Privacy infrastructure vs end-user applications: Michelle Lai, Nathan Ginnever, Kieran Mesquita...

okay cool my name is uh Michelle Li and today we're going to talk about privacy infrastructure versus enduser applications um let me start with a story before we do self- intros so in 1969 we sent people to the Moon with a computer with a lot less computing power than the dumbest smartphones we have today how did that happen how did we get from there to now so one answer is we had a lot of crazy nerds who really enjoy solving intellectual problems the other answer is people want to get rich um there's a chapter titled I want to get rich in uh Chris Miller's Chip War and I think that explains where we are today which is that infrastructure has been in recent history uh been the focus of venture capitalists and shitcoin speculators and so that's why we have infrastructure fatigue today but now the tide is turning uh we're starting to hunt down applications and and so that's what we want to talk about today how we're making that switch if I can ask each of you to introduce yourselves yeah I'll kick it off my name is uh Nathan jev I am an applied cryptographer that's been working with ethereum uh ipfs distributed networks um for about 10 years now I'm working on a protocol called enclave and it's a multi- party compute Network to facilitate uh FHA and to help democratize the computation portions of the uh cryption for FHA thank you hi um my name is Kai um I've been a uh supporter of um of uh crypto decentralized private um tech for a while um I've contributed to a number of projects most recently um and for the last few years uh rail gun which is a private transaction system um for ethereum hi I'm Garrett and um yeah I've been working in decentralized infrastructure starting with making Uh custom circuit boards for fpj Bitcoin mining and ever since then been involved in infrastructure a lot in Hardware so I believe that uh decentralized infa is the best way to increase the default level of freedom for people and that's what I care about doing the most and um yeah now I work on a fund called permanent Ventures where we're investing just in decentralized infrastructure uh in general like in and out of blockchain so yeah thanks hey everyone I'm Aiden from chains saafe um and at chains saafe we build blockchains specifically for the ethereum filecoin and Polkka do communities um and then we build other Frameworks to help people interact with those blockchains and different Native programming languages um and recently we've built out Sprinter uh which gives developers access to unifying the uh chain abstraction World um and so you don't have to be worried about you know specific formats uh token formats or specific wallets but rather providing your users with the best and cheapest routes possible uh regardless of where those assets or that state lies in the web 3 space with the hope to give people the opportunity to build out their dream applications without having to worry about the complexities that go into doing that building their dreams hey I'm d lion I'm your friendly ethereum core developer focusing on consensus now I'm Sigma Prime used to be at loadstar with this lovely guy and uh yeah focusing on EX including the ethereum broad map currently focusing on sharding and P awesome great lineup um I have a question um that that may be obvious but I'd love to get your answer and um so the question is are infrastructure people good at end user apps um and how do we get better all my questions are open so pick up the mic if you want to I think that's changing and and these guys are a great example of that at chains safe for example um but in general no right I think if we're talking about how the user interacts with our protocols um maybe not so much I mean I think in like in the majority of um you know tooling around infrastructure right you you can give infrastructure people nice dashboards and all to um to like you know coordinate and like set up the whatever um they need to do and everyone keeps yelling no give me my yaml Playbook or something so clearly I think you know we can see where the uh where the preference is um so in general I think maybe no but I hope to be proven wrong yeah I I think at the end of the day it's kind of irrelevant you talk into yeah sure um at the end of the day I think it's irrelevant um you know infrastructure people are going to be building infrastructure um the problem is I think that there just aren't really application developers because we're missing so many kind of primitive components and so you know we have these Cycles where everyone builds the same thing rather than kind of people building things that work together um and I think that's why for example defi has been so sticky is because there's an ecosystem of tools that then allows for people to aggregate those things into some really interesting new things um but that hasn't really happened for Consumer applications or anything like that um and we're seeing that with chain abstraction right now where you know the point of this was to end the fragmentation but we're just R fragmenting within a different Banner this time chain abstraction um and so I think as long as we do that this is just going to persist but whether or not we're good at applications is I think not necessarily the kind of it's it's more to the greet piece that you talked about earlier right where everyone just sees the money they right now and so that's what they're focused on right right um okay so I think the the short answer is they're they're not but they're improving and part of that is because the money is moving towards application U which I think is a great thing um okay next question at what point like if if I I don't know if any of these specifically applies to your protocol I know it does to zap um where um we we were forced by the market to transition from a heavy infrastructure uh platform to more userfriendly applications we shipped snarks we made it performant and then we shipped uh trustless setups um and and uh sometime about a year ago we started refocusing um on making ourselves a lot more user friendly we were quite challenging from that perspective before and part of that is because we're token funded uh which meant that um at a certain level at a certain price level we're in Jeopardy so we were forced by the market so I wanted to know if um any of you have experiences where there was a strategic shift and if so uh how what was that like Yeah from our work in the zcash community we wanted to build something um that would Target end users uh specifically within the wallet space um and then when we went to do it we couldn't because there was Miss infrastructure and so we built something called Web zjs recently um and I think that that kind of speaks to the situation in a lot of these maybe more isoteric kind of ecosystems where we want to believe that everything is there um but everything is not there especially when you go to actually build something um and so I think we still need to fund and focus a lot on some of these things and then also just making them more accessible right if I need to learn a new API every time I want to do basically the same thing the average web developer is just not going to do that they're going to do whatever is easiest for them which totally makes sense for them and their family most likely um and so I think we're almost there uh but we need to really work with people to see how they build and what they're building and make sure that we're doing things for them and not necessarily for what we feel as infrastructure developers is the right thing to do because I think we get lost in the sauce a lot got it so ethereum interestingly is going the reverse way as you it's transitioning from a user chain to a rollup chain sorry who is ethereum ethereum L1 it's now like with the rollup Centric road map you would say that the chain is even less usable because we have all this fragmentation and we are taking this trade of for scalability I see so ethereum first started as a product an application and then now more of an infrastructure yeah yeah and so at Enclave we're a newer protocol so we've kind of come into this with the understanding that having a user base is important so it's been quite the struggle we spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can take uh these these pieces these building blocks of cryptography and find um just the just enough to piece them together to where it works in in like the most duct tape aped together way possible and so that we're we're pumping out an application that at the end of the day um would feel more like ethereum on its launch where you know you you download the wallet and you you know hit a few buttons um do a little tutorial and hopefully you're running on a a nice secure private Network right so like almost like an MVP kind of application on top of the infrastructure correct yeah we're targeting voting um and the protocol and the underlying cryptography is a large uh motivator for why we've chosen that specific application because it's an easier one to pull off got it great yeah um well I think you know if even if you're just a pure infrastructure play um like at some point someone's going to have to use it in order for that to be any activity or for they to be use right um and I think time and time again um with um you know new technology and all you kind of have this point where like all right cool we'll have this amazing launch whatever like it's it's ready to be used whatever and then um people actually start using it and then you realize oh wait all of these assumptions that we made about how it would be used uh we got to throw them out the window CU like you know people go and and do things differently like oh you know the iPhone um four right had the little antenna in the place where you hold the thumb uh where you put your thumb usually and it would just drop calls and all right um and you can of find the same thing in in crypto applications so I think at the very least even if you know the ux sucks initially you need to have something out there in order to um inform your like architectural decisions and like you know where you're actually um you know putting uh putting productive hours otherwise like you're quite possibly just building the wrong thing I think that's a good reflection like you know figuring out what to build is a very organic natural thing and you don't have to yeah yeah like having a whole idea in your head about what it's going to be at the very beginning and sticking to that is not the best way to go I think it's just like what you're said like building a little more selflessly kind of it's nice thinking about the others as infrastructure Builders it's like what we should all be doing right like thinking about the needs rather than the V the technical vision of what we want to it's so fun yeah and I think a big part of that is understanding when you're building an open source and that's what we all should be thinking when we're building right that we're a part of the peer-to-peer open sour Community first and foremost right web 3 should be an afterthought really um and when you're doing that you really need to take into consideration intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and if you're not considering both the kind of open nature of it while considering how you're going to monetize and sustain yourself which also needs to be front of mind you're definitely not going to be a part of the long-term kind of zeitgeist right you're just going to be building for whatever hype cycle and we've seen it you know some of the best and brightest um raising all the money in the world don't make it um and obviously we can do a lot better than that y okay I wanted to move on to uh a philosophical question um so the question is do we want invisible infrastructure or conspicuous infrastructure and taking us back to the 1990s um Intel started this relatively genius campaign where um um it was the moment where PC manufacturers were starting to compete ferociously and Intel said they're not a PC manufacturer but they Supply the chips and so without that direct connection to Consumers they ran a campaign where they highlighted how important it was as a consumer that you want an Intel chip inside your PC so which is why we get Intel Inside stickers on some of our pie I don't know if they still do it it's been it's been a while um um and that generates demand even if they don't have the direct connection at the point of sale um so as infrastructure providers do you want users to know that you're underneath the stack or should we Aspire towards a world where they only need to choose the application the front end and you make everything work seamlessly behind I want to say invisible but it's incredibly frustrating that you see rollups offering extremely secure solution with all the quad rails and then some random project comes deploys a multi seek with no guarantee whatsoever and just captures all the users in a terribly insecure fashion so yeah yeah I agree I I was going to say it's actually incredibly important I think that the users know what's uh that we built something under the stack that they can trust you know the security is is very important in the space and it it's important to know that you know it's not just the developers that you know we building with the right intentions but the research was done um in an open Manner and everything has been peer-reviewed uh and then you get that stamp of approval because you know you're trusting a lot of things with these networks I'd like to hear from Garrett as the only one the only VC on the panel I think he's not necessarily married to infrastructure or applications yeah but so I've always also just wanted to say it should be invisible people don't care whatever whatever but when you brought up the Intel Inside example like they turned this whole idea of like the infrastructure inside of a machine into a meme and that caught on and then everybody wanted it and I think we should leverage the same mimetics that are like native to us as humans like we should like latch on to like say like oh like you know ZK inside or whatever it is right like I think uh that'll be that would be huge if we could bring that into like the broader Collective Consciousness where people demand certain like cryptographic assurances that like their privacy is you know considered at least like yeah I I I think the point to highlight though is I mean infrastructure doesn't necessarily need to be um hidden it can be quite visible but it needs to be visible in uh the context of like what properties am I getting out of this right um so I guess you know taking the Intel inside um example um I'm I see the Intel Inside sticker and the properties that have been led to believe is this is going to be reliable it's you know a standardized instruction set at the time time at least so it's going to be compatible with all of these different programs that are compiled um you know presumably high performance right like I'm I'm interested in those properties um when I see that sticker I'm not interested in the fact that it has a fancy glowy eye on um on the like a little hologram sticker on it right um you know it's like ZK okay well I slep ZK on it um I'm not interested in like ZK for ZK I'm interested in it because oh it's either going to give me some privacy like benefits or it's going to give me some scalability so I think infrastructure it's good for infrastructure to be visible right it's needed for there to be like trust but it needs to be in the Contex of what properties am I getting as a user so you know I I love the emotions about these things but there's you know some tangible ways we can do this as a community but I think people aren't prepared to hear it um so the way that open source started with was with the copy left movement um and so something like GPL which was introduced by Richard stalman the whole intent and purpose was to ensure that not us as developers or people developing things would have access to free code but rather end users would be protected from things they can't understand and so we can actualize These Feelings by deciding that we as a community actually care about things like GPL but we do not and so there is ways we can do this and it's not through imposing our opinion it's not through imposing our beliefs but it's through actually leveraging licenses is the original open source license to make sure that people cannot literally do the things we don't want as a community with this and so if we actually stand for the things we believe in we need to come together and ensure that there is actual protections that come into these things and it's not just wow I wish people would do better things with the things I'm building um and so you know I I believe that we just need to go back to our roots and you know the cipher Punk movement and all of this actually a lot of it and is built upon a lot of this kind of copy left primitive based thinking um I think On a related note if I can contribute and also related to what uh lion said um it's it's almost like you have a very secure layer and then you have some random application with two out of three multi- it's almost like Intel inside and spyware in the middle but I as a consumer I don't really care what's inside I want the whole stack to deliver the promise uh that that I'm being told when I buy a thing when I use a thing so I I wish I hope that there can be some sort of um a collaborative messaging or kind of Association that we need like a third party like L2 beit perhaps yeah yeah a neutral third party tell me if it's really doing what it promises to do yeah yeah which L2 bit I think has been extremely successful at the mission of helping users understand the trade-off of rollups and basically call out the people that just deploy a multis seek and pretend to be a rollup and they have done an excellent job of communicating a very complex tradeoff space into these little squares like the pizza so having something for applications would actually be quite cool awesome and hope that they don't get captured um okay final question if we have time um everyone is competing for abdabs now how how do you think you can compete just work on ethereum and you don't care because everyone is there already naan yeah I think I don't really see a lot of I I don't think of fit as competing so much right now I I think that more so we need to find more collaboration to get what we want together to be to be out I think there's still a lot of um a lot of work that needs to be done a lot of kind of people working on the same things and not coordinating to get certain components uh better faster stronger and so I don't really look for competition so much in the app space as looking at another app developer and saying hey how can we work together um I think I think my answer to that question is uh um get sick of competing and just become the of yourself you are the application I mean I would agree go where the people are like uh yeah if there's a massive interest and yeah people building on ethereum go there sure but uh appeal to people's emotions you know like uh just uh yeah be be interesting I suppose um yeah yeah I think kind of what makes us as a community not just open source peer-to-peer Tech is cryptoeconomics and until we find a way to achieve that collaboration and that lack of competition through incredibly I guess futuristic ways of empowering and redistributing the weight associated with decision-making in these protocols which right now is basically buyable in any exchange that to me is what will kind of push this wave of innovation with applications Because unless we're able to ensure that people have that power and have that control you know when we go to uh non or I should say to traditional conferences the big question is well what's the difference between these captured blockchains and web 2 product X and the answer is not much um but we can do better and we will do better but we have to remember that this is what we're working towards is that collaboration piece is that post scarcity economic mindset where the world isn't just Zero Sum and is a positive sum based future future that we can all work towards yeah and that comes from like as wide a distribution of like tokens and those kind of systems like as possible right so as little as possible like direct VC investment which is so I was going to say how are you going to tell the VCS that yeah I don't think VCS are bad right like Capital exists somewhere and we cannot build things without capital and so I I nothing I just said is meant to vilify any participant in our community we need VCS and and we have some incredible people who support us who help make the journey possible just like anyone like Lion when he was building loar um I think what's important is to make sure that the end game is to make sure that those people understand that without the widest distribution possible as the endgame their value capture is basically impossible and we're just waiting for the French Revolution but I guess it can also be selective about which VCS because I think there is quite a widespread of philosophies at the different firms I think something that we're seeing more and more of now is like protocols raising is specifically ones that are like have Ambitions of being very decentralized not taking direct investment anymore this is like relatively new thing I guess but leveraging uh now that we have interest bearing uh coins like Dy and staked ether deposit those in a smart contract and take the interest let the investors keep their principle reward them with your new tokens by slowly emitting tokens to them and that's a system that's totally open where anybody can participate and it's not locked in to just a few Insider VCS and I think in general uh yeah we could see like that causes wider distribution which makes everybody happier even like exchange listing teams are much happier with that kind of system because there's not so many insiders that are going to sell on retail and I think yeah moving in that direction makes a lot of sense so I think the role of the VC will play is changing in that way I think we have a lot of flexibility too because projects have a timeline to them so you you can start off with a more owned model um in in capital ownership and then start to allow the Community to purchase out that ownership and there's a lot of different methods and models for doing that all right I think that's all the time we have we are a bit behind schedule thank you everyone thank you all the panelists [Applause]