1TS: 1 Trillion Security on Ethereum

Hello, hello, hello. Can everybody hear me? Can everybody listen? No, am I on yet? Hello?

Nothing? One, two, three. Oh, you're on. I'm not. Perhaps I can hear myself now.

Okay. Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. I hope everyone actually had time to get lunch. And welcome to SafeCon as well, if you're just joining us. We're here all day talking about all things self-custody, security, privacy, and all the other good stuff.

But for now, we're going to talk to Frederik Svantes. Thanks for joining us. And we have a very big topic we want to share to the Ethereum Foundation. So let's start with that. You just launched something called 1 Trillion Security Initiative.

So should we just start with, it's a huge label. What does that actually stand for? Yeah, so the idea behind trillion dollar security is to do one of two things, or both combined, I guess. One is to either have the faith to place $1 trillion of value in a single smart contract, or to have a billion users who each have $1,000 each on-chain. That's the current objective.

And how did you all arrive at that vision? What inspired you to get there, actually? It's kind of a cool name, I think. That's kind of far away. One of the core things is that I feel that there's quite a lot of, like, everyone here is probably quite interested and hyped about the blockchain and what's going to happen with it.

But there's also quite a few people who are quite skeptical towards blockchain. And the idea with this kind of initiative is to kind of reduce the amount of skeptical people by showing that blockchain is not only scams and hacks and stuff like that, but it's actually something much better, which can enrich everyone's life, not just financially, but from a privacy and censorship resistance point of view, etc. So that's kind of the Great, yeah. I remember the time when we were still talking about the billions, and that was not so long ago. And we've gone to the trillions, and as Lukas says here, when quadrillion, you know?

Yeah, yeah. We'll see when we've got to the quadrillions, I guess. So before we dive into the meatier parts of the topics, a little bit, maybe, about you, I think the curiosity is, like, what's your background? Like, how did you end up in the Ethereum Foundation? And how do you all work within the foundation, for example, on this?

Yeah, so I joined five years ago. Before that, I was working more traditional security, primarily doing things like doing red teaming and forensics on critical infrastructure, such as national healthcare systems, national banks, airports, transportation entities, payment providers, etc. I think the one thing about working with national banks, and national healthcare systems is that they're not bleeding edge. They're very, very slow at doing things. So I felt like there must be something more interesting to do.

So I started looking into blockchains, I guess, back in 2017. And it was like a whole new world opened up. Awesome community, awesome ideas, awesome mindset that really aligned with me. So yeah, I just ended up joining. And now I joined the EF and lead the protocol security team at the EF.

Gotcha. And this project, so you are the co-chair with Josh Stark, who's... We are a few people who are working on this. Josh Stark is working on this. We have Jason, I think he's sitting there, who's helping out with it.

We have Tyler from the protocol security team, who is also now starting to help out with this, as we're going into this kind of second phase. Because we have been spending quite a few months now talking to hundreds of people, getting a lot of awesome feedback from anything from like... It can be founders, it can be developers, it can be institutions, it can be just traders, etc. Or just general users. And we kind of collected all this feedback of what are the current concerns with Ethereum, or actually as blockchain as a whole.

I would say that the vast, vast majority of the things mentioned are actually things that affect the entire blockchain system. I think we're just the ones who are currently looking into this. But I also think that this effort will actually benefit the entire blockchain ecosystem in the end. Yeah, so you just recently published that report, lots of findings. We had a workshop yesterday, for example.

I think in the report, you mentioned you take a three-phased approach, right? Like mapping, execution, and communication, right? And as a... I guess being an Ethereum foundation was so horizontal, right? How do you actually approach that?

What does this look like in practice? Yeah, so a lot of the findings that we had was that people generally have quite a lot of faith in the protocol itself. They know that there's not been any major incident on mainnets for the past 10 years. We've had 100% uptime through that. But what people are concerned about primarily is the layer above that.

And that's generally not something that the EOS itself can solve because the layer above is not... There are so many different entities in the space that are working to build awesome tools, awesome apps, great protocols, etc. And in order to kind of with the entire ecosystem to get this done. So a lot of this effort now will be to first figure out, okay, now we know what the problems are, but how do we solve them? That's the current step.

So we're looking for feedback on that. And then after that, we will try to start executing. And how that execution phase will look will be quite different. Some cases, or I would say the majority of cases are probably going to be a lot of coordination or facilitation where maybe the EOS can gather all the wallet providers together and try to facilitate a discussion to figure out what do we need to do in order to onboard non-tech people into this space? Because a lot of the wallets are quite technical today.

I quite often use the analogy of today, we're so early and most people are so technical or at least willing to use their technical tools that we're kind of like in an arch Linux space. Well, I think to get the next billion of people to use this, I think we need to also have some kind of iOS experience. Does that make sense? I can't imagine that orchestration, especially as being a 24 seven switched on network global, I feel like that's going to be a big challenge. Or is that how you'll see it as well?

Just like coordinating? Yeah, there's been a lot of coordination. Just getting up to this report, the working days have been like 8 to 11 PM most of the days, because obviously we want to speak with as many people as possible from all across the world. And I think this next phase is going to probably be even more challenging in that case. So we are going to be having some specific people, we haven't really decided who yet, but there will be people working as, I don't know if project manager is the right word, but we need people to kind of ensure that there's progress on each of these tracks and that we actually see the action and hopefully results quite quickly.

And it's just my personal opinion. It's very cool to make a very intentional effort by the foundation with a focus on security at scale. And I read the report and the insights were very familiar, but also very refreshing. And I think it really showed some broad strokes at the extent of the challenge that we have. For the folks that maybe that have not read the report, could you give us a little summary of the key insights and what's really sticking out perhaps?

Yeah, sure. I would say that the key thing that sticks out is that, maybe not sticks out, but something that's always being mentioned in all these calls and form submissions, etc., is the UX experience as a whole. And maybe primarily or specifically being mentioned are wallet UX, how people would like to see that being improved. It's not really clear yet exactly how that should be improved, but that's something that many people are seeing as areas of improvements, which could range from people having concern about going to malicious websites, ending up losing all their funds.

It could be signing transactions like on a DEX or something like that without fully understanding exactly what they're signing, to basic stuff like having a public key as your address, not being really intuitive for beginners. So I think there's quite a bit there. There's also been a lot of other things mentioned, like especially institutions, for example, have mentioned things like decentralization being a very important aspect for them. They're concerned about the reason that they're migrating, many of them towards Web3, are concerns about censorship, where a central entity could decide that we're going to block transactions to a country in South America, for example. So that's an area that I don't feel we should, like we need to improve even further on that.

But also privacy is something that many institutions are mentioning as a key importance. And being able to transact without competitors seeing what they're doing, etc. And how much of your focus would be, for example, with the enterprises or the institutions? That's an interesting topic, because I think they're starting to pay more attention, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

They're definitely doing that. And I do definitely see that we need to, like, to me, it kind of goes hand in hand. I think many people who are not institutions, they are likely to want the same thing, but maybe they can't articulate that specific thing being important. For example, someone in South America might not see a concern about a centralized RPC provider, for example. A institution might see that, but a retail user probably don't want to use a RPC provider that ends up censoring them for some reason.

But they might not really have that as an idea or concept yet, while the institutions might have that. And the institutions actually care a lot about the non-institutions, because they also understand that in order for the institutions to succeed, retail also has to be on board, basically. And for retail to succeed, there has to be institutions. So in my view, they very much go together. Gotcha.

Yeah. And obviously, there was a lot of highlights recently on the Etherealize team, right? Now, do you all also work with them internally, or are they participating, for example, in maybe making some of the bridges happen? Yeah, yeah. So we have a few people who are acting as advisors to the project.

So we have Zach from Etherealize, and they're doing awesome work with institutions, giving feedback back, returning feedback to us about what they're wanting, et cetera. We also have Samson, who is helping out, and Nettie from Sigma Prime as well, who is helping to work on this project. Right. And so now you're in a very interesting position with a repository of insights, right? Yeah.

You have a lot of different insights, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different stakeholders, some invisible biases, for example. So I can't imagine, how do you remain opinionated, or how does your opinion form? What is your North Star in general in shepherding all of this together before you'll act upon it? Yeah. I think what's going to be important is to look at the ROI of these efforts.

I think there is definitely space for long-term efforts, but I think we should also try to focus on the near future things that we can do that will have a high impact. Like I said, there's going to be efforts that might require potentially protocol changes, and that might take a few hard forks to do. The EIP process can take quite a long time. But there might also be aspects which we can get done in three months, for example. So I think we need to figure out which are the short-term objectives, which are the long-term objectives, and then try to execute.

But I think, I mean, we will try to do that in parallel, basically. I would guess the North Star is to try to accelerate this by shipping faster, like from a security point of view, so that we don't say, okay, we'll release the report, come back in five years, and we'll have an update. We will try to accelerate this quite a lot so that people start seeing improvements quite soon. So say like two years from now, if we look back retrospectively, what do you feel has to signal or materialize for you to feel what the initiatives that we're doing here, for example, like the $1 trillion initiative, is successful? What gives you that insight, perhaps?

So what I would like to see is like a, I guess, KPI would be that the amount of users losing funds has gone down significantly. I think that's a, I mean, it can't just be the amount, because hopefully we'll have many, many, many more users, but like the percentage of users losing funds and the amount lost should be decreasing. To me, that would be like one of the main things that we should ensure is fixed. So with all of these now at your helm, what does the next three months look like? For example, you are just getting into the priorities or what are you all working on essentially?

Yeah, so right now we're still collecting a bit of feedback, but we shifted the focus into being more feedback around how can we solve these issues to see do the ecosystem have some ideas on how to solve it or like do we need to start thinking about potential solutions already or like new solutions to these problems. I'm guessing that the ecosystem, after reading this report, might be thinking like, hey, this is something that I've been working on or this is something I have a great idea on. And at that point, we can be looking into potentially providing grants or other things to help accelerate the process of improving the current status. So like I mentioned, the amount of people losing funds, that's a very, very broad thing. It encompasses everything from it can be a wallet UX, it can be ways to detect scams, it can be things like moving from web to hosted frontends to more decentralized, verifiable frontends.

There are a lot of things that can be done. And I think we need to also start thinking more outside the box. Not perhaps like how can we, what feature can we add to our wallet, existing wallet to fix this, but rather maybe rethink the entire wallet experience. How can we make a wallet experience that works for non-technical users or who prefer to not run a risk of losing a lot of money, basically. Some people will see that or have the mindset like, I accept that risk because I want to do these kind of risky things.

But some people, or probably most people are not super interested in that. They want this kind of streamlined experience. But we still definitely need to continue catering to this more, I would say, technical crowd that exists today and will also increase in users as more and more people end up using the chain. It's my personal opinion that over the years, I found it very challenging when I talked to people in crypto. We're all very opinionated.

And everyone has a lot of opinions, very strong opinions, sometimes very polarizing. And when it comes to security, there is this polarizing opinion. This is the area of responsibility or accountability or self-custody, for example. Is it on the individual or is it on the dApp or is it on the protocol? And I think with the cypherpunk approach, perhaps it shifts a little bit more towards the individual rather than the product, for example.

And now with scale, with 1 trillion, you're building bridges to enterprises. And I feel like the more traditional accepted model is more towards the enterprise or the company or the product. And is this something like, we can expect ES to take a more opinionated approach on how that should look like, for example? Well, I can speak for myself here and I think that you should be responsible personally for what you're doing, at least if you're not being abstracted away, so to speak. But if you have control of, let's say, your wallet, then in the end, in my opinion, you should be verifying things, et cetera.

But I do think that the experience has to improve so that you can actually verify in an easier way. I speak with very top-tier security people in this ecosystem quite frequently, and even they have trouble decoding what kind of stuff they're doing on-chain, because it's just a bunch of cold data and it takes time to, like if you're doing 40 transactions a day or something like that, or even more, it gets quite time-consuming to be decoding that. So we need to move to a world where we can actually understand what we're doing, because at that point, if you know that, okay, I'm actually giving all my ease to this website that is most likely a scam website, and you press approve, then you've made an active choice in a way. But if you end up, if you don't even know what you're doing, if you can't understand what you're doing, then it's kind of hard to make that call. So I think we need to improve on that.

That's one of the key. Yeah, bringing clarity to the user. Exactly. It's almost like a responsibility that we collectively have. Yeah, for sure.

So the blind-signing issues that we're having today, in my view, that would be one of the key things that we as an ecosystem need to solve in some way that works for the majority of people. Earlier, there was a panel when someone said, who would like to kill blind-signing? And everyone's hands went up. We just killed blind-signing from the foundations of how we build things. So I'd like to just ask this very general question.

If you had a magic wand, and with the flick of the wand, you could change one thing just tomorrow, for example, that would change the face of the industry, for example, in terms of security. Is there something that you wish for? Well, to be honest, I think the blind-signing is the most obvious one. That will unlock a lot of things. It will make things a lot more easy.

Obviously, just removing that will not solve all these problems, but it will be a massive step in the right direction. So if I could remove something today, that would be it. Do you already have some ideas on what that could look like? Probably a few, but maybe we should keep that for the next report. Leave them hanging.

I don't want to opinion too many people who might be submitting things, like feedback, because we do want... That's kind of the concern, that the EF will say something, like, this is how we envision things being solved. And in my experience, historically, that's kind of been what people then start to at least think about and pivot from. But we want there to be kind of a blank paper that people just start from to just get as wide ideas as possible. Okay.

Last question for you. When it comes to security, how has your perspective changed over time? I think that things have improved. If you look at how things were, I guess, five years ago, there were a lot of smart contract hacks, et cetera. This was something that...

And there weren't that many auditors back then, I would say. I don't think there were any bug bounty competition platforms. The space was kind of not in a very good state at that time. I know I was thinking about, like, how can we get more security people from Web 2 to move into Web 3? Should we be, like, creating these kind of courses that people can take to make us quick move or jump over?

What should we be doing? But this is something that the ecosystem actually solved themselves, which is super, super awesome. And between then and now, I think this area, like the smart contract space, has just improved significantly. There are so many, I would say, expectations by people now with regards to securing the smart contracts, be it audits, having run competitions. The tooling is a lot better.

It has built-in security checks. You can do clustering. And I guess that is what I hope will happen with this as well. We can make a push to kind of make the user experience more secure now. Now, previously, we ensured that, like as an ecosystem, we secured the smart contract part.

Hopefully, we can now move into securing the user experience part. Making UX secure. Yeah. I would say to the audience, hold that thought for the rest of the day as well. We're out of time, but is there anything that you feel like you'd like to cover or what the audience should know that we haven't chatted?

No, just if you have any thoughts or ideas or anything related to this project, we are super happy to hear about it. You can email us at trilliondollarsecurity at ethereum.org. And we would love to hear from you, hear from your ideas, work together with you. So just reach out.

All right. Great. Frederick Fontes, everyone. We have some time for Q&A. We can take a few questions.

Okay. There's one hand up there. Two. Hello. I'm wondering what's your personal security model for interacting with blockchain?

I don't know how much else to say about my objects, but I mean, actually, you can very much see how I kind of interact. We have made this website called howtomultisec.com, which goes through kind of best practices on how you should be interacting. This depends, of course, like what you're interacting with, what types of wallets you're interacting with. I think one of the key things to consider is like how much value are you actually at risk of losing when you're thinking about how you interact?

Like if you have obviously $50 in a wallet on your mobile phone, it's not the end of the world if that is lost. But if you're doing something where you have $5,000 in your wallet, like I would personally be more concerned and verifying more about what I'm doing. You know, it's things like verifying what you're going through is actually the correct website. Are the contracts actually being used? Like if you're interacting with a contract on a website, make sure that it wasn't deployed like one day ago.

If you're going to Uniswap, for example, and you see that this contract was just deployed, or any other DEX, and there's a risk then that there's been a front-end hijack or something like that. Using various tools to decode the transactions are obviously also useful. But yeah, it kind of feels like this would be a half to one-hour presentation on its own. I think we're at time, but thanks for the question. Yeah, thanks.