Zero Knowledge for Private Identity on Public Blockchains | European Blockchain Convention

foreign [Music] hi good morning everybody uh gonna switch uh switch topics up from uh the fun all about sports and entertainment and something a little bit more more serious I'll give a moment just for the conversation to die down from the previous session see some folks are still filing in I like to get to know my audience and kind of understand exactly where you're at at this place in time and space um so how many of you out here think that regulation is coming for crypto and it's imminent please raise your hand yeah pretty much unanimous how many of you think that this is going to come at the sacrifice of privacy or the values of decentralization and I'm assuming that those with their hands up think this is probably a problem uh today I want to talk a little bit about what I think is the most important topic that we should be discussing in web 3 today just to turn the page on a little bit of a more serious note and that's uh the issue of privacy on public blockchains and how we're standing at an inflection point today however we have all the tools that we need to make the decisions to go where we need to go to retain that dream of a decentralized future so my name is Shadi I'm a co-founder of holonym is a zero knowledge identity startup and as I was alluding you know we are really standing at this precipice today right so there's this overall claim and I think most of you all agree with me that's institutional adoption of blockchain isn't possible with compliance specifically Regulatory Compliance and so you have a bunch of organizations that are tackling this head-on you know whether they're issuing their own digital currency backed by the world's Reserve currency or whether they're creating sandboxed environments for institutions to begin playing with the technology or whether they're looking at uh Bridges from off chain to on-chain and lastly we're seeing some experiments here in the EU on what institutional government type of adoption of blockchain looks like it's all really really terrible it's terribly exciting however it's also fraught with danger so I have a bit of a mathematical scientific background and I like to think of things in terms of energy Landscapes right so if our society today you could think of it as our decision points as a collective is a ball that's moving through an energy space we're converging to a global the rate of adoption technology is pushing us towards a global Minima meaning a place that once things settle it'll be really difficult to get out of those to get out of that that sort of situation so there's two paths here and uh you know it is definitely a firm stand so if you disagree with this come find me after the talk there's two paths here one that leads to a non-consensual future where we're all servicing a protocol that's been developed over a series of decisions that try to make the old hierarchical patriarchal systems of the past work and integrate with decentralized systems it's like mixing oil and water and only one will rise to the top on the other side we have something uh what I think is a dream that we're all sharing where we have a protocol that Services the people where we automate away much of the architecture and infrastructure of of civics of institutional infrastructure of things that require trust and allow us to engage in voluntary crypto Commerce with each other and that accelerates the pace of innovation progress in our society so which one is it going to be and how do we get there so how do we Co-op this human-centric future where protocols and blockchains and uh Civic infrastructure is servicing individuals and individuals aren't a thrall to some super intelligent AI That's turning us into paper clips to make an illusion there we have all the tools that we need right so we have Smart contracts that allow us to customize the terms of our coordination in a trustless manner for group directed I'm sorry a goal directed group Behavior so how do we you know all get there together and then the answer for that really are going to be variations of daos so really key to that though I think is having embedded systems for identity Providence what does that mean it means systems that allow us to know who's engaging with what and how they're coming together as a group to be able to push this forward it's a bit of a I would say like Paradox though right so it's there's a huge conundrum if we're using these public smart contract blockchains to coordinate to do Commerce to votes to you know record our search engine history and some tokenized data monetization model right where we sell it to uh uh to AI companies as opposed to being sold ourselves on behalf of ourselves it is an issue right so how do we kind of deal with this concept of all right well um we all need to use these coordination Technologies it needs to be public it needs to be trustless but also we need to maintain privacy a really great example is imagining what on-chain governance in a nation-state selection could look like right so say for example you have some proposal that's been passed at the nation state level everybody has a did that starts with 0x123 or something like that and everyone can perform an action they can vote yes or no on a specific contract to allocate funding for education or some Bridge or what have you well how do you know that each of these dids right is one person how do you know that each of those dids is not for example a contractor that's buying out all of these votes and making sure that their project gets pushed to the top so it's a huge problem and this is something that we see all over the map in governance and Dows in dapps and defy uh all sorts of situations right now if you've been following the curve Wars I think uh you'll find a really great example of that but the main issues here really the takeaways are civil attacks are really common on Smart contract blockchains when we're trying to coordinate so these are people that are you know multiplying their identities or chartering their identities and trying to influence the direction of the of the governance in One Direction or the other accountability is really limited so if you just create a did and don't attach any other information to that like how do you know that that's a person right if they rug pull a contract that those funds stay in that in that identity and there's unless they just go to an off-ramp it's impossible to really have full accountability there and lastly privacy is Black or White right so developers either need to embed doxing into their dap or they just need to accept the status quo so one potential solution to this is a reputation I think reputation systems are going to be key and uh you know we've seen examples of this with like poapp um on-chain graph graph mechanisms SBT Soul bound tokens that attach kind of a a sense of reputation to an individual but on-chain reputation is really really hard these projects have kind of just made grasps at something that's ephemeral that's still difficult to really uh deploy in practice so one of the some of the main questions really that we need to solve for on-chain reputation are how do you verify uh Behavior off chain and I think bolaji has a really great mental model for this right where we think of how do we take uh things about ourselves off chain so for example I have a PhD you know I went to school at Georgetown I am a member of a couple professional societies how do I bring that information that reputation with me on chain while maintaining my privacy and still presenting a proof of verification that those are real claims non-trivial problem how do you Abate identity resale right so if you are putting reputation if you're attaching reputation to an identity you're creating value on that identity and well you know maybe it's possible that folks can sell that identity it's not a not an easy problem either and I think critical to this entire point and I've kind of uh really underscored this just because the brevity of this talk usually uh don't give this short of the talk but how do you maintain user consents as part of this process right so how do you make sure that when folks are coming together to coordinate around smart contract governance that individuals are properly and informed informally consented into each of these processes and what sorts of information or reputation all sorts of information is used to build a reputation and all this comes down to the basic question how do you maintain privacy so that's why we built holonym holonym is a throwback reference to Nick zabbo one of the original cypherpunks who's been fighting for freedom and information freedom for for privacy on the internet and free association on the internet and uh so in 94 zabbo coined both contracts and this concept of a Nim which actually comes from a Greek term for name a Nim is a a piece of information about something that doesn't tell you everything about that something but tells you just what you need to know to accomplish a certain task or do your business as usual so a hollow is a holistic identity of Nims and the way that we do that is we use a zero knowledge layer or a zero knowledge cloak to take all of these individual components of an identity do I have a pointer here so we take things like your name country social security number from your government government ID we take things such as Biometrics like your face or your fingerprint from a device that you carry with you or we also can take signatures that are generated by keys that correspond to a specific web accounts that are tied to some you know on you know a web activity right your your internet footprint and we can take all of these pieces together oops sorry guys we take all these pieces together and we are able to create what's called a hollow and from the hollow we can generate proofs uh we we call these Soul bound token proofs that tell us that this particular account has is a single person has or hasn't voted hasn't took a transaction broken it up into tons of little pieces to avoid money laundering or is you know of drinking age for another example how does it really work I'm not really going to get into the details here but basically we take the principle that we separate the identity that's off chain from anything that happens on chain so once you're on a chain you're completely Anonymous even though you might have verified with the third party such as a government service provider like the DMV or the state department and gotten a state issued ID but as soon as you pass through the relayer add your hash credits to The Merkle tree and these hash creds are signed by the issuers so you know that it's verified and using a ZK proof you can prove sub-segments of uh of that data structure and assign those to any arbitrary address that you might use for example for git coin to prove that you're not a bot when you're participating in quadratic funding or to prove that you are a U.S resident when you're participating in a regulated Dex because that's going to happen really soon so who's using this right now our very first client was Andrew Yang he's a U.S presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2020 uh he's really pioneered the concept of Ubi really Pro web3 he started lobbying Dao specifically for advocacy they had a huge problem where they had an nft sale they said let's start a dow collect some money feed it into elections so we can get some great legislation passed however anybody in the world can buy an nft and there are this this thing these things called U.S campaign Finance laws that prevent you from really financing U.S elections from internationally sourced uh funding so they had a big problem uh luckily enough we were sitting together at a hackathon and we were able to uh to help them out there by providing zero knowledge proofs of U.

S residency for their members that allowed them to basically vote on proposals that allocated the treasury specifically for a particular election while still maintaining engagement with the International Community so now we can do all sorts of complex logic aiding uh who else is using it and this is kind of the tip of the iceberg here we've we've we've have had a couple of different things come up in the past couple months but uh get coin is a is uh one of the things that we're most excited about because they're looking for ways to make it really easy for non-web three users to be able to onboard um and prove that they're not a bot or prove certain things about their identity in order to participate in these Grant making mechanisms and protocols however uh you know like I think if you've ever used get coins incredibly difficult it takes like anywhere between 24 hours to a week to verify for using something like bright ID with us it's really simple you literally just do what you would do for Airbnb uh we can also support phone number verification as well so you can prove with your phone number uh that you're not a bot so what are some use cases of holonym um well we right now where I kind of alluded to this got two minutes thank you I've alluded to some of this already but uh so we can do things like for example prove on chain that you are a bar certified attorney right and this is incredible because you know now you can have a gnosis safe where you can prove privately that the signers on that nose is safe have some legal Authority right and I think this is going to be something that's a game changer and we're still exploring very very early in exploring this we're also looking at things like medical credentials phds for types of professional societies and Dows that allow us to bootstrap the reputation of these of these organizations um I alluded a little bit to the plutocracy democracy use case but I think the most important are going to be the ability to for dapps and protocols to produce proofs that they are in compliance that their users are having certain traits and attributes that allow them to service them you know whether it's these users aren't breaking up their transactions into multiple pieces or whether it's something else like now that these users are from one jurisdiction or the other yeah so yeah privacy mechanisms for compliance are really just the start and I think um when you really embrace the concept that Nick Zaba really pioneered of what a Nim is and how you can combine them to create these virtual avatars that interact in cyberspace that transcend geopolitical boundaries it opens up a whole beautiful can of worms the can of worms that we definitely want to go fishing with so I just want to say thank you to the amazing team that's behind this it's not just me uh and uh yeah we've been at this for about eight months and uh we're more than excited to speak to you if you need zero knowledge identity proofs for your particular use case whether it's institutional on off ramps or whether it's uh thinking about compliance or whether it's about how you can add add certain proofs on identity to your Dow to maintain uh uh privacy but while also having accountability so thank you very much appreciate your time and I'll catch you around [Applause]