ethOS + dGEN1: Self sovereign OS + Hardware

[Music] hey everyone my name is Marcus I'm building uh ethos um so the first question is what is eos so three years ago we um fored Androids more specifically graphos and basically we started building uh ethereum putting ethereum into the OS layer because we think that basically current os's see eum as more you know as an app but we want to really leverage to protocol so what the first thing that we did was basically put a light note on it and um yeah and um so for example we have uh on the uh on EOS we have a system wallet or Os level wallet so we took basically a signer put it into the OS and any app can basically connect to it and make signature requests to the user and the uh upgrade for the users they don't have to switch apps or anything and it just works there's also basically uh upgrades to privacy and security and um basically the reason is uh it doesn't do any outbound internet transactions so you also don't need any internet to uh sign anything also yeah as I mentioned before we put uh right now on ethos we have two light client proxy so um when we first started we uh wanted to put a the first thing that we wanted to was put a light note on it and at the time we didn't have much to choose from uh so we took the GE light node put it into into the OS as a system server and basically what happened was it uh really turned the phone into a pocket warmer uh the battery really really uh drained pretty quickly but it did work when you uh had a stable internet connection it would connect to peers and then you would have a local RPC with which you can send transactions uh get blockchain data and also any app could connect to this RPC yeah as I mentioned right now we have Helios and the Nimbus verified proxy they're both currently light client proxies not full light clients because of the merch the um uh ge light node stopped working because the beacon chain uh was added to ethereum and so right now basically you still need an centralized RPC but it does verify some pieces of data that it gets from this RPC so this is pretty cool and also like for the ux for the user we wanted to make it so that it's like as simple as turning on and off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi you can turn on your light client and just like have a local RPC on your phone and so uh this brings me like to the first issue that we have basically There is almost no mobile native dabs currently so um basically I'm a big fan of like like native dabs um currently the uh like all of the dabs are like web dabs and then there are some that are progressive web apps but they still face the platform risk of you know Apple and Google can shut you down if you are a pwa and so basically what we created last week actually is like a um basically an app wrapper that is a native it looks and feels like a native lab and but it actually opens up a web view that auto injects the OS level wallet into the webt so for a user it's just like you know opening AA and uh the wallet is connected and you can start like um basically uh you know doing transactions and so um this uh brings me to basically our announcement from last month we uh uh announc our first Hardware so basically what we uh first did when we first started was basically bring your own device we have a we have still have a web installer where you can basically buy a pixel by yourself at a local store it has to be bootload or unlocked you connect your phone and it just installs ethos on it for you but like people ran into some issues so basically you know because you had to get a specific pixel and it had to be bootload or unlocked and some carriers actually lie about it being bootload or unlocked and so basically we then started like uh selling pixel pixel 7 a uh running EOS but then we we also came into a roadblock and basically the the roadblock there was that uh it's very hard to reliably get pixels and so we were just like hey let's do some hardware and so we started talking with some phone manufacturers and they sent us like some phones that they did in the past but they all really looked bad and we were just thinking okay nobody's going to replace their like iPhone with you know uh random crypto phone and so we thought to ourselves hey let's first make a really cool fun an exciting secondary device that you know because it's a secondary device it doesn't have to be boring and basically it's called the D one because it's our very first device and it's our first device on our journey that we want to like like our big mission is like self soverign Hardware um and basically what is self- soverign Hardware I'm glad you asked um so basically I wrote a blog post about it last year and for me self-or and Hardware is where basically not only the uh OS that runs on top of it is open source which we have currently ethos is fully open source but also the hardware is open and inspectable like literally from the uh CPU instruction all the way to the app it's a big mission but I think it's very important because currently with like um if you look at the current Hardware wallet landscape for example if you take a ledger you really rely on security for obscurity and that's very very bad especially if you're storing a large amounts of crypto on it and basically um not only that but also basically uh last year uh there was like this big controversy if you remember the Ledger they uh announced like this Ledger recovery program where they basically said like yeah uh with a firmware update we can extract our private keys and it was like oh my God uh okay so basically if a ledger uh can a firmware update can extract your private key what stops a malicious actor from pushing a a malicious firmware update it's basically the uh Ledger firmware signing key now I assume and I hope that they hold it very dearly and very secure but this is like a huge trust assumption for like every ledger to be secured by basically one uh Ledger firway signing key so this is like very bad and so for uh self Hardware it's like a natural use case for crypto because you don't have to trust there's no trusted modules everything is open and like that's the one of the like big big things with like the current phone landscape like the iPhones is like the worst because it's like okay closed OS and closed Hardware you can inspect it on any level but with Android it's a little better you can inspect the OS but you there's still like proprietary Blobs of code like for example like Play services and like uh device drivers for Hardware which they don't allow you to open source just like um Ledger they can't like open source like uh some things on the like low level stuff and so this is like you know very bad as as as soon as you have crypto uh in it as well because you're like okay I have this phone it's has uh you know uh this OS and it's open source but there's still like some trusted like Blobs of code uh that are closed source and you can't you don't know what they do and so basically yeah that's like our uh big mission and yeah the DJ one is like our first step towards admission