# Lost in transition | Hira Sidiqqi (April 2024) - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2024-10-07 - Duration: 41:08 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-QUm909X56Qw - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUm909X56Qw ## Description Join us on Meetup to keep track of our events in Berlin: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu... See you at the next one! --- Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/5y9Y5ywZC7pSEqpV9 --- Twitter: @BerlinMeetup ## Transcript hi everyone um so today the talk is not going to be very like educative or about a new de tool but it's going to be more like a philosophical discussion so I want you all to like put on your thinking hats and start thinking with me as we progress through the presentation so first of all I want to start by asking here who knows what a profile is like like like an internet profile so yeah so so like you have a Facebook profile or LinkedIn profile or like a profile at whatever platform how many people here have at least one profile so the entire room how many people here have at least five profiles still the entire room how many people here have more than 10 profiles still like you see like we we have like a bunch of different profiles on the internet okay now coming to wallet addresses how many people here have at least one wallet address entire room how many people have at least five wallet addresses still the entire room more than 10 maybe okay still the entire room okay this is this is a good one more than 20 yeah I think like this is a developer room I think I I have more than 40 because I just use them as burner addresses so yeah so this is exactly what we are going to talk about what is happening why do we have so many profiles so many wallet addresses and like how are we thinking about these things so since I told you this is going to be a philosophical discussion let's start by the very beginning so what was web 1.0 web 1.0 in did we have profiles in that one did we have email addresses we had email addresses so is the email a profile yeah maybe maybe not okay let's just say that it was not a profile but web 1.0 was static and contextless it was just like a oneway communication Channel people could maybe read the news get some entertainment and that was about it and uh it's not open is it now okay yeah I think I was out enough um but people could not really interact with anything they saw on web 1.2 since there was no context so Yahoo was a perfect example who has used Yahoo do we have okay so we have enough tolder people then came Web 2.0 in Web 2.0 contextual interactions were introduced so the internet evolved a little bit and now it let you interact with the content that was being presented as well so you could not only just read or see content but also interact with it and this was the first point where we started leaving a piece of our personalities online which is also called as a digital footprint did we have profiles in web two yes we did Web 2.0 was the first time where profiles were introduced so what exactly is a profile profiles basically identify users within a platform the contextualize interactions they personalize your experiences but all of it is sted within a platform let's let's understand more what I'm talking about so first coming to how do profiles identify a person so um normally we think that when we go on the internet we as a person like I I here I go on the internet and I'm I'm just like interacting online but how we actually behave is very different both in real life and in digital life so we all have these personas different parts of our personalities that get activated based on what we experiencing so right now as I'm here standing on this stage my speaker Persona is activated when I'll go home after this meet up my mom Persona will be activated and so on and so forth and this is exactly how we behave in the online world as well so when you if all of us maybe have a LinkedIn a Twitter an Instagram and even the kind of choices we make for the profile picture is different so on L we put our head shots maybe in a code maybe in bright light on Facebook we maybe have a profile picture of the recent travel that we went to or maybe a picture with our family let's say and on GitHub well nobody puts a profile picture on GitHub so most of the people have just a random Avatar that gets created now goinging to how do profiles contextualize your interactions so we are all smart people here right so no matter where the information is coming from we interpret it the same way yes no well no we basically see the context where the information is coming from I have an example on on the screen so let's say there are two people both are talking about some some new thing that happened in the three maybe a new legislation that came out or a new protocol that came out one person has a blue tick and let's say 50,000 followers the other person has no tick and maybe just 26 followers who are you going to believe whose post are you going to retweet whose post are you most like to interact with even though both of them are saying the same thing so this is how humans interpret the information that's presented through the context that's around the profile profiles also personalized your experiences the when you go on Netflix most most of you if you're like if you're tired and you've you've had a time like like a hectic day Netflix shows you a list of recomend recomendations of the movies right on top based on what you're interested in or what your past viewing history is and most of the times we just pick something from that top layer this is called recommendation then if you go on Instagram you don't want to like see irrelevant stuff you want to see content from your friends or the influences you follow or the topics that are of your interest this is called curation and then for for example if you go on Facebook they sometimes recommend you groups or uh let's say communities that you can join based on what you're interested in this is called Discovery so profiles personalize your experience and this is what makes web to platforms so addictive and makes us want to go back to these platforms again and again because they actually make us feel good they they provide us a good user experience and they want us to come back again and again and again however profile Silo your context as the internet started growing profiles started becoming more and more ened and it got to a point where now the profile is so so valuable that this is what the entire uh Web Two platforms are fighting on do you think that uh it serves the purpose of big giants to kind of like open their context or like tell everyone and the entire data that they have gathered on a person no because this is their entire business model how are they going to show ads how are they going to like you know recommend them things if they don't even like if they like open source this this context or this data and this is why profiles have get siloed and this is why now it is becoming impossible to um compete with these platforms on an equal basis because a platform that's that just spins up today they would not have access to the same data the same profile the same context that these big giants already got at a good point maybe a decade ago and therefore the the playing field is not equal then came actually web 3 and web 3 basically introduced the ownership economy so we all know that web 3 introduced this Paradigm where you could really own your assets own your tokens own your data but nobody's until now has ever tried to own their own profiles or own their own context the other very interesting thing that V three did was they they introduced a new paradigm for interactions so the very interesting thing about we three is that the person has privacy so the person is tonomous it's just a wallet address but the actions are transparent and this was perfect for a financial use case so like why do you need to know who the person is uh if if you're just like you know transferring money or some asset from one person to another but in in the Quest for sity we completely lost context we we during this transition from web 2 to web 3 we left behind context in and this is because the anatomy of a wallet is such that a wallet has a pony like like an address a hex address has some transactions has some assets but it has no information about the preferences of the wallet holder the interest of the wallet holder the social graph of the wallet holder the social context or anything like that and why are we talking about this today like why is it so important to have this or not have this like why why is it even a topic and this is because web3 has immense potential to create a new generation of platforms so we using the technology behind web3 we can actually create platforms that censorship resistant and the world the state of the world that is today censorship resistance is a huge huge upside then we can have actually platforms that could have open ranking and recommendation systems the entire Creator economy music economy IP all of this can be revolutionalized through creating platforms where where like we have these open source decentralized censorship resistant principles however even though it hold the three platforms hold a great promise every time somebody has tried to create such platforms they have failed or at least not done very well and this is this is one of the reasons why retention rates are also very low how many people here have far faster or have at least tried okay there are a few hands maybe eight or 10 people do you guys use it the same way that you do Twitter no that's the point that I'm trying to make that what exactly is happening why are these platforms failing to retain or engage users and why is it that the only viable way for platforms to actually attract or acquire new users is by offering them air drops airdrop farming has actually become like a culture and like it it feels good when you get a free airdrop but um when that is the only way the platforms can acquire users and something is not exact right and like until last year everybody was saying that uh people are not coming to vet three because onboarding is very difficult and nobody wants to create a metam agreed but imagine let's say in one year we solve all on boarding problems everyone has come on web three everyone can create a wallet through email address they don't need to like care about SE phases all of that stuff do you guys think they would sell user platforms like the the entire world or maybe like the the major part of the world your siblings your parents your friends were not in three I don't think so and the reason why is that even if everyone comes to web we need a way to engage them until we engage them until we incentivize them enough to come to platforms again and again Mass adoption is not going to happen and you've seen this before how many people here were at the time when crypto kitties kind of pro ethereum okay yeah so there are two or three people I tried I I had deployed a smart contract at that time and it took two and a half days for that smart contract to be deployed I used to freelance at that time and uh this was like a customer's smart contract that I had to deploy and like it was a tough conversation okay theum is not working so you have to wait but the the point is that was the first time when I people um kind of felt engaged by by something that was being offered on the on the blockchain so it was fun like people were having some fun people were like trading these crypto kitties and it was it it kind of brought out the whole scalability issues of eum the other example is that last year uh base that's the L 2 by coin base um that became the most profitable layer to with the most transactions in the first month after it laun the reason was not something that base itself offered the reason was that they did a podcast with Jesse p and they they like brought on favorite people like famous influencers and stuff and they just had this podcast and this podcast was something that people were enjoying and that is why the underlying layers started getting more transactions so the point is that you have to have something to engage users I didn't really introduce myself in the start so I'm H I'm co-founder of plurality Network and we are trying to solve this exact same problem and what we're doing is that we're building an open social context layer for the internet and using this context layer we're building actually profiles so imagine you have your ethereum address against your ethereum address you can create self custodial profiles that are not siloed within any platform that are are tagged to your wallet address they that are not transparent but you can take it with you wherever you go on any platform across any blockchain so just like a USB stick which you take with you with your data from one one computer to another you can take your profile With You from One platform to another and if you allow a certain D to get access to your profile then they can essentially improve the experience for for you or provide you with relevant offers or maybe discounts or whatever it is that they can offer you smart profiles basically equalize the relationship between the platform and the user because now the user isn't actually in control profiles what can profiles do for users profiles allow users transparency over how their data is shared gives them the option to either remain unlocked or if they if the if the platform is offering something to them in return maybe good experience or maybe some some offers then they can uh diverge some information about themselves so for example you could have a gaming profile which could have the G your gaming interest or you could have your music profile which could have your music interest so let's say you like to listen to Jazz and your profile has this information that you like to listen to Jazz next time when you go on a web three music platform or platform and if you connect your music profile the platform would know that okay this address has these music interest and they can recommend you what you like so that would bring us one step closer to the personalization experience that we get on web two platforms but in a way that does not replicate the same problems but puts user back in control for D apps they can um use these profiles to enhance to that's all thank [Applause] you so you can connect with me if you want uh this is the uh Twitter page of plurality Network and we're also going to have a ha plan next month in Berlin also remote but primarily in Berlin so if anyone of you are dels please join questions I know this is a very very new idea concept and um yeah I might have confused the people or do yeah sure go ahead what format of the profiles in how do you ensure Interac yeah so the profiles are on uh ceramic which is ler on top of um ipfs like decentralized storage we use DS as the method to create these profiles and Link them with the uh original address but we have also introduced a z knowledge there in the m so that but um the information in these profiles is not transparent but only when the user allows somebody to get access to this only then this data gets diverged the format is um open I open idvc 4 which is like um a verifiable credential um schema and the verifiable credentials are been held in the users water so they tagged to the users wallet but they're held in uh streams that are created on ceramic so it's like this so you have wallet address against this wallet address uh your whenever a new profile is getting created then a new diid gets created against this wallet address and against the CID with the D Keys the data gets encrypted and stored on camic screens and they can be updated as well so it's not like a static fixed context it can it regularly keeps getting updated as well yeah is it one profile per one wet address m n n profiles per wallet address and um ideally these profiles would be like different so it's not like you would have all your information in one profile and then you're diverging all of this to every platform it's only the part that relevant to that platform so like as I give the example you you can have like a gaming profile a music profile a social profile a scientific profile whatever and then let's say if you're on a d app which is a music platform then you just con connect your music profile is it uh within metamask or where where would I talk yeah this is like we created a widget so if you have used prey or dynamic wallet or anything like that before uh the interface is very similar to that but just when you're connecting your wallet either through email or whatever you use to create it after that you can also connect your profile you will have to create your profiles beforehand or otherwise the the the widget will show you how but once you have created your profile once you don't need to do it again and again you just then can connect to a platform yeah and is the infrastructure similar to like self identity so you have like three yes exactly it's it's very Sim so uh my co-founders and I we have worked extensively in Sovereign identity that's the background that where we coming from uh We've also written several research papers work with German government for this and we are um introducing the same same concept we're using very similar there are some tweaks that we have done to make it like more Crypt native but you can say 80 90% of the stuff is same yeah if someone knows the address can they get to all the profiles no not unless the user specifically allows them to do it because the user would have to sign a trans not a transaction but like sign the data for it to be decrypted so it's it's like only when the user allows yeah from the address do we understand external addresses or also maybe smart contract wallets both both yeah both we are so in the widget we are um introducing so our mission is to like really onboard uh the next billion users everybody says that but it's it sounds like a cliche now but we really want to onboard people and then make the them stay on blockchain as well so in on top of this year we have a lot more ideas lot more apps SDC that we we are going to be building but the first artifact is the widget through which somebody can just create uh connect their existing uh wallet through metam Mas wallet connect or they can also create uh their account exraction wallet for which we using um multiparticle techniques yeah so you said before us need to sign um kind of the wallet to give access to the data to the platform which wants to read it so it means you also as a provider you don't see the data as well no you don't then second question would be what is your business model then because uh like if you think about Facebook and call like they're it's all about data which they're selling on the advertisers ET what will be for you because I think it still cost to run all of this yes it does and we going to be charging d daps I don't know what everybody says I say the app maybe it's daps but uh we're going to be charging daps because like just like they pay for account abstraction so we have tagged this solution with account abstraction because like it it makes sense when like if you think about like profiles and accounts they go together right so when you're logging in it needs to be part of that so we have an account abstraction plus profiles personalization solution so that's already pay for account extraction Solutions right and they're already paying for air drops they're already paying for marketing so we believe that if we kind of like combine these and give it to them right when a user lands on their platform then they will pay for this as well so of course we a very early stage startup so some of the Theses that we have are uh research based right now but not really practical but maybe in 6 to8 months I'll be able to give you answers with exact numbers yeah um so out of my several profiles when I connect to adep I can choose any of these profiles to diverge to them because For You music app it makes no sense to diverge my reading habits exactly so when they um when the D app is integr integrating the widget they will have to tell uh what profile they need and then uh only that profile the user gets prompted to um just like have that profile and if for example none of the existing profile schemas that we have in the system if none of those serve the needs of the DAP and they want something else maybe it's a new kind of the app that we haven't thought of then they can also create a custom profile which is specific to their needs and this could actually also be like a revenue generation model so if if you want to like create a new custom profile then you pay something extra yeah yeah two questions first will privacy basically not boost your company but also kind of destroy it because when when you cannot basically see which interactions when all inters are private I mean it's hard for you to do that but once it is I think profile makes a lot more sense and the other one is why not just build like on T because I think it's like you like a billion you have a billion it's already there onam on the network and what what are your thoughts on this yeah so in order to create profiles we are we are sourcing this data from several different platforms so like when the when when the person first creates their that's say music profile then we ask them to connect their Spotify or YouTube and we take some like data from from those profiles don't telegram is something that uh we looked into maybe it would come into one of the dat sources for our uh profiles but the amount of information that you can get out of telegram uh in a compliant way is pretty limited so that's why it's a little bit de prioritized at the moment and your other question was if I get correctly about privacy so um Can can you repeat the question please well let let me rephrase it like this want but maybe it's also not possible when basically itself said privacy is high on your road it's only only question when it comes what do you we we want to preserve this option that if a person wants to remain like completely Anonymous and wants to use their platform in an unboxed way they should have that option as well so we are you still confident that you can like the data if basically transactions are like private or kind of with the smart account bus if you cannot really do anything no the on transactions are not private so let's say the user comes to a platform with their profile and then later on they do something on that platform in a like they perform an on transaction then that's really not in our hands because like that's that just follows whatever blockchain is it on so if it's public then it's public however uh even when people do these transactions getting context out of this and like having meaningful information or meaningful Insight from these actions is also pretty tough so what we do is that we also scan um wallet add is um onchain activity and try to make some sense out of it and add that to the profile context as well for for later on yeah I'm not very familiar but I think like smart account wets are coming to ethereum and basically IFI so from my understanding it's a legal torado cash I always connect with this and then do whatever I want to do and you can basically then not Trace What I've Done Right because 100 people connected did everything and then you cannot trace my my smart accounts are not something that that that can be synonymized to turn into Cash because like uh smart accounts the the controller of the smart account is still either an like a wallet address and eoa account or an email address so it can still be traced to the to the to the whatever addresses so it's not it does not mix um it's not like a mixer that makes his transactions and you have no idea who did what I think just want to clarify I think he's talking about onchain privacy transaction privacy whereas you're talking about privacy of attributes that are revealed to the deps right so that is basically done in zero knowledge so that is yeah exactly so like the transaction is open and secure whatever happens there but then the information that's in the profile so what we do is we also have some um some engines that we run based on the W add activity and try to get some meaningful data out of it so like maybe if a person is consistently buying nft collections uh certain kind of NF Collections and maybe he's interested in in like let's say a person buys auki NF and always buys these kind of anime nfts and maybe that's an interest that can be added to the profile context if the person wants so uh but these are different from or you know like I mean they all these services that basically do what you do but they're just for like speculation so people want to track the whales and it's basically right I mean this already exists so it it exists in in in like okay there there are some like like you said speculation of the whals so that's like in the D category then there's also some people are trying to build tools for Dow governance to figure out how to allow people into a certain D Bas on certain attributes and just getcoin as well so there have all these fragmented kind of um attempts at solving parts of the problem or maybe like in a specific Niche what we are building is more like a holistic solution that could be used for all of these use cases because like each profile uh is like a catering to a specific use case yeah and will you offer verified profile attributes for example residency within Europe as a property yeah no that's that's that's a legal nightmare so we do not want to yeah it's not really in our scope technically it could be but uh we don't want to need to check ID cards we don't want to go there very valid question because we don't know yet but M could could also say Okay nonc transactions are basically or illegal so I mean I think very so that you want to do if you had to do I would have loved meeting you if you had met me like one year ago because I actually pitched this when we were like uh like we were in the process of like refining the idea and this was one of the discussions I fed in some conferences and uh yeah people let's just say people were not very happy thinking about doing kyc when you're interacting on chain so yeah even even though I also think that it's it's a use case that can be uh relevant but um yeah let's let's just see there's not a strong enough market for that yet okay yeah question so so the main Val proposition here is to users right so that they can have interoperable media social media profiles and yeah but it's the main value proposition is not just to users so there are actually three aspects that we discovering so the for the users of course they have interoperable profiles they can take their like they don't have to like manage extra SE FES or anything for that they just create their profile T to their wallet and they take it along with them wherever they go um but then for D apps this is a a new way to be able to connect with their users and understand their needs and their requirements so that they can provide them with an experience that's uh more tailor made for them similar to what happens in web platforms today we so a lot of people say that personalization people don't need that but the statistics say something otherwise 76% people are annoyed when they don't get a personalized experience and uh yeah same is for web three platforms as well so yeah and the third thing is um third party bookies actually I did not cover that here um but third party cookies are being faced out this year CL and M and their support in December and uh there for for loyalty and engagement a lot of companies a lot of Brands used to use um third party cookies to gather this data which was which infringed on people's privacy because they were like getting thrown all all these ads or all these promotions but they were getting nothing like nothing in return but and therefore uh in anticipation for this uh many Brands like that are trying to enter into we like Gucci or Raj Lauren they started using nfds as a zero party data strategy for loyalty program Starbucks did a very famous loyalty program as well called Odyssey and all of this was because because of this in pending Doom that third party cookies are being um faced out so this PL the plurality smart profile that can essentially serve as decentralized cookies but only when a person is allowing their their their profile to be accessed and therefore brands have to offer something to the user to be able to get this information out of the user so now the the balance is more tilted towards the the user actually there a lot of brands have already shown interest in this dech because of how how things are and because it's like more privacy preserving as well so that's brands are also a huge um Persona that we have yeah yeah can you mitigate against uh certain depths colluding with each other and sharing those prop without the consent of the user that is a challenge that's true so we we're working on it but we don't have a finalized solution for that yet but that's well it could be contract right contract exactly that's that's that's what we're we're counting on right now so in the developer terms of VI so like every time somebody uses your software product they have to comply to this devel terms of use so right now our intermediary solution is that we would like make them sign this that you're not going Toe with other DS or like use the data for like like anything malicious and the other thing is that that we are trying to keep the data to very minimal so like really actionable insights but not any kind of identifiable information so let's go yeah yeah want to challeng the value proposition to site it knowing theirselves up an identity space and the problems that it has had in adopting getting traction so essentially here like the dabs could individually collect the personal data they want from the users but I mean they could without without something like this so what you're offering is something that you know where they which doesn't really I mean you want did you try to monetize them so you charge them for something which may not necessarily direct benefit to them do you see what I mean um yeah in in a way I do but I just see a little bit of a challenge there terms because it's a very multi-sided problem you need to have so many players in there yeah yeah that is true that is true and I I if it were easy to like balance all of this then this wouldn't be a startup this would be like a project but yeah these are some of the challenges that we are um seeing but I don't think that DS have no interest in um getting this uh data because like as I said third party cookies are um getting out and like maybe you can get this even if even if they were not being faed out then it was maybe possible to kind of find like this Facebook address has these interests but when we're talking about wallet we are like in the middle of the web two and the web three world so a wallet is actually a person that has real interests that are being generated on all the web two platforms plus all their web three activity as well that's on chain so it's a multifaceted problem and um the there are now okay there are now a few startups that are coming out that are trying to like combine this web to web three world and unifying it in a way that's that's what's our attempt is yeah um maybe last question sorry uh I was wondering planning to also enrich this attribute based profiles as it sounds like with more context information such as I don't know CRM type like your conts and so on that you can in some way p over because I feel like every time like you mention or something your contacts are missing and um yeah I feel like so this whole personal CRM world is kind of uh besides my personal attributes such as interest in a way is that something how how are you thinking about that aspect yeah this is this is also something on the on the road map uh not imediate road map maybe like in a year or so but this is this is the the fascinating thing so when we started like this this open social context here and this profiles I like people are now coming to me with use cases that even I hadn't thought of before like uh somebody other said to me this is like gasless token G and and this is something like we're pretty huge on so like it's like a it's we are calling this profile gting because what you can do with token gting you can do the same with these profiles but without having to give out nfds to people or any kind of tokens to people to figure out who gets access to what so yeah but but what you said this was also something that we've discussed so the first um use case so we're launching our MVP with a with metaverse um virtual Fashion Event in September so the first use case the first B big um event or customer that we have this is like the metor space that is trying to like um utilize this dech to connect various different metaverse platforms uh so that's like the the first thing that's on our agenda but after that we have a social s plan uh where anyone could like create their any kind of social apps along with built-in personalization features like open ranking and recommendation systems uh and like this like what you said this um uh social graph so this is what's a social graph so uh the people that you're connected to but there's also social graphs migration as well so that would that's like the phase two of the protocol yeah because if if you think about it the the the the recommendation algorithm that different platforms that's also proprietary and therefore we have no idea what's what's going into this algorithm and why we are being shown the things we are shown okay interest are definitely one part of that but maybe there are other sneaky ways to like like they they're pushing things in our face so if you like if you follow the E even that curation algorithm should also be open source and people should be able to choose that yeah yeah maybe just on that open source not just checking your website there giop link and clicking on like the like paper link right now just needs to a form is that is that something on your road map that you will actually publish some of that or uh yeah the website need to be updated uh yeah I need to do that this month yeah as I said we very early s startup so um yeah the website I know it's it's Scrappy right now I made that I'm sorry yeah but if you um you can go to the dogs. plural. network uh the there Al going to be updated next month um you guys are all welcome to join our hackathon we're doing this with uh D Telecom uh graph and arbitrum um sorry not arbitrum chain link and it's going to be like a good big halfathon so yeah we are probably the smallest fish in that in thaton but I would love it if you guys join there um I can send you the the DI paper as well yeah I think if you like enter the form this comes to my my email and I I manually send out like uh light paper yeah it's a trick to get emails you know that yeah any other questions okay perfect yeah I love talking to all of you um I was in a conference last week and uh frankly I traveled all the way to T there was a lot of snow and even then in my talk the um there were like lesser people than this and they were not engaged at all so thank you everyone [Applause]