Welcome and Opening Ceremony for ETHGlobal New Delhi 2025 I Kartik Talwar and Vitalik Buterin

[Music] Good evening everybody. My name is Cartek. I'm one of the co-founders of ETH Global. I want to welcome all of you to ETH Global New Delhi. This is not a conference.

You are here at an ETH global hackathon and our goal is to help onboard thousands of developers into the web3 ecosystem. The next 36 hours are set up to be for hacking. What makes these events different is our focus is on builders. Anybody in this room is here to build something and not just talk to people. These events and these entire weekends are structured for you to learn, grow, get help and help others and become better builders in this space.

And the most important thing is that we believe showing is way more important than telling. That means on Sunday you have to show what you built instead of just talk about it. We started eight years ago in a city called Waterlue where we did one event just to see what the world of Ethereum looks like. that turned into more than just one thing and became ETH global. In 2018, we did three big events in different parts of the world.

We started continuing this thing every year. In the year after 2019, we added two more continents to that list. 2020 was an interesting year. We started playing with some async events went all in in 2021. We're doing so many events that got tens of thousands of you in just a single year.

And I still got to meet people here in Delhi who joined us for the very first time in 2021 on Zoom. 2022 we came back started doing more inerson events added more continents more countries went back to some of the favorite cities we've done our events in we started back in 2023. Last year we finally did our sixth continent by checking of Australia and it's been incredible to see the last eight years. We've done more than 220 events, brought in more than 150,000 builders, done more than 2,700 educational videos for anybody to learn how to build something on any protocol you can think of. Collectively, these 150,000 people have submitted 15,000 plus projects.

We've given more than $15 million in prizes and the companies that have come out of this have raised collectively over 500 million and that's just the ones we can count. Come 2025, we started the year off with Taipei, went back to Prague and Ken and New York. And now for our fifth event of the year, we're back or in India by doing a new city in Delhi. There's over 1,900 people in the building. 1,600 of you are hackers.

30% of them are new to web 3, which means they're existing web 2 engineers starting their careers in web 3 for the first time. They're here from 181 different cities, 25 countries, four continents. This is where everybody came from. And it's amazing to see representation from all parts of the world. And the most obvious thing that I'm excited about is meeting people from all across India.

And you guys are here from basically every single state. So can't wait to meet all of you. And not only just the hackers, we also have 114 partner reps who are here to help you accomplish your goals for this weekend. 37 technical mentors who are here 247 to help you with any problems in in our mentor station and we're doing 21 workshops all of that that have happened available for you to watch on demand and because this is not a conference it's going to be just one talk today from Vitalik in 20 minutes. Not only that, there's also a lot of prizes we're going to give away.

So over $200,000 in prizes thanks to these 21 incredible partners. So please join me in giving a massive round of applause to our amazing sponsors starting with 1 in ASA, Citria, ENS, Ethereum Foundation, Falcoin, Flow, Hyera, PayPal USD, Polygon Pit, Rootstock, Self, the Graph, Uniswap Foundation, World ZeroG, Fluence, Integra, Acadea, and Walrus. They're all here in the building. You can talk to them, learn more about what they're up to, use their APIs and SDKs to simplify a lot of your projects and uh they'll be giving you a lot of prizes on Sunday. Now, before we go into the talk and our keynote, I want to cover some important things you need to know for Sunday.

We're going to cover how the rules of these events are set up, how security works in this building, how internet should be handled, all the schedule related things you need to worry about, how the venue is set up, and key things for you to know. And the most important part on how judging will happen on Sunday. Hacking officially begins now. So you can start working on your project and you have until 9:00 a.m.

on Sunday to finish your project submission. You can work on your project with up to five members. So you can have anywhere from 1, two, three, four, five people and you can contribute together. We recommend that you work on people with like on a project with a team because it makes things easy for all of you and you get to accomplish a lot more. And you have the next 36 and a half or so hours or almost 37 actually.

You have 37 hours to hack. The rule for building a project is that everything you're doing must be done from scratch. You cannot add a feature to a pre-existing project. You cannot clone something and just deploy something to another chain and call that a submission. It has to be fully done from scratch so that it's fair for everybody.

And we do check for these things in a more automated way. and you'll see notifications on our dashboard that you've been flagged and you will be automatically disqualified at submission if our systems determine that things were not done correctly. It doesn't mean that you cannot fork an existing code. It does not mean you can't use the boiler plates from our prizes page where we've made a lot of things simple for you. It just means that you cannot work on something that has existed already by you.

And if your team members are not listed on your team and they are not checked in, any prizes you win will not be given out to them. It'll only be given to people registered on the dashboard at the time of submission. So, please make sure your team members are checked in and listed on your team right now. All the other stuff is designed for people from all different skills to be here. You can learn about how to use different protocols.

Whether you're a beginner or if you've been in this space for five years, there's something for you to to learn and learn new things from how different protocols are set up. And all that information is on your info center again on your dashboard. And everything that we're doing, including what I'm saying now, is being livereamed. So you can watch this on demand by heading over to our YouTube channel on YouTube.com/global.

Now let's talk about the most important thing, security. Your wristband must be with you at all times. This is your entry point and each wristband is for that person, which means we know who that person is and who that wristband belongs to. Don't take these off. If you lose your wristband, we're going to charge you $100 to replace it because this is the only security point, especially when the venue is open 24/7.

These are waterproof, so you can wash your hands, take a shower, all that is fine. Make sure you don't lose them and make sure you don't take them off. The rule is simple. If you don't have wristbands, especially after midnight, you will not be allowed. Doesn't matter if your stuff is here.

Doesn't matter who you know, doesn't matter if your team is in there. No wristband, no entry. And do not leave your stuff unattended. Again, this building is open 247. We want to make sure that you are responsible for your stuff.

And don't make a mess. This is something that we're using for someone else's building and we want to make sure that we leave it the way we found it which is nice and clean. Now the important part which is the internet. 2,000 of you are going to be connecting a lot of devices and we have a very simple rule. Do not use hotspots.

There are custom internet connections were set up. their custom Wi-Fi 6 routers we're setting up so that nobody has interruptions for their project submissions or just generally for this entire weekend and the second you turn on a hotspot you end up interrupting the entire frequency band and that slows down the things for the next person sitting 5 meters from you and then they start complaining and they turn their hotspot on and it just becomes this crazy thing where everybody gets low speed because now you're competing with our Wi-Fi network and that's going to be a problem. We have devices to scan people in the room to see who has a hotspot and we will be going around it. And this is a big enough of a thing that if you are found with a hotspot and you do not turn it off, we will st slash your stake. Uh I am very serious about this and we can tell down to 2 feet where the hotspot is coming from and that's what the next 36 hours are going to be from us.

If the internet is not working for you, just tell us where you're sitting. will send one of our engineers to your spot and just test it out and fix it for you. And a simple rule is if you moved places, you just need to turn your Wi-Fi on and off because it'll connect to the closest access point and that's why it slows down because if you moved, it'll still try to connect to the old place. So, that's the only important thing to take away. You can shut your brains off now if you want, but do not turn on hotspots.

Now, let's talk about the schedule. A lot of things going on until Sunday. Everything that we're doing is on the website. That is a source of truth. If something is behind schedule, if something changes, we will update the website first, then we'll announce it on Discord and then we'll come here on stage and announce it in the building.

So, anything you see on the website is the best version of that information. Everything else for real-time communication will be on Discord. That's where we do announcements. That's where we do support. That's where you get to talk to all of our partners, all of our mentors, the ETH global team.

Everybody has their own channel and you can just find the right person in any of those channels and not have to worry about finding where they are in the building. And don't forget that you are in person. There's 2,000 of you here. Just talk to each other. Chances are the person sitting next to you has likely faced that same problem before.

They can help you with your React app or your contract deployment or the backend app or figuring out what the right prompt should be for the app you're about to work on. About this venue, this is a massive place. You've already seen some of it. Workshops are on the other side. This is a stage.

All of you know where your hacking spots are. All of where our partners are. It's going to stay the same throughout the weekend with the exception of the very end where the food was. That's where judging is going to be on Sunday. So, all you have to remember where to go is all the way to the other end of the building and that's where judging happens.

Beyond that, there's a lot of small stations that are going to go in and out to help you enjoy this weekend, and we'll talk about some of that. And if you have some storage uh needs, the room to my left and your right is the storage area. It's an unmonitored room, so you can leave anything you want at your own risk. That's just a generic storage, but it's not going to be monitored and looked out for. So, keep in mind that if you put something there and uh you can't find it again, you may have to worry about how that happened.

and trace it properly. Now, a lot of food is going to be given out. We had dinner. There's going to be a midnight snack at midnight. Tomorrow, there's brunch, dinner, another midnight snack.

And on Sunday, there's going to be breakfast and lunch. So, you don't have to worry about being fed. You just have to worry about working on a project. That'll change this ecosystem. Today's midnight snack is a lot of items from this menu, a lot of things you can pick and choose from, a lot of snack foods.

So, those of you who are sticking around late night brainstorming a project, we'll make sure that you get to also enjoy some good food while you work on your code. And tomorrow, we're going to do something similar, but we're going to change up a few more items. And you can see all these things on the website as well. There's also going to be other smaller activations. So, we have chai stations.

There's yoga tomorrow at 1 p.m., 2 p.m., and 3 p.

m. Multiple sessions. There's going to be another session about Mandela. And we're also going to be doing a Mandi session also from 1 to 4. So you can try a bunch of things out, especially for hundreds of you that came from outside of India.

You get to experience some cool things. Uh if you haven't taken a photo, you get to take a digital photo. It also prints the photo so you have a memory of you and your team. And if you have not collected your swag bag, you can go back near the registration and collect your swag bag, which has a lot of cool things, such as a t-shirt, our amazing sticker sheet, a mini microphone that you get to now use, an amazing leather kit to put all your stuff, and a travel adapter to make things work in various countries so we can see you in the future. Now, I want to get into how to be successful for this weekend.

And one piece there is being on chain. We want to make sure that you get to see what's possible with our ecosystem and how we're actually progressing as a space. And a good way to experience that is making sure you don't have to worry about being a good developer and you also don't have to worry about seeing is this going somewhere because we also integrate these technologies ourselves to help show you that all these things are working. Starting with these NFC wristbands. These wristbands are NFC.

You've seen us scan these things. But the cool thing about this is that it's a special chip that is an Ethereum wallet. And each band has its own Ethereum address. You can send anything to it, whether it's NFTTS or ERC20s. You can receive things, you can sign things, and you just have to go to arcs.

org and go on their documentation and just use the JavaScript library to basically interact with any band. And this becomes a cool ID. And this works after this event ends, too. It's just it's yours to take home and you can do whatever you want with this chip. And we get to understand what's going on because anytime we look at these scans, we publish these things on chain.

And also, if a phone scans these chips, it goes to a website that lets you connect with the person you just scan. So, if you want to meet somebody, you want to get somebody's contact information, just scan the wristbands and you'll see a history of who you met. And they get to choose what they want to share with you. Whether it's your email, Telegram, or Discord, you get to have a whole history automatically. And that's cool because all these things are happening on chain with attestations.

The other thing is that we're set up for helping make sure you can do a lot of good test net development. So all of you are set up as hackers. All you have to do is go to eglobal.com/faucet and you can get test net tokens in 18 different chains including USDC. So you can test everything without being on mainet or paying high gas fees and you don't have to worry about it while you're working on anything this weekend.

Now let's talk about prizes. There's a lot of prizes being given away. $200,000 to be exact. And when that happens to know what you're qualified for and how to actually be set up for it, you have to keep this key thing in mind. You you have to remember that you're picking the right prizes on your submission page.

There's two ways to think about prizes. One is our partner prize, which means any partner we're working with using their SDKs lets you qualify for their prizes. And then there's a finalist prize, which means you get to do all of that, as well as be a recipient for our pack and win additional money in fame. And you get to choose which one you want to go forward with. When you are selecting for a prize, you're allowed to only select three partners.

It doesn't mean you can't use more than three APIs or SDKs or protocols. It just means you can only qualify for three. And you can use and integrate however many you want. But at the time of submission, you just have to pick which three you want to go for and our partners will get a notification and they'll pick the best project that qualifies for their prizes criteria. They get to make the final decision and some of these things will happen asynchronously which means that you don't have to go to them to present.

You just have to put in all the details and they will make sure that they get all the the right information and they'll ping you if they need any clarification. Now, if you pick the finalist track, then you get to be one of the top 10 projects from this hackathon. And that means you're one of the best teams out here. You're making the most interesting, whether it's technically interesting or the most usable and the most friendly thing to to bring out to the broader audience prize. And that's the project we're going to look at for being a finalist.

And this has no impact on being a partner. It's judged by a set different set of people. It doesn't matter if you use any prize from a partner or you use all of them, you can still qualify because that is going to be based entirely on the quality of your project. And when that happens, you'll come on stage on Sunday and you'll present what you built to everybody in this room. And why you want to be a finalist is because you get to win our onchain finalist pack for ETH Global New Delhi.

And that gives you access to ETH Global Plus for one full year, $1,000 for every member on that team. You get a $500 flight credit to the next event that we're doing and we'll fly you to hack again. You get an onchain proof for being one of the best hackers out there in our ecosystem which lets you access different services, protocols, and early launches from our partners. Uh we do a lot of events with different founders to help them share their thoughts that help you be more successful or take your project to the next place. And if you want to deploy your projects, we have so many credits whether it's on AWS to RPC to security audit discounts.

You get $15,000 plus of credits to launch and have thousands to millions more people use your project. And you just get that by being one of the best teams that build something super useful this weekend. And the rule to be a finalist is very simple. Just like hacking here, you have to start your project from scratch and you have to make sure that your audit your GitHub repository is very auditable. Which means you cannot have just three commits with a million lines each.

You cannot just have a fake account permit doing something or you have three people on your team and only one commit from one person exists. You have to show us that this is started from scratch and incrementally made better. And it has to be open source deployed onchain and live which means you cannot show a local host project because the judges need to be able to click on a URL on their own computer and try things out. And you have to physically be here on Sunday to show the project to our judges because if they can't see it, they will not pick you. And uh if you're sleeping or if you leave early then there's no way of knowing what you did for anybody else.

And the reason why you want to be a finalist in addition to all the friends is because we also have this new initiative called Spotlight. And we highlight some of our past finalists who have now gone from a hackathon to a company. And we have some of them here. They have four boots in the back. EVVM, MCP, Prime, Livestick.

These are some of the amazing projects that come out just in the last four months. and they're here to show off what they can do and how they've taken their project from a hackathon weekend to where they are now. So, you get to even talk to them and see their experience and uh get to be one of them for our future events. Now, all this leads to is judging and how judging will happen and how they will determine what prizes you are going to win. Submissions are due at 9:00 p.

m. Judging starts 30 minutes after. When judging starts, all these things are going to happen in parallel. Which means from 9:30 to 12:30, every project is going to get judged, whether it's on the partner only track or the finalist only track, which means that if you are selecting three prizes and you're also trying to be one of the top 10 teams, you will have four demos to do. You have to go to each of the desks for each of our partners and then one separate judging for being a finalist.

So, make sure that you time things well. It's going to be treated as a first come, first serve. So, if you join a line and you're at the front of the line, you have to be ready to present and they will look at the project as it comes. Some partners will just tell you that they're not doing live demos on their desk, which means you can still go there and show it to them just to tell them what you did, but that demo is not what's going to count. Uh, and I'll tell you more about how to make that successful.

So, if you do the finalist judging, you qualify for the partner prizes as well. So, it's not really a choice. It's just an add-on. And all the partners will look at their own criteria. They'll look at your code.

They'll look at your demo. They'll look at your screenshots. And they'll see if you ended up meeting all the requirements and award you that prize. And our judges will do the same thing, but they'll see a live demo of what you built. And they'll determine who were the top 10 projects from from this weekend.

So the only way we know what prizes you're going for is if you select this on your dashboard. If you forget to click one of the logos, we have no way of knowing, the partners don't have any way of knowing that you wanted to go and demo to them or qualify for their prizes. So, make sure that you check, triple check that everything is good. And this can happen out of order as we said. So, if you're also saying, I want to be top 10, but you can go to the top 10 judging first, come back to our partners, you can do partners first, go to the top judge.

You can do one partner demo, go to the thing, do the other two, doesn't matter. It's just whenever in the front of the line, we are going to expect you to be ready to demo. And the most important thing is that prize qualification is going to be based off of the quality of your submission page, not the demo. So if you don't have any screenshots, you don't have a good description, you don't have a video demo just in case they want to see how it works, the code doesn't really make sense or it's not linking multiple repositories, all that only hurts you because the partners are going to use other members of their team. Some of them are going to be online on their Slack.

Some of them are going to be in different parts of the world. Some of them may be taking turns. So they need to be able to send a link to your project page and say, "Hey, can you look at this? Can you read all these things and tell us if this is good?" So the more information you put on the page, the better it is for for you.

Now, the key to a good submission is well, make sure you record a demo video because if something goes wrong, you get to quickly tell that this is how it should work. Siri is activating very quickly. This is interesting. All right. Um, and the less slides you have, the better it is for you because you get to the demo faster.

So don't spend more than 60 seconds talking about yourself or your background or why you did all these things. A quick intro is helpful. Just show the demo because you only have four minutes. And again, use GitHub really, really well. People can see your commits.

It makes it easy for them to ask what's going on. It makes them easy to really trace how something was working. And the more description you add, the better your chances. So the short version of it is make your submission good because that's the best way to understand what you did for anybody else who is not your team. And the better you do that, the better your chances of winning more prizes.

And of course, there's going to be cases where you don't know how to use certain things. You want to know how to help simplify some part of the code and you just need help in any form. When that happens, you get to talk to our mentors. It's a big mentor station. People take shifts and you can find them wearing a neon vest.

They're not construction workers here. They're helping you be successful. And they're also going to be on our Discord monitoring. So, anybody you see in this page, on this photo, are our mentors. Go talk to them.

Ask them questions about Solidity, front end, back end. They are there to help you and uh make sure that you are not stuck on any problem for long. And if there's anything else we miss, you have any more questions, you can find us on email, Discord, there's a help desk from ET Global 2. can find me, anybody on the team and just ask your questions. And the other thing I want to say is that this is an inerson event and just like any of our events, the rules and the code of conduct is made available on our website which is on eglobal.

com/ruules. The key summary of all this thing is please be respectful. Any harassment or abuse will not be tolerated and if you see somebody being treated the way they shouldn't be, come find us, tell us and we'll take immediate action. And the other important thing is that anything that you build here is owned by you and your team equally. So you own the IP.

Neither Eat Global. None of our partners have access to the rights to your work. So you can do whatever you want with your project, whether it's turning into a a company or just keeping it on your GitHub for anybody else to use. Now, we're going to bring on our keynote in just a second. But before that, I want to bring on one amazing partner who's been with us since the beginning of starting.

And uh they're going to tell you about who they are, why they're excited to be here, and what you can do with their APIs. And with that, I want to welcome Matt from 1 in to tell you all about 1 in. So, please give Matt a big round of applause. GM GM New Delhi. How is everybody?

My name is Matt and I work with the strategic partnerships and developer relations team at 1 in. And for those of you who don't know, 1 inch was actually born at a hackathon just like this back in 2019. and our two co-founders, Anton Bukov and Sergey Coons, stayed up for, I think it was like 50 plus hours straight building out the first iteration of the 1-inch protocol. Since then, it's grown substantially. We've processed over 750 billion in total volume over the last six years uh with 25 million unique users and we have one over 180 plus you uh core contributors around the globe working on this project.

So, it just goes to show that what you build here this weekend, if it's the right implementation and has the right product market fit, um, it can actually blow up and become that next big unicorn. So, we have three bounties this weekend. The first one is our largest bounty for $12,000, and it's our extension for crosschain intents. Basically, we're looking for you to build a 1-inch non-EVM crosschain extension. Um, and there's three different bounties underneath that for 6K, 4K, and 2K.

Second up, we have our extended limit order protocol uh for $6,500. For this, we're looking for unique trading strategies. You could build like stop-loss orders, take profits, trigger orders. Um you can also use hooks like pre and post interactions to build very complex uh transactions. You could uh swap USDC to Ethereum and then deposit that Ethereum in a for example.

And third of all, we have our developer portal APIs. So, any usage of our APIs qualifies for this bounty. Um, up to five teams can receive $300 and we have a whole host of APIs um for checking wallet balances, portfolios, P&L, things like that. So, here's a QR code that you can scan to a link with all our bounties, documentation, and everything. So, thank you guys.

Happy hacking.

Thank you. All right, we are ready for our main event and for this one like to bring on Vitalik. He's going to be joining us remotely because of scheduling issues. So, we're going to learn about practical applications of how we can do more onchain privacy and uh we'll get set up quickly and uh let's give a massive round of applause to Vitalic. Ev, can you hear us?

We'll do a quick audio check. There we go. We are not getting audio. Let's make sure it's not a mute thing. Oh, there we go.

We're all set.

Okay. Um, are you hearing me? Well,

we can. Welcome.

Perfect. Thank you. Uh, so great. Uh so uh today he'll talk about building privacy preserving applications on Ethereum. So what kinds of things can be built um and uh why it's a great time to be focusing on uh on privacy now and what we can do to get started.

Um so I think uh first of all uh I'll focus on uh like four major application categories here right and uh the top four here that I have in mind are one is just funds transfer so this is uh the most basic crypto privacy thing that uh you can have and that we have had all the way since Zcash. Uh second is voting and uh third is identity and uh fourth is uh DeFi and privacy matters in all four of these. It matters in uh all four of these for different reasons and uh the specific technologies that you're going to use in all four of these uh differs quite a bit but uh you know they they are all in their own particular way important. Uh so what technology to use? I think uh the very basic one-s sentence answer here is zay snarks.

So I'm sure uh people I mean if you if this is your not not your first E global then you've almost certainly heard of ZK Snarks before and even if it is there's a chance yes you have but u basically quick re summary ZK sonark is a cryptographic algorithm that lets you prove uh something about uh some computation about a piece of data that you have in such a way that does not reveal the uh underlying data and in a way where even if the computation is complex, the proof is very easy to verify and so you can uh verify things about yourself and about data that you have uh like and where you can verify specific where you can prove specific claims without actually revealing uh anything else about the rest of the data. So extremely powerful technology. Um the most bas basic way that uh it has been used in the crypto space I think is uh some version of this uh nullifier Merkel tree construction that I have over in the diagram here on the right. Basically uh this is privacy for transferring funds. And the way that azekar here is used is uh basically it is a proof that uh essentially proves that you're spending a coin that has not already been spent without revealing anything else about which coin you're spending.

And so you're able to enforce the guarantee that one coin in equals one coin out. um or or phrased in other words no double spending uh but uh without actually making the graph of uh like which transactions uh are upstream of which other transactions which user sends to which other user is public. Um there is uh this entire hierarchy of uh technologies that we can use here right so there's uh the basic deposit and withdraw uh uh kind of use case and this is something that tornado cache had it's something that's been like very basic then you have splitting and merging uh so basically if you receive one ETH and if you receive one ETH then can you immediately use that to send uh some other address like 1.3 ETH or alternatively if you have 1 E then can you partially withdraw 0.3 ETH uh then internal transactions uh so can you create systems where like you can have a private address and then you can privately send funds to a private address without doing a withdraw deposit loop and then uh also this other interesting thing that happened over the last couple of years association said technology so privacy pools and rail one of the best examples that uh basically limits bad actors.

And the way it does it is uh that you provide a zero knowledge proof that proves that you are not in uh some list of transactions that like some actor flagged as being transactions that come from thefts or something similar. Um so these are things that people have already been working on for quite a while, right? and uh you know rail gun exists, privacy pools exists. I think uh right now the frontier of all of these things is not so much uh building the actual basic technology although there's definitely places where it can be optimized. I think the uh frontier of this is basically just making the UX better also making it cheaper.

Uh so for example uh one thing that should be built uh at some point is uh proof aggregation. Uh so basically uh if you imagine 10 transactions coming from 10 users they need to make 10 of these zark proofs. A zik snark proof is pretty uh expensive to verify. And so instead of putting the 10 proofs on chain, you can put one proof on chain where that proof just proves the fact that the other 10 proofs exist. And you know, yes, you can do this.

And yes, that one proof only takes as much gas to verify as any one of the 10 proofs that it's replacing. Um, and so it's a very powerful way to reduce costs, but it's just like the wiring for that hasn't really been done yet, right? But going beyond that, there's just like a lot of UX work, a lot of uh trying to make things like this as uh seamless and integrated as uh possible and uh just like really pushing up the up the user experience. But I think uh the the whole like privacy for funds transfer space is something that uh a lot of people have talked about, a lot of people been working on. So uh it's I think it's uh one of those things that's valuable to look at but also importance to look at some of the other spaces.

Um so privacy for voting right so uh I think very recently you know a few weeks ago um Aragon announced that they're taking Macy this is this uh private Ziki starkbased private voting technology that we've been working in the foundation for a few years and uh they're planning to put it into their DAO software and or the uh and so the reason why uh privacy for voting is so important I think is uh I mean first of all you know privacy for voting is already standard in elections right secret ballots are already the norm and uh the sh basically know if voting is public then the problem is always that side incentives dominate right so this could include bribery this could include coercion this could include social games right this uh I mean I'm sure many of you have experienced uh you know on Twitter a couple of years ago back when likes were public and uh you know if you were deciding what to like especially on any kind of controversial topic there's always this game of like oh you know on the one hand you you want to express what you think but on the other hand there's the question of like know are there going to be people that'll be like scouring through the list of things that you've liked um in order to write write some kind of hit piece about your like suddenly highlighted and pointed out to 50,000 people and likes were recently made private and you know I actually think this is one of the best moves that Elon Twitter has made and uh like I've definitely felt like it's uh made that whole aspect of Twitter more honest right so one of the things that people complain about also in voting in dows is basically yeah the exact same thing right that voting uh turns into a social game. And so with privacy, this is a just a very natural way to make that not a consideration. And uh we can use cryptographic technology and blockchains to achieve strong privacy and strong verifiability at the same time, right? And this is like the line of work that we've been working on with Macy and but you can actually take that a step further. there's starting to look at how to make the security assumptions and look even stronger by using things like FHE.

Uh so it's I think we're really at this point where the practicality of uh doing this has just uh kept going up and up and uh I think it's worth really starting to take this kind of technology seriously. um privacy for identity, right? So uh basically know many contexts online and offline where you need to prove that uh especially online that you're not a civil and you're not a bot, right? You know, we used to have captures for that, but these days uh I think the robots are actually better at the captures than the humans are, right? Um and uh number two is he wants to prove that you're eligible for something, right?

The standard use cases like prove you're at least 18 and uh you know that's like exactly the use case that people that do these like zkar proofs where you prove that you have a passport of some country with some parameters uh do. Uh but uh you can do more interesting things, right? like you can try to figure out uh you know is someone eligible for a discount uh for something based off of like some history of activity that they've made. Um you you could make proofs over someone's history of activity on Ethereum for example, right? Uh so like you can try to make proofs for more interesting and complicated uh statements that aren't just about like is this a human or is this a bot, but that are more about uh like proving that someone has some level of standing in some community or in some application.

Now today any of these use cases they generally require giving up your personal identity, right? And so we've seen a proliferation of uh all all kinds of online services just demanding that you log in for everything. And this of course uh involves giving up your personal identity and like exactly who you are in your account which is links to everything else. But uh with ZKRS we can do better right so I think uh the very baseline for this kind of stuff is single factor identity right so there you know we've seen zk passport I think you know we've seen things like anon at har and also for on the other side there's like biometric things like world ID so this is like basically using one particular identity provider like one actor that basically says like this uh is someone I recognize and you basically just lean on them as a source of truth and this is like very simple to implement and know it probably works fine for a lot of applications. It's like a very clean mental model.

But there's uh a lot of weaknesses in doing identity in this way, right? Because uh you know you end up concentrating a huge amount of power in one actor. One actor is able going to be able to deplatform people. One actor is going to be able to give generate huge numbers of fake accounts. Uh they'll be able to decide who can make these proofs and who can't.

they'll be able to shut down accounts at the moment where people try to renew their credentials. So the thing that I think would be interesting to also work on is uh to ZK proof plistic identity, right? So pluralistic identity is basically yeah an identity system where instead of relying on one credential you're relying on some total sum of some combination of credentials where no single one of them is strictly mandatory right so for like think about the Gitcoin passport score for people who went through that whole thing for dur quadratic funding but with much better UX. Now there's a lot of challenges in uh doing pluralistic identity right right like you want to resist kind of identity farming like you want to resist people optimizing for having huge numbers of identities and getting them cheaply and uh using that to manipulate things like voting systems but at the same time you want to avoid overreiance on one single provider. Uh so a lot of uh really complicated uh considerations to balance here, right?

But like I think privacy like pluralistic identity and uh especially ZK wrapping it is something where like we just have to correct the right formula for making the UI for this sort of thing convenient enough for at least some set of applications and I think it would be yeah really good if we're able to do that. So then uh we can get to privacy for DeFi, right? So this is like financial stuff that goes beyond payments and there's like actually really good safety related reasons uh to do privacy for DeFi, right? So sandwiching protection is one and so all of the different know RPCs are a good example of this. liquidation sniping profession is one and it's definitely valuable for some of the high leverage stuff.

Uh basically like you wants to be sure that uh or you want to be protected from a situation where someone can uh figure out this is exactly how much they need to lower the price in order to force you to get liquidated and and this is exactly how much they need to market sell. And so someone's able to like finally yeah target an attack in order and have 100% confidence that they're going to be able to grab up your money. Uh so that's uh important. Also just generally keeping your positions and your portfolio private, right? There's a lot that you can learn about someone if you know all their financial activity and what kinds of things they are positively and negatively exposed to.

Um, so we've been recently seeing more private DeFi. I mean, synthetics, I think, announced something interesting uh recently, but having more different private options for all kinds of DeFi primitives, I think, is uh something that would be really interesting. Um, and then finally, a bonus, right, is uh making wallets more private. And uh here I can uh like push out a couple of uh idea different ideas right so one of them is uh you can take as many pre-existing wallet features as possible things like transaction simulation price querying like any of these convenience functions you know the equivalent of like the block explorer function and basically rewrite all of them in a way that will leak no data to anyone except to the RPC provider Right. So, route everything through the RPC provider or through the blockchain.

Like basically, yeah, you know, the like the only thing worse than leaking your data to one actor that you have to trust is leaking your uh personal data to 14 actors that you have to trust. And so I think like that's the first step, right? It's like to just reconentrate all the data collection in the RPC because once we do that then uh like there's only one target that we have to work on improving. Um also uh in intercept and reroute requests to custom RPC servers, right? So there's a lot of DAPs that uh send do requests to their own RPCs and instead of using the users and like you like I think we should have wallets that just like basically do that in reverse and say like nope you know you have to talk to my RPC.

Um then uh we get to privacy of reads. So this is uh once we get to the point where the RPC is the biggest privacy bottleneck then uh you can do things like stick the RPC server inside of a TE and then use oblivious RAM on top of that and that really reduces the RPC server's ability to read uh and see exactly what kind what what are the like requests that everyone is making and then you can go further with private information retrieval which does the same thing but with much better cryptographically strong privacy assumptions. Um, and then here like the technology is only one part of it, right? The other part of it is like actually implementing it in the wallet and then actually combining it with things like transaction simulation. So, a lot of challenges here.

Um, and then also static page interfaces for some really important uh applications, right? So there's a lot of applications that people use often where the most common UI for that application like just goes off and talks to like a whole bunch of servers and makes a lot of requests and you can just like make a a better specialized UI for that that like does not make any of those requests, right? So like you can really like basically go piece by piece to the wallet and user experience and uh you can do a lot to really minimize some data collection. Um so you know conclusions right basically uh why now? I think uh to me the big reason the biggest reason why now is uh you know the tech the privacy has I think been a uh a goal of uh you know people in crypto before the space was even called crypto like the original crypto project was probably David Cham's ecash back in 1982 and Chomian ecash was actually not decentralized but it was private right and so then of Of course, we started caring more about decentralization and for a long time it was not possible to be decentralized and private at the same time.

Now it finally is and so all of this technology know Zekeark's other things it's getting to be quite mature that you can do quite a lot and we've hit this inflection point where I think uh the remaining challenges are really not about building the hard tech. remaining challenges are much more practical, much more user experience layer and uh like much more application level and uh I think uh like in general this is the one aspect of Ethereum's not trustlessness that currently is probably the furthest to really being a reality for users and like I think we needs to really make some moves like forward on that, right? And basically build more and uh better privacy preserving Ethereum applications. So thank you.

Amazing. Thanks, Metallic. This is an amazing primer and uh just goes to show that a lot of this is actually prime time ready. We've seen so many incredible open source projects and libraries that help you make ZK proofs quite easily. And uh if you look at Tees Oram and just even Macy from just a bonus slide that helps you really kind of do something this weekend and put this into practice.

So please give him a round of applause one more time. All right, not a lot more to go. I want to quickly just tell everybody about the prizes. There's over $200,000 of prizes. One inch is giving 20,000 artificial super intelligence alliance Citria ENS EF filecoin flow hyera PayPal USD polygon rootstock pit self graph news foundation world and zero g are giving up to 10,000 each.

Fluence kada and walrus are giving $5,000 in prizes and integra is giving 1,000. All this information is on the website. You can see all the rules, what qualifies, what doesn't, how you can use existing code to start, so you don't have to worry about setting anything up. And if you are still looking for a team, the workshop room is going to be holding a workshop formation session, so you can still find other team members or get ideas for your projects in 30 minutes. And last but not least, make sure you get to enjoy this weekend.

We don't want it to be exhausting for you. Make sure you sleep. Make sure you have fun. Make sure you meet new people from all across the world and try to do something new where if you learn something new by Sunday that you didn't know today, that's a win. So, make this about experimentation and learning and happy hacking.

We'll see you all on Sunday. [Music]