# Guerrilla Interoperability by Andreas Tsamados || Ethereum Privacy Stack, Devconnect 2025

- Speakers: [Andreas Tsamados](https://streameth.org/speakers/andreas-tsamados)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2026-01-09
- Duration: 20:33
- 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, privacy stack, devconnect, 2025, eps25, pse, privacy stewards of ehtereum, ethereum foundation, ef, Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-CqG2zeHKjZ4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqG2zeHKjZ4

## Description

Andreas Tsamados from Fileverse talks us through what he calls Guerilla Interoperability.  Stating that main feature of privacy shouldn't be just end-to-end encryption, but rather ablity to take your friends with you, he goes throug Revolutionary optimism, rejections of big corpos rules and urges to act collectively.

Ethereum Privacy Stack is a global privacy summit during Devconnect 2025 bringing together Ethereum builders, protocol maintainers, and advocates. 
Featuring Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, Andy Guzman, Polymutex, Ameen Soleimani, and 30+ speakers on 2 stages, celebrating privacy acceleration.

Ethereum Privacy Stack: 
http://eps25.web3privacy.info

Organized by 
Web3Privacy Now & Privacy Stewards of Ethereum

Web3Privacy now collective: http://web3privacy.info
Privacy Stewards of Ethereum: https://pse.dev/

## Transcript

[applause] Okay, great. Can you hear me? Yeah, perfect. Uh, thanks for waiting. Um, little technical issue. So, today I'll be talking about something uh quite practical. I'm here to give uh some advice, maybe instill a little bit of uh revolutionary optimism and maybe uh naive optimism but uh the title of the talk is guerilla interoperability. So we'll talk of course about privacy but I think it is important to actually cover uh an element a component to get to privacy for a mass audience that is often maybe maybe too often uh forgotten and not mentioned. So I'll get right into it. Uh just FYI I'm one of the co-founders of FAverse. We're the ones behind dedux dsh sheets new. We're an alternative to Google Workspace but and to an encrypted and decentralized. So let's get started. The premise of my talk is very much based on this. A good majority of the internet is now filled with what we call hostile architecture. For those of you who don't know, hostile architecture is really what uh you find in most big cities. It's uh things on benchions, benches, in front of stores, in front of banks that make the life of homeless people but the general population as well very difficult and forces them to be out of public sight. So despite those people already living in precarious and difficult conditions, the city makes sure that their life becomes even more hell. And the analogy that I want to make is that a lot of the internet in the open web today is starting to look like it's filled with hostile architecture. So I want to get a little bit into why and how we fight uh fight it. So a majority of the internet users today use uh two app stores, one of two office suites, one of two mobile oss, one of three cloud platforms. And as a result, the technologies comprising the internet we call the internet uh the network called the internet uh have come to represent a significant means of control over the creation, access and dissemination of large volumes of information. Now okay uh this is from from Cloudflare I believe. uh this is what most of internet traffic and uh the the top domains look like today. So you recognize those names. Uh all those companies are centralized quasi monopolies and the fact that the internet is so much based on those centralized cloud services means that developers are forced to move around their arbitrary rules and obstacles that really make no sense. It forces apps, not just crypto apps, to be really never tapping into their full potential because they are constrained within a world garden that they have no control over. And it is a process that is uh very well understood and quite well described as well. You all know Corey Doctoro. I imagine he calls it the process of entitification of the internet. I quite like it despite the the aggressive terminology. But he describes really three uh uh stages um for those platforms. One uh they are good to their users. They promise the world to them. Second, they're starting to be very good to c to business users, business customers. And third, once all those user groups are locked in and captured, they start to enshify the internet for everyone else. meaning they log them in, they become as extractive as possible, they remove dev access for the for you. For those of you that were building on Facebook uh mini apps, you'll remember what I mean. They jack up fees, they add tracking ads, etc. The powerful entities that we're describing also use uh other means. They use DRM, DMCA, and uh there's been this long uh waged war against general purpose uh uh computers uh and making sure they turn them into appliances that only run authorized code rather than whatever you uh you might want. And these prevent users from modifying, repairing or innovating upon the systems they own. Of course uh this is not uh uh this has not gone unnoticed. Uh there are rules regulations around the world including the GDPR in Europe, the CCPA in California that have attempted to constrain uh those uh those uh really destructive uh uh developments on the internet. But really they pay lip service to data portability and don't actually constrain incubance that much which uh always find ways to circumvent those new regulations. For example, try exporting your data from uh WhatsApp, Tik Tok, you end up with an unre unreadable huge JSON file which even if you're technical, good luck making sense of it or using it in your uh next app. So why is that related to privacy? I I'll get a bit more specific now with my talk. Um there is a problem that all privacy uh app developers and builders are very aware of and it is a fact that okay you might be speaking to a room of 100 people that are interested in privacy but fundamentally if you separate those people from their social circles your app will never get the adoption and the guarantees you're offering people will never get that wide distribution that uh people deserve. So for those of you who tried to onboard your family to Signal two years ago, uh it was really difficult. Good luck getting them from Viber or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger onto Signal and you really had to choose between your own privacy and staying with your social circles. So what we want to really do here is we want the value proposition to shift from abandon your friends to get a better private experience with the friends you already have. And this brings me to uh uh one of the core points of this talk which is that one of the most important privacy feature isn't and to an encryption which of course it is a very important uh feature. It is really the ability to take your friends with you. So how do you do that? Uh you can take a very aggressive way. You can take one that is uh more uh uh you know that uh that leverages the closed systems you're already using in order to break out users and we'll go into those. Yeah. Okay. So, one second. Okay. Um Guerilla interoperability. So I try to uh uh write a definition that's not too heavy. Uh so let me uh read it through. What I mean by guerilla interoperability is really a userdriven tactical resistance where individuals or small actors repurpose the infrastructure of a dominant platform and system often using stealth and ingenuity to reclaim their data self-s sovereignty or the functionality in the service of a better alternative. And case in point is this uh I'm forgetting the name of the of the artist, but uh it's a group of artists, a collective actually that we're building uh uh clothing or that we're creating clothing that um adapt to the hostile architecture that we find in our in our cities. And I think it's a it's a perfect example of what I want to describe for the digital world. So uh in other words, Gerilla interoperability is a bit like the right to repair for your digital life. Uh if they won't build it, we will and they will be forced uh to accept it. I'm quite happy that a day ago or two days ago, Vitalik talked about something quite similar on Twitter. So this user was complaining about the fact that uh delivery apps have a tipping mechanism that is very much uh constrained and make sure that you only have very few choices. It's quite hostile to towards the user and you don't really have ways to uh bypass uh those uh those limitations. And Vitalik was proposing that okay when you're interacting with apps that are really constraining your autonomy uh it would be great to have maybe at the OS level a way to bypass or force those systems to uh you know have a different UI or maybe present you with options that speak more to you and your values. So this is really what uh uh the the purpose of Guerrilla interoperability is and uh it was a very timely uh example. So one last time uh guerrilla interoperability just to make sure is really not about attacking a specific company although a little bit uh it is mostly about defending the people's uh right to self-s sovereignty. So how do we do this? Uh there are two parts to my talk. One is more cultural, the other is more technical. It's mainly based around advice, recommendations, etc. This is a picture of a pigeon I took uh in my village. Uh I thought it represented my point quite adequately and uh what we like to call um a culture of revolutionary optimism. So what do we mean by that? Revolutionary optimism is really the active uh conviction that human agency our capacity to act to build uh to struggle can reshape the internet for the better. It's based on a clear understanding of the forces directed against us and not just pretending that everything is fine or everything is already settled. We're in a fatal fatality. It's impossible to change the internet today. No, it is. The internet is in its teenage years. Uh nothing is set in stone yet. So it's time to actually be more active about our will to change it. What does it mean? Some recommendations. Reject the rules that you're imposed on uh that have been imposed on you more often. It doesn't mean necessarily reject all the terms and conditions of every app that you're using. It's really just have that reflex of saying no. Why? Because the next thing when you say no to an app is okay what's the alternative I just said no to Facebook Messenger what's the alternative and there you discover signal session matrix etc. Another is to really become a an aggressive shill when it comes to new technologies that you respect that protect the values that you you abide by and that can subvert the status quo. And finally, act publicly, collectively, and outside their rules of actions. Uh because if you do it alone, you know, you might screen I know my rights to the police officer that stops you. If nobody is there to film or support you, you know, good luck. Second part is really the more uh technical counterpositioning. Uh there's really never been a better time for building apps that impose your rules of engagement with uh the internet, with the open web, and with the systems that you use. Uh we like to call it internally peace through excessive cryptography. And it's based on a few things including uh what what we call uh the new infrastructure for for those apps which are built on open standards. I won't go over everything here. It's really just for you to take a a picture for the developers uh in uh in the room to get a sense of what I mean by new infrastructure for apps built on open standards. There really two essential pillars. One is community computers or public blockchains. They have strict global consensus, credible neutrality, computational and data integrity. Uh they have interapp composibility thanks to smart contracts. Uh you don't need to ask the permission for a certain protocol to uh to be able to use your data. If you actually have just two smart contracts uh uh interacting, for those of you on Farcaster, you're very familiar with what I'm describing. You might be on your feed but actually you're also interacting with three other protocols because the smart contracts are represented through some user action inside the interface of Farcaster. The other are peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks are really what scaled the early days of the open web until 2010 2009 a third of all internet traffic was just peer-to-peer. it was Bittorin traffic and there were some limitations to those systems and those are now really complemented by uh public blockchains. But just briefly, peer-to-peer networks are scalable, they're hard to attack, they're modular, they're easy to recover, easy to join, easy to exit, and self-configurable. So all those things boil down to self-s sovereignty. Next uh final slide with uh a lot of words I promise. Uh what uh what kind of new primitives and standards can you leverage for your own privacy app for your uh a your uh your uh self sovereignty focused app. There is uh today a lot that has come out of the past 15 years of building censorship resistant money that can be reused for also non-financial activity and applications. You have programmable accounts, objective identities. Uh we have today uh scalable proving systems. We have proof carrying data for all of you that have used the defconnect app. You have used proof carrying data that protects your privacy without actually compromising uh uh your security. You have portable social graphs. You had content addressing ZKTLS etc. Now I want to just double click on ZKTLS because it's one of the latest primitives that I really think speaks to that concept of guerilla interoperability. So forcing closed systems to actually allow you uh to build apps that are more uh um that speak more to their uh users without necessarily either breaking their terms or conditions or getting their permission to offer their users an alternative. So ZKTLS is really a technology that creates a cryptographic bridge between private secure interaction and a public uh verifiable one. In other words, it lets us plug into a dominant platform without its permission to offer users a new service or a better alternative. One last point about that, you can really think about it as uh the ability to turn personal data on a centralized platform into a portable verifiable asset. breaking the monopolistic control that enables what we described before as entitification and allowing competitors to build better user centric alternatives. So you put all that together, what do you get? You get really decentralized apps that protect as much as possible your autonomy, your privacy and are actually quite beneficial also to your security. I won't go over everything here. It's really for people to take a picture and also I don't have much time but you can see the the the radical difference between uh the the trust components control components the difficulty of exiting the system between a centralized cloud app and a decentralized app built with a stack that I described just before what can you get with that uh quick moment of uh uh self-promotion. Uh so Fiverr has built two apps that are currently uh uh available publicly available. One is really an alternative to Google Docs. It's called Ducks. It looks like that. Why is it special really to give you an example of how do you boil down or how do you package all the primitives I described before in order to create a good alternative. So Falmer is open source. It is built on open standards. You can bulk import data from other platforms. You don't need to reveal your identity or create an account even to start using the app. It is built in such a way that if another app that is based on smart contracts or can read uh smart contracts can use filever without ever asking us the permission. It is built in a way which uh passes a walk away test. So, if tomorrow my team and I turn evil or decided to uh leave the production of uh of our apps, you'd still be able to access all your data, decrypt it, and continue even using the app by downloading the static uh web page from IPFS. I have one minute left, so I'll accelerate a little bit. We also have dcs.new. I'll just describe one cool thing about it just again to shill those core primitives that we've developed all those years in the crypto space uh which is you can invite let's say 50 people using their ENS or their uh uh email address and when they arrive on your document your spreadsheet they do not need to reveal their identity they can compute a proof locally that they're part of the permission set of your document for that we're using the semifor contracts by the PSC team and it's verifiable on chain. It preserves their identity completely and yet it gives very similar UX to what we all use today like uh Google Workspace, notion etc. I'll finish just with one slide. Sorry, I'm a bit over time. Ah, user sub use apps. Uh I like to finish usually my slides with uh with that. Uh the first point of action I would say is just start using those apps. A lot of them are built on the primitives on the core primitives I described before. It's worth your time. I'm not saying port all your data already from Google, Microsoft, etc. to those apps. But it's important to do even the bare minimum which is start using them understanding why they're special and how you can help them uh develop better UX. I had a video prepared, but we'll keep it for next time. If you're interested in talking more, we're at the privacy booth. If you want a floppy disc, come talk to me later. Thank you. [applause] >> Okay, thank you very much, Andreas. Uh, we've got time for one question, and that is, were the slides built on Fileverse? >> Uh, so if you go on ducks.new, you can click a button, it transforms the document into a slide as well. But uh it's not there yet in terms of full feature parity but it's coming very soon. Slides, email and much more. Okay. Thank you very much. That was a really fascinating talk. Thank you so much. [applause]