Welcome to East to Ethan to East. Hello everyone. I'm Danny Vard. I'm a PhD student at Cornell Tech in New York from Barcelona and I'm going to talk a bit our about our recent project liquefaction. Um first I want to ask you do you want to own an ape a board ape for less than a dollar?
If so, I'm going to show you how today. Um, but I'm going to ask you first. Um, who sent this transaction? Yeah, Vitalic sent this transaction. How did you tell that?
Well, there's many ways you can tell. First of all, by the ENS name. Also, by the history. It It's an account that has a lot of ETH. Also, there's a bunch of social signs and I mean he may have have told people by like his Twitter address or or many channels.
Uh but what you're making here is something we call the single entity address ownership assumption. You're basically assuming that that one address is owned by one person. Uh it makes sense for that to be the case. I mean would you share your keys with someone else? No.
If you did that, then the person you share the keys with could just steal your money. Well, we showed that could be not the case if you do it carefully. Uh what we kind of thought to kind of uh build a liqufaction is that the keys are just used for signing. But like what you actually use in web 3 are the signatures, not the keys. So what if we don't even like care about the key and we just work on top of the signatures?
How can we do that? We basically encumber a key. Key encumbrance is hiding the key inside a TE. You can do that with MPC for those uh tea haters. Uh we do think that TE's are great and um much easier to use.
So we'll just assume that we are working with TE's now. But what can you do when you hide your key inside the TE? You can sign messages through the TE. So now I'm a user. I want to send a transaction using the address linked to that key.
I will just ask the TE to sign that transaction and it will give me the signed transaction. Why is that more powerful than just owning the key in the first place? You can enforce restrictions on what you can sign and you can not sign. There's uh um well, if you do that, you can then no longer sign any messages and you could for instance uh if you own some DAO tokens, there's a proposal coming on uh now, but you really don't care about the result, but there may be someone that does care about the result. After all, someone proposed the proposal.
So you could just share uh the like you could could rent the Dow boat for that specific proposal and sell them. How can you do that? You basically uh enforce this kind of restriction inside the TE and uh restrict the signature for the DA vote to whoever pays you the most. An auction system for instance. And imagine that person won the auction because he really cares about that proposal.
then he can say vote for Carol to the KT and it will return the vote for Carol signed with that key. But what if that person tries to transfer the DAO tokens to another account? The TE will say nope, you cannot do that and it's going to restrict you from from like stealing the tokens. Well, uh this is what we kind of uh started with. We call that dark dowo.
It's a blog post from 2018 uh by Philip Diane. Uh he's the founder of uh Flashbots and also a previous member member of our group. Uh but then we kind of thought further last year about it and we found that there's so much potential this this key incumbrance system and that we were just using it to sell Dow votes but it can be used in many many more places. So uh liqufaction is basically a wallet system for privately liqufying blockchain assets any asset not just Dow votes it's uh built on top of Oasis because Oasis does not only provide us with uh the privacy coming from TE's but also with the livveness coming from a blockchain and uh we call this uh kind of uh like restrictions you add on top of these encumbrance policies everything is written in solidity and Everything is super easy to use. But yeah, what are encumbrance policies?
They are basically the restrictions you add on top of a liqufaction wallet, on top of the private key that's encumbered. You could have a restriction, for instance, that only allows you to sign typed messages. And then you could liquefy that restriction once again to only allow for Dow votes and add another policy that uh restricts for metaverse login. So now I could give you the DAO votes to sign uh to vote uh for a specific proposal and then someone else the metaverse login and you could both use the same account, same address like the the assets that are laying in the same account for different purposes. Um but yeah, that's what we basically do.
You can have two people agree on sharing an account that has different assets and use them differently. There's many many applications that come from bat. Uh I'm going to not go through them uh one by one but there's so like these three then we got like the dark I mentioned sell locked or vested token which uh semi liquid is doing now. There's uh bypassing identity air drops uh some really clean implementation of uh privacy pools private fundraising. Uh you all heard about uh Constitution Dow dusting attack mitigation overlay smart contracts on top of uh blockchains that don't allow them.
But what I'm here to talk about is what we built. It's the take my ape demo. This uh demo basically allows anyone to own an ape. What does owning an ape mean in that sense? When it comes to liquefaction, owning the ape is basically being able to do anything you would with the ape, but transferring it to someone else because if you could transfer it to anyone, you could just steal it.
So, I'm going to show this example. I actually uh how that works is you every 15 minutes an auction is opened. Anyone can bid in rows. I want this ape for seven cents, I think. So, I now get to own it for uh 15 minutes just for seven cents.
And uh here I can see you own the AP 8180. You can see how to auction uh all the steps in the how to use. There's a couple of videos here showing it. But I think the cool part is what you can actually do. Uh what do you get from owning the AP?
legally get full copyright ownership on top of the aid according to Yugalab's uh copyright license. So for instance, that's uh IC3 my lab hosting a website with the ape I own. What if I don't want them to use that image because it's I own copyright. I could just restrict them from doing it. And now in about 10 seconds it's going to blur the image.
But you can do even like more things. You can log into places where you can only log in if you have the ape. For example, let's see if it blurred the image. Yeah, it blurred the image. It even put a mask on this uh cute ape here.
But uh I can now uh go here. This is a website that allows me to kind of play with the ape if I own it. And I can try to connect my wallet. The wallet I'm trying to connect is the encumbered wallet that's that has the private key hidden in the TE. So, how do I do that?
I go to my wallet here and I connect with wallet connect. It's going to ask me for the uh a couple of things. And now I can just sign in. And that basically what signing in usually in blockchain terms does is it asks you to sign a nons that the website. and I just signed the nons.
What's doing now is it's asking for the smart contract in oasis to sign that nons. And once it has the signature, it's going to send it back to the website. And I'm signed in with the 0x7 this account. If I go to for instance ether scan, you can see here that this account owns an ape and I just logged into a website with account an account that owns the ape. So now I can go into that website and see the ape I own.
I can play with it. Well, there's many things you can do. There's even if there's like a live event happening, I think there's the board ape uh yacht club uh pool party in Lisbon sometime a year. You could even go into that party for 5 cents, which is pretty crazy. Um you can even sign any message you want with that account to kind of prove ownership to whoever um you want.
I could It's just the same idea. You go here And now when I'm back uh here I can be like hello e them and same thing it asks me to sign this message approve and here and I can publish it. So yeah, and you can sign any message, any transaction as long as the transaction is not transferring the ape to another account. So yeah, I um I encourage you all to try to steal the ape from me anytime. It uh it now works when the gas price is under two guay.
There's been some crazy days these past two days. There was a meme con launch three days ago. There was uh some pep pectra thing happening yesterday. So the gas price has been crazy high. Uh you may probably like see it's it's really really high now.
But uh whenever it's under two way you can steal it from me and you can play with it. You can even after one month after owning the ape you can uh get the private key out of the ET and actually own an account that at some point own a board ape. So yeah [Music] um this is uh what we have done and uh this is the website for anyone to to try to steal the app from me and this is the paper uh the main author is James Osken I I worked on it uh and uh but there's many adversarial use cases as I mentioned I mean no one wants um people to start sharing soulbound tokens that maybe like steal their identities or selling Dowo tokens in the first place. So another project that uh my lab worked in a couple of years ago was called complete knowledge which is a way to kind of stop liquefaction. It uh it's complete knowledge is a proof that the person actually knows the private key.
So it's the it can only be you can only create a complete knowledge proof if the key is not encumbered. uh there may start being some Dows that start implementing this as a kind of protection to encumbrance. Uh but there's many also good use cases of liquefaction. So it's kind of a double-edged sword that one of the edges um can be protected with complete knowledge. Uh so the conclusion of the talk is that ownership will be harder to determine.
Now you could have an account that on Ethereum shows that someone owns an ape and has some Dow tokens but it not be the case that only one person owns both. Uh now now account sharing is possible and you can uh you can't enforce ownership uh constraints uh unless you start using uh complete knowledge and yeah uh everything's happened privately. So when people say we are not going to allow the logation on a DAO they better start using CK. So thank you very much and if you have any questions feel free to ask. [Applause]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.