# Vitalik: "Off-Chain Privacy Solution are needed" - Rik Krieger | Web3Privacy Now

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 22:55
- Topics: web3, decentralisation, blockchain, privacy, purefi, web3privacynow, now, dweb, crypto
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-VmR_J0qNJXQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmR_J0qNJXQ

## Description

Web3Privacy Now | Community 1st - Rome Takeover (5/10/23) - ETHRome 2023
Vitalik: "Off-Chain Privacy Solution are needed"
Rik Krieger: https://twitter.com/rikzrh | Co Founder HOPR: https://hoprnet.org/

Web3privacy Now is a think-and-do tank made by individuals who care about digital privacy and individual rights. Its primary objective is to explore, spotlight, and evaluate privacy-centric goods and services within the web3 domain.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/web3privacy
Github: https://github.com/web3privacy/web3privacy

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Filmed & Edited by BabyBit Production: https://twitter.com/BabyBitProd

## Transcript

[Music] so we continue with Rick from Hopper come on stage come on stage um I was in protocol ber in Berlin so I kind of knew what they're planning to do uh which is super cool and I think that uh if that uh will be the topic of the talk I like that these guys are thinking about how to make privacy pretty mainstream and not that high bro so lots of the people who have I guess wallets could access privacy that's like that and I think that's what's one of the biggest challenges how to make privacy tangible and not that complex so you should care about the full stake privacy first to have some sort of the best of the best we should start something and one p is connecting maybe you will do intro about the company and stuff like that perfect thank you very much for having me thank you very much for inviting me hello my name is Rick I am one of the two co-founders of Hopper and by the end of this talk you're going to have $300 more in your bucket indirectly H how do you make 20 people stay in a room you start to give freebies away especially in the bare Market good um before we get started um very quickly I'd love to know you a little bit better although this is a privacy conference but I'm going to ask you know very lame questions so um who actually is from Italy somewhere in Italy so the rest is from somewhere in the world very International okay super cool um who of you is this is the f I mean that's the second web 3 privacy conference um whose second privacy conference is this is okay perfect um do we have developers here or who is the developer 5050 that's cool who of everybody here in the room is um still in the web 2 not being in the BB three oo okay everybody in the BB three this is going to be complicated for me so um vitalic said offchain privacy Solutions are needed in Singapore um that was a really nice event and a really nice statement so perfect uh for us in order to get started um privacy itself I know that there on privacy conference but I can't say it often enough because I think this is a this privacy itself is a really a weird momentum and it's a weird word and it's a weird feeling um we have over a dozen nationalities in our Hopper team and uh we talked about privacy and we I think we emotionally understand all more or less the same but at the end of of the day um if you translate it in your mother language in your mother tongue it doesn't mean really what we mean about when we talk about it the English word and what we really mean about it plus I do believe it's this strange word which is different because it's one of these words which get a new meaning if we add the digital environment around us so privacy itself is very clear if you're at home and you close the door you close the windows you're in a private environment so you choose to be private in that moment unless there is no digital stuff around you this is clear everybody understands this one and the moment you invite guests the moment you open the window and the neighbor is looking in the moment you start a camera and a live chat everybody knows okay this is now not private anymore because you're able to see it you're able to grasp what's around you this is visible but in the digital world world it is not in real life you're able to Simply close the freaking door and that's it but in the digital world what do you actually do for privacy H how what what's the you know what's the button what's the door to close it in order to say okay now I'm in a private environment in the digital world so tricky you're all cozy tucked into your bed at night and then you have your iPhone or smartphone with you who of you has a social media account Tik Tok Facebook Instagram Twitter Tinder whatever or maybe the other way around who hasn't good guy do you have email got you so not socially but this is a really strange feeling because the moment you touch your phone you feel kind of safe although it's not it's not a private moment anymore and you choose to share data very willingly you know you know depending on the onboarding process step by step but you share so many information about you but you don't only share it with the ones you think you're sharing it you're not only sharing it with Twitter or with Instagram and if you post a picture or you state anything and even if you choose oh only my friends yeah [ __ ] off this every the machine is a data learning machine in the background and it sees and knows everything about you so although you're only sharing with your friends the service in the background they get everything about you and literally they don't really care about the picture which you're posting with you and your puppy at home and it's so nice or that you're traveling that much and it's so amazing what they care about nowadays is the metadata because it says so much more about you in so less data so it's a strange feeling and who cares about it and why should anybody care about your data it's [ __ ] boring in the beginning I was like everybody can have my data I don't care about it because who would be that dump and stupid to be interested Ed in a lame guy from Switzerland well there's a really good reason for it because you're able to buy a $400 million yacht or you are able to buy the houses around you because you don't like the Privacy in Los Angeles so you you know buy a little bit of the neighborhood and that's the centralized web to what do you think is easier to touch your data and your metadata in a centralized world or in a decentralized world when you have so many peer-to-peer connections now the question is do you want to add privacy to these connections or you is stay it open and share it with everybody on planet Earth what do you think how long will it take until these Web Two Guys which became billionaires will come into the web 3 space because they discovered that there is more data data harvesting didn't even start though haha I really have a competitive Advantage Plus it's much easier to get all your data now coming back to how we started um this little weird thing where we do not have a connection too from your cell phone to these guys how does the data I get from there because it's invisible you know it's flying through the air woohoo if you you know it's not real life I can't see it pro it well yeah you see it on the screen but you can't see the data you can't see the transport layer you can't see what the data gets in and out unless you look at a special app so this data gets transferred by AT&T T-Mobile or or or or whatnot and then the same for the web 3 so you have decentralized applications which need to write or want to write data on chain how does it get on the Chain yeah well it's the decentralized application which is sitting on the chain and that's it well no not really there's a server there's RPC calls and so on and so on so this data is transported via the transport layer it needs to get there from A to B it's not that these servers are next to each other or the one is sitting on top of the other now you might say yeah but I mean they are all encrypting the data seriously like not going back to Mr Heiden from the NSA who said like we're ping killing people based on metadata no just thinking about what does it mean that WhatsApp is telling you that they're encrypting the data that's funny because think for one moment you start working for DHL or any whatever packaging post Center on planet Earth and then um you make a really big Excel sheet and then you start you know taking the first package you're measuring it the date and the time it comes in and out um the address where it comes from the address where it goes to the uh the height and the weight and then you unpack it and look what's inside and it's like hey cool um an umbrella second package oh wow cool tennis record third package and so on and you do that for really a good long amount of time how long does it take you as a human being to tell everybody after whatever the 500,000 package what's most likely going to be inside oh it comes from this region in China and it goes in that region in New York h okay good this that this time of the year most likely is going to be and this is just for you as a human being what do you think how complicated it is because me telling now encryption is like you know packaging the data or whatever it is nobody looks inside the package anymore because the encryption is lame what you're looking at is the data about the data you're looking at the metadata so nobody needs to read your emails anymore or look what puppy you are patting on that picture and this is why vitalic said we need more of chain privacy Solutions and this is why we started three and a half years ago um the project called Hopper which takes care of what we believe an important piece of infrastructure in the web 3 space the hopper protocol is live since August last year now and quickly telling you what we're doing in order to carve out the differences between a mix Network which is decentralized and maybe other Solutions on the market like a VPN or a proxy so the first thing what we're doing coming back to the D L package is DHL is sending these packages all in one goal it's I think it's really better that they do it that way because if they would split it up into a 100 packages and they would deliver it at your doorstop you would be literally pissed because that doesn't make a lot of sense you can't do that with real life items but you can do that amazingly with data so you have a message and you want to send whatever message from A to B like for example from Unis swap you want to buy something and um have the transaction written on chain then we take your package we split it up into many indistinguishable packages they all look the same they're all very small and then we send each part of this message through the mixed network via a different route so even if somebody decrypts the package which you received they'll see a part of it so they see you know some some numbers and some nice science what to do with it because you don't know if it's the first the last part the middle part which part is it where where does it come from and where does it go to now it gets really complicated to decipher what's in there the second thing is Packet mixing so at each of these notes we're making a little bit more complicated for all these people who would like to look at it by just mixing them in reality they're not yellow blue and light blue they're all yellow but just a different shate and show what we're doing here and then the one thing which is unique and the USP of Hopper we are doing um proof of relay that's what we invented so everybody on planet Earth is able to run a hopper note super easy you're able to buy AAP note device or you're just able to download it by yourself and run it on the laptop and if you would like to send data just like DHL you pay DHL or in this time you pay the network in order to send the package and the other way around if you would run one of these Hopper nodes and somebody would use your node in order to relay data via you then you would earn money so you would earn Hopper token in order to send and receive these messages and that's exactly what we call a transport layer that's what some call a layer zero and this is what vitalic means when he says offchain so this is an offchain privacy solution and how does it fit into the entor game whenever data in is in transit so for example there is many amazing ZK projects like ZK B for example and there is something done or needs to be done onchain then you would be able to use Hopper and then write the data so that it's 100% full privac stack and not just the 50% can I use a VPN sure just doesn't really help we're in Rome traffic in Rome is amazing so let me give you a little example I showed you the mix network of all these Hopper nodes which are somewhere live on planet Earth and uh you have these yellow packages which are running around a VPN um to give you an example is um you have a blue car in order to go you know deliver one of these DHL packages from A to B so you have a blue car that's your IP address in the the B world in real world it's a blue car so you take this blue uh this blue car and you go from A to B is it hard to identify you no because everybody knows this is your IP address this is a blue car you go from A to B I see you everything is nice I see not what's in the car but I can observe you fine um a VPN changes your blue car to a black car congratulations how much more difficult is it going to be for anybody to observe the black car same same yeah they say it's two milliseconds more complicated to get you fine um what Hopper is doing we're giving everybody in Rome a yellow car and you have a black car you arrive and you say I want to use haer two you also get a yellow car now in Rome so much nice traffic so many yellow cars how funny is it going to be for anybody from the outside world to watch who's that boy girl he this is the difference between the hopper mix Network and the VPN and don't misunderstand me vpns are amazing they're just 25 years old the technology is old but the idea was nice in the web 3 and this is the problem which we're now getting to we see the early onset of data harvesting this is the ugly part about it and in the last 12 months this has costed all citizens of the B 3 estimations are around1 billion US sweet how young is the web 3 and there is no real data harvesting happening so this me especially front running and sandwich attacks cost every citizen of the web 3 already 1 billion US dollar and if we're looking at this what's happening um me today is rather kind to all of us why because it simply wants your freaking money it's not like the algorithm in the web topace which wants to learn about your sexual preferences your political opinion how can I make you buy more of these Puma shoes they're amazing how can I influence you more in order to do this and that currently web 3 me front running and sandwich attacks just your [ __ ] money okay that's nice but if we're looking at it today it's just the freaking snowflake on top of the iceberg because they're only looking at the ethereum manool and this is not stopping they just started to look at the orderflow of cow Swap and the these web two boys and girls are not here yet so this is really really really baby [ __ ] about just1 billion doar so that's not so heavy how can we change this well very simply one of these things is maybe that we try to realize or reflect a little bit more what privacy is the metaverse is coming would you mind explaining me how privacy is going to be established in the metaverse oh no but you're going online I mean it should be clear to everybody that you know this this is visible to everybody and people are making money off your data yeah sure CL yeah why it's not cool don't you think that in the digital world we should equally have the opportunity to say no this is private this is a picture of me and my baby and I only like to send this picture to my wife or my partner and nobody else is able to see it and no I'm not printing it out in a black box and then you know getting a pigeon and bringing the picture picture over there if you really want to see how bad it is we uh have a little solution in order to make it a little bit transparent in the web 3 space um dp. hopper. org derp is the dump ethereum RPC provider so if um you're all from a Dev spe space which is pretty amazing I guess that everybody here has more than one wallet address you know one for salary one for business one really private one super private aping account uh the problem is only that your wallet as well as your RPC provider know all that [ __ ] so although you're locked in into one of your wallet addresses and you would like to buy whatever 500 Hopper token or to Ether or whatever your meta your wallet is pinging all these all these wallet addresses and you know to make it really useful for all the people who would like to harvest the data they're also pinging all the tokens and coins you have and to make it really clever because everybody needs to know they're also showing the amount of tokens and coins you have why not why oh funny there was one thing I forgot really not so important but they're pinging your freaking IP address so they're connecting your IP address with your wallet address s it's it's an opportunity that's the reason why Hopper um started with rpch so it's an RPC provider over Hopper and it provides you with the first very first time privacy when any RPC call how does it work for example if you want to buy something in Unis swap you're logging into your metamask in the middle you have rpch which is an adapter over the hopper mixnet and the data goes on chain what would make an RPC provider which is private slightly better what would you add to an RPC provider which is private for the very first time and you're able to use it in a beta version if you are 50% developers I guess 50% of you are able to download a Docker I'm pretty sure you're able to use it set your own RPC uh and point and that's it so it's pretty easy to use but we're making it even nicer so we're adding to this private RPC endpoint we're adding propeller heads me Revenue share so when you're using it you get 100% me Revenue share from back running your own transactions so you get privacy and you get cash back that's cool even without Visa why sounds like a product promotion privacy is what we are Believe We Believe makes the web 3 stronger because in order to establish censorship resistance and credible neutrality we need decentralization and that's what we all know but if we don't add privacy to these peer-to-peer connections it's going to be complicated and the reason why we're all of us here is we all want to reach a state of Freedom so you would be able to go to d. r.net or to make it super super super easy you're able to scan this code and you're able to use the code word free privacy and then you get six months of Premium Dean rpch in beta version for free uh worth 50 bucks a month so 50 bucks time 6 months makes $300 whoever wants to grab it feel free to grab your $300 free account spread the world and make the web 3 space a censorship resistance Space full of happy people living in Freedom thank you very [Applause] [Music] much