# Community Privacy Residency by Ying Tong Lai // Web3Privacy Now Rome Meetup 2026 - Speakers: [Ying Tong](https://streameth.org/speakers/ying-tong) - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-06-09 - Duration: 17:26 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, Rome, meetup, 2026 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-2Pwu8W0FDcE - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pwu8W0FDcE ## Description Web3Privacy Now Rome Meetup 2026 "Shaping and Defending the Techno-Political Evolution: Cryptography, Open Source, and Public Goods" ​​​Half-day dedicated to fostering solidarity among: ​​​- zk researchers and applied cryptographers ​- open source and human rights advocates ​​​- developers and hacker culture ​​​- internet freedom and grassroots movements ​​​- hacktivists and the general public ## Transcript It is that >> Uh thank you PJ for organizing this and having us here. Thank you Sterling and Jeremiah for your talks. Um yeah, I think this Matthew Green calls this the coming forest fire whereby these regulations for age verification and VPN bans are just getting instituted at very top level and as activists, as cryptographers, as technologists, we feel like we're always fighting a battle that's already half lost and that um all of our mitigations are just like pouring like tiny cups of water on the huge raging forest fire. And um I think I really appreciate you guys including these calls to action and things that we can take heart uh thing uh initiatives that we can contribute to. Um but yeah, I'm an applied cryptographer as well and I've been working on zero knowledge proofs and cryptography and financial privacy as well as um digital identity, privacy and digital identity. And um recently I've been feeling discouraged by yeah, like these age verification laws, VPN bans. I've been feeling discouraged by the corruption associated with cryptocurrency in our industry like at the very top. So, World Liberty Financial, you should look that up if you don't know about it. It's like the Trump administration and there's like very explicit blatant corruption um by issuing, for example, their own stable coin, uh getting Binance to buy it and not push it to their users for for in exchange for a pardon. It's super disgusting, explicit. We're all like pretending it's not happening and in fact we're grateful for the Trump administration for being so benevolent to being the crypto industry. I think it's like super disgusting. Um anyway, I'm also discouraged by the so-called compliant privacy, whereby we have private payment systems that are just backdoored to some regulator. And um this is a complete perversion of our understanding of the term privacy. So it's a privacy from your competitors, privacy from other users, but not privacy from the regulators. And I think the companies pushing this compliant privacy as if it's what we asked for, as if it's what we're promised, they should be ashamed. Anyway, this slide is what I've been feeling discouraged by. This is what I want to rant about. And I think today the focus of my talk is about basically what I've been doing to stay motivated, to stay inspired, and to help um myself and the people around me to keep fighting. So, um my talk today is going to be about use cases and revenue models that go beyond the speculation that's holding up the crypto industry. Um it's going to be about interdisciplinarity in the sense that I want to understand how change gets actually made, for example, sponsoring bills, for example, grassroots movements. Um this is beyond just like shipping a cool project that no one uses, for example. Uh this talk will be about joy and beauty uh that I find in community, things like the Web3 Privacy Now Meetup um that's just feeds me and is so important spiritually. I think a lot of activists are fed by, you know, anger and this feeling of injustice and we can forget sometimes to appreciate the joy and the beauty in each other in community. So, specifically I'm going to tell you about the community privacy residency which we organized last year last spring in Taipei. And this these were the three people in the organizing team. And we very much came together um motivated by this joint um Oh, no. Yeah. Motivated by this joint goal of creating a space for decentered communities to finally be centered to finally be prioritized and to be able to build technologies for themselves by themselves. Um so, what we noticed was that most of these crypto- cryptography or privacy-centered residencies are very very technically biased in the sense that they're focusing on researchers and engineers. And often times they do not invite like Jeremy said, they do not invite social scientists. They do not invite activists and organizers to be in the same room. And for our residency, we were very intentional to select a cohort with a balance of both technical residents as well as community advocates and organizers and designers and creatives who could help these groups of people communicate, who could understand needs from one group and that capabilities uh, from the other group. And so, yeah, I think uh, we brought together about 40 residents from over 15 countries. Um, and I'm really proud of that we achieved this diversity in the cohort. Um, so last year this ran in, uh, from February to March, um, in Taipei. And, um, we have some alumni from the residency here. We have Liam and Violet who both attended the residency. Um, and basically the residency format was yeah, a 4-week long, uh, which gave people the time to get to know each other, to, um, conceive of projects that were interesting, and then to actually ship some kind of minimal version of it. Um, so this is basically what we thought was missing is a space that is diverse and interdisciplinary and is not too rushed. So, it's enough time to, actually get deeper into discussions and, um, try and make a preliminary working version. Um, so I'm going to go through a few of the emerging themes from our residency. And, um, basically these are just a selection of the projects that, uh, were built during our residency. So, the first theme is really a methodological theme, human-centric methodologies. So, this is very much already a norm, um, actually in big companies where they start the product research from yeah, talking to the users and gathering their needs and requirements and but this is very much not the norm in in crypto, I believe. Um, so one example project, one of my favorite ones is um, this application of federated learning um, to a sex work a social for sex workers. So we had one resident Val Elefante who runs uh, this lips.social. And yeah, it is a social media platform for um, creators in the adult entertainment industry who got deplatformed for example from Instagram or deplatformed even from OnlyFans which I think is ridiculous. Um, so basically their posts and their content were um, flagged by um, the filters on Instagram as being inappropriate. And um, they were trained on data that was heavily biased. Um, and that was just designed to exclude them. So, um, this project was exploring how we could have a more uh, a fairer way to train these filters and these models uh, but at the same time to not um, have to uh, share um, personal data with these platforms. So, Val actually met um, another resident Yurego who works on federated learning. And federated learning is basically a way to flip AI model training such that um instead of submitting your data to the model uh you download the weights from the model and update them locally and then you only submit the delta of the weights. And in this way you can train the model in a private way uh without having to divulge your local data. So um Val and Yuriko actually talked to a whole bunch of their contacts um that they knew from work um from various social circles and um but that overall this is just one of my favorite projects in the uh example of interdisciplinary collaboration. Um we also had a a really really important group of people is designers and UX researchers because these people their job is to listen. Their job is to understand the needs of users. And so a lot of um very abstract cryptographic concepts such as Shamir's secret sharing uh often result in really awkward UX and um awkward UX can be very dangerous. So for example no one knows how to use PGP properly and if users are operating under some false belief of privacy then that is dangerous to them. Um yeah. So we had a resident Evie who conducted these um user tests for Shamir's secret sharing. And I actually did participate in one of the tests and I did really really embarrassingly badly. So yeah it's just like three testers asked for independent verification. So it it was something like, "Oh, your friend um your friend's secret share they recovered you with you. And now they're asking you to give them back their share." So, when I encountered the situation in the test, I just provided the share, and I was one of these two people who did not verify at all uh whether this was really my friend. So, yeah, this was really enlightening in um sort of the gap between the primitive and a usable product a safe and usable product. And again, this could only have emerged from an interdisciplinary cohort with like different sensibilities who come from different perspectives. Um I'll skip over this one. So, um we also had a bunch of people who are not technical at all. Uh and instead had experience in policy and in regulations. So, a group of people conducted this workshop on red teaming. Uh what red teaming is is basically you're presented with some kind of regulation, and your job is to find every possible loophole um in order to maliciously comply uh adversarially comply with this regulation. So, for example, um there's this regulation that companies have to delete user data uh upon the user's request. And you they were get we were given roles. Like, let's say you are a executive at Facebook meta. Uh how would you maliciously comply with this regulation while making it as difficult as possible for the user to actually achieve this. And uh putting you in that position of the adversary uh is extremely helpful in a um firstly letting us recognize these dark patterns. Uh and secondly um prompting us to rethink how regulations can be placed better. Um how these concerns can be raised to policy makers. So yeah, once again uh completely new perspective to me and to many technologists in the room. Um So yeah, I wanted to go over as well. This was actually a project by Violet who we'll hear from later on. Um so we had in our cohort um many activists and many organizers who were familiar with the social dynamics on the ground of um trying to um safely um coordinate collective actions. For example, organizing a labor strike uh while not revealing your identity to your company and not becoming um individually vulnerable, individually liable. Um and so we found that one of the needs for these um union uh labor union coordinators is to establish some kind of threshold. So they a strike is only effective past a certain threshold of people. But before that threshold is reached, nobody wants to de-anonymize themselves. After that threshold is reached, then there's strength in numbers and people are comfortable with coming forward. So, um based on this insight, um there was the prototype to allow people to anonymously form these critical thresholds. Um and I I think it was interesting that they found the a a main bottleneck was to um establish the social trust and the social verification in the first place. So, it's the equivalent of passing out like union cards. Um uh basically entry into the system itself has to be based on existing networks of social trust. So, uh yeah, I think they did actually make a demo over here. Um so, yeah, this was just a recap of last year's residency and a selection of some inspiring projects that uh show the value of interdisciplinarity. So, this year we are organizing the second iteration of the residency in Berlin in the summer. Uh we've already picked our cohort of 20 residents and once again, we are aiming for that diversity and that balance in terms of their fields of expertise, in terms of their countries of origin, in terms of their lived experiences. So, for me, this residency is a source of joy and inspiration. Um I'm very much looking forward to our next iteration this summer and once again, please reach out if you have any questions, um if you'd like to collaborate or get involved in any way. Thank you.