think about games today in in crypto they could actually be a lot more fun uh than they are today and and this is because you think about all the game mechanics that in web 2 that actually make a game fun require some kind of hidden information right so either I have to hide the player stats the amount of gold that I have and so here you can imagine a new uh game mechanic where you know the the player stats are actually hidden and so if you tri trigger some kind of battle mechanism you can multiply the player stats by some kind of a Randomness and settle the battle right so uh this is where you know for us we do think uh gaming is a very you know interesting uh vertical here that we can definitely expand and and just have people build novel Primitives and and game mechanics uh identity is another one um the reason why it's also very impactful is because today all the dids are completely static you KC with someone like binance uh that will basically send you a so bound token that says okay you're a very te you're in Europe you have a good credit score uh however this is all public right what if you don't want all this information to be public so what you can do with FH is what we call Dynamic did which you know the idea is I can actually encrypt your credit score and store it directly on chain and selectively reveal information um so the reason why you can do that is because with FH you can also do comparisons right so you can do a f. greater than so I just want to know that I have a credit score over 700 and nothing else right and this credit score can change over time times right so it makes sense to have a identity layer that gets updated and where people can query different insights and this Insight could change over time um so other examples could be your geographic location um your age and this is very similar to you know how web to works right you use your Google Au to connect to different applications you say I want you to access my contacts but not my Google Drive or my calendar right and this is kind of like um missing user experience that we have in web 3 which which everything is public but what if you know for a casino dab I just wanted to know I'm over 18 all these other information should remain private defi is very interesting because uh in the case of a private amm if the amount you're trying to swap is hidden essentially nobody can f on you right because they don't know you know necessarily what the slipage will be and you know what the AR Arbitrage opportunity could be right uh I mean they could try it but they're taking a lot Risk by trying to Cent attack you so you know you do get me protection by default uh and I would also say like you know I would urge people to think about other novel defi mechanisms so let's say you know confidential lending where you know today there are attacks where if I know you can be liquidated by manipul manipulating the price you know uh they I can actually do it right but what if you hide the liquidation threshold uh then you know it makes it a lot harder for a a hacker or attacker to to basically try to gamify the system and so this is actually a problem that actually happened in the past where you know people will manipulate the price Oracle to get whs to get liquidated right so you know there could be more interesting things you could do here around private defi uh private voting is a very good example of how you know a share private state is useful here when people cast votes they directly interact with this smart contract layer there is composability there is the ability for you to directly uh you know cast the votes and do do the tally directly on chain and and uh again if you were to do this you know using something like ZK that's happens offchain then it becomes a lot more complex according into the states and because ZK cannot do state transition over private data there could also be information leakage so we are compatible with existing ethereum tooling if you are a Sol developer you can get started within 20 minutes uh so you can use hardhead remix metamask and uh I would say you know for anyone who has experience building solidity all you really have to learn are the new syntaxes and also this slight different way to write conditionals which is you know select and uh we support a pretty wide range of operations comparisons uh so you can do divisions you can do right shift life shift uh bitwise operations and uh yeah it really means that you can build a lot all things uh Beyond just you know simple payments if you want to build defi gaming it's really up to you to unleash your creativity and then create Noel Primitives and also experiences with the end user just from a high level the way this works is you know there is a JavaScript library where you encrypt data or the inputs and so the way data is encrypted is called CeX so you have data padding some data Some Noise padding and some noise that's sort of the structure of the cyhex so you generate that on the content and you pass this on chain um as a as a as a input pram and then from there you can you know cast this into different types like EU 8 16 32 64 included address or included bullan um and so yeah we have a 10K uh Bounty uh there are three tracks one is open in Innovation so here we're very flexible if you can come up with Noel Primitives around you know defy identity governance uh this is kind of what we're trying to push people to you know explore and then uh it is pretty Green Field opportunity because you know these perimeters don't exist over FH and so you know there is an opportunity for you to be the first one here uh second is around confidential defi so like I said uh amm uh lending if you want to try to experiment with flash loans dark Poes um the idea of private defi I would say is still very much underexplored so so there could be a lot of opportunities here lastly gaming so yeah there could be a lot more games that you can build now some examples of previous games include fully onchain risk so that's like the the the bluffing game where it's more strategic than bluffing so essentially you have armies across a map and you can only see your enemies if you're nearby a certain border right or for example the mafia game that you know I explained earlier that could also be uh one of the novel type of games uh people have built let's see uh hangman um you know simple guessing game so yeah there's just many new games that you could be building and uh and yeah lastly you are uh you do have a chance to be part of our Builders Advocate Program um we'll have a booth uh somewhere somewhere in the venue and then yeah definitely come talk to us uh we're happy to provide you feedback on your idea and then our team members are also here to help you debug if you have any problems and so you can find our documentation here uh we have a couple demos on this arcade page and um we also have a Discord uh channel here and we do have a hackathon channel so if you need any you know supports uh from on the technal side definitely know ping us um and yeah that concludes the workshop yeah uh any questions okay great thank you