Privacy Ecosystems at Play - Alex Zaidelson | Web3Privacy Now

[Music] okay so pleasure to be here my name is Alex uh I recently joined secret Labs as the new CEO and my talk today is privacy ecosystems at play right which is pretty generic uh so I'll try to cover some ground which some you will probably know so it will be just a lot of it you probably know but it will be just a you know refresher and then we'll talk about what we are building in terms of privacy ecosystems okay so I want to start you know with the first principles right and what what the guys here were talking about uh this whole movement and all of the blockchain started back you know the idea started much earlier than the actual technology so we're talking about the cyper punks Manifesto from the '90s I think and uh one thing it says is privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world right and then if we move forward to the Bitcoin white paper right so chapter 10 talks specifically about privacy right and that turned out to be a big mistake as we all know right because sat's idea was that anonymity like they kind of mixed anonymity and pseudonymity and what they thought was Anonymous actually turned out to be pseudonymous and uh we know what's going on today right so blockchain is essentially an open book with all those analytics companies digging the data de anonymizing people I don't know if you guys heard about this company called arcom intelligence have you it's it's a yeah it's a very funny project I mean what they're doing is they're paying people money for doxing uh um blockchain addresses so if you know and know the blockchain address of a of a famous person you can just you can get some money from those guys so they're trying to build this list of of known addresses and you know CH analysis have been around for a very long time elliptic qu CER trades trm Labs you name it and they have become like de facto kind of a police of this blockchain world where they decide who is good and who is bad and who is connected and who is not connected and and they said the risk scores um and on top of that we have uh guys who are probably less controversial but doing a lot of research um and uh you know nansen it's a great company one of the services is uh it allows you to follow trades of high-profile successful Traders right so it's good for for people probably not so good for Traders who want to keep their strategies uh hm right and of course all the me uh thing which is huge um over 60 60 to 70% uh of all the trades on ethereum dexes in volume are coming from me boss I don't know if you knew that but that's that's the reality right and uh flash blocks is one of the pieces of infrastructure that actually allows that now they are moving to this new Suave uh infrastructure which would keep the meol private but probably private from other people but not private from uh from fly spots themselves um anyway blockchain is an open book and you know this whole uh whole discussion whole uh event here is about how how this is solved um I'm just coming here from uh uh uh cosmoverse which is the cosmos ecosystem event that was held in stul and I got a lot of questions there like mixing up different things and I think it's important that we set those two things separately there is transactional privacy right meaning uh when people send money to each other uh we want to hide who is sending how much to what in addition to that and separately from that is computational privacy right the smart contracts that are running on lots of different blockchains uh it is very desirable desirable to be able to hide the inputs and the outputs right and only putting those things together actually reaches the desired result of privacy okay so uh we can talk a little bit about the solution right which you all know um I used to be uh I used to be this CEO of beam um and beam is one of uh one of those layer one privacy uh privacy coins privacy blockchains these are all transactional privacy Solutions right we all know Monero zcash beam uh tornado cach well we all know the story right and there is a new one uh called namada interchain privacy all of those guys do transactional privacy Solutions uh back in 2018 everybody was talking about transactional privacy as the next big thing in blockchain it didn't actually happen right Monero is more or less where it was it's still it's the biggest privacy coin protocol uh seems like just transaction privacy is just not enough right it's not enough on its own because most people don't care uh that much about it and when I start if I care about the transaction want to send something to somebody else and I need to move them to another blockchain it's very hard so this this didn't happen uh that much so for computational privacy uh there are different Technologies available right now on the market right so and we put uh we put it in three axis so this is the uh development difficulty the computational cost and the Privacy guarantee okay so in ethereum we just put like the evm technology here with like almost zero privacy and then uh here uh somewhere in the middle is the te which is actually the technology of uh that secret network is using it's trusted execution environment where everything is running inside an encrypted unate um and it's it's pretty it's pretty good right it gives it's it's relatively easy to develop not very high computational costs and and very good privacy guarantees there are other Technologies right MPC blockchains like ptia maybe you guys know some more zkp projects like Alo Aztec and many more who are doing this using ztp which is very uh it's supposed to be much more difficult to develop and then there is FH which is has supposedly higher uh privacy guarantees but it's still uh out there uh to be R developed and deployed right uh so there is like this whole zoo on of threel acronyms and the question is uh whether there is one ring that will rule them all um okay and my answer is no no so uh there are different tradeoffs for for different applications sorry right so if you think about securing a simple roope paper scissors game for one cent versus securing your institutional private keys or building a billion dollar dark pools then the Privacy tradeoffs would be different the cost the computation time required so we believe that the future is multi multi- technology right and there are and there are more applications which we are you know on the lookout for and which we are encouraging Community to build on and that's why we're participating in in hackathons and you know trying to find more and more use cases but it's very clear that the tradeoffs are different and different uh privacy technologies will be needed okay uh some more words about secret Network it's one of the oldest confidential blockchains with computational privacy so layer one in Cosmos running on Intel sgx development is done in Rust some statistics um over 300,000 wallets uh we have all kinds of applications running on the blockchain starting from defy to private nfts to sealed bid auctions to some gaming and we we are looking for more and we have recently announced and this ties up to this tradeoff idea we've recently announced we're starting what we call the confidential Computing constellation uh with the idea of exporting privacy to other ecosystems right so uh it's clear that it's pretty hard to move developers move Builders from one ecosystem to the other people who are building on evm or Solana are used and they love that system and they don't want to move to a not necessarily want to move to a 100% privacy blockchain so what they actually need is uh certain is a way to use certain private functions private methods in some parts of their apps and this is what we are actually starting out to build uh so we will be developing those privacy SDC for different blockchains that will communicate with secret Network and other networks in the constellation to receive those privacy Solutions so our latest Network upgrade actually allows for this line over here from Ax GMP ax General message p in so we will be soon rolling out end points that will allow basic things like storing encrypted values uh getting uh random values from Secret uh basic set operations and then we'll be building out more high level building blocks like you know voting uh seal be auctions and more uh as we discover more needs so and this actually uh this constellation is started by secret and also a sister project called Phoenix which is developing uh the FH encryption and uh here we already see that different tradeoffs will be available so this this SDK over here will let people choose actually see how much they want to pay and how long they want to wait to get uh their privacy thing done and and to actually choose which kind of Technology they they want to use and we will be seeking out and calling out for projects to join this constellation right in addition to that we will be having app chains that will be running on this constellation and using privacy Solutions natively right on on secret or other okay so you know summing up um what we want to build is actually a full-fledged privacy ecosystem with transactional computational privacy supporting different trade-offs interoperability um asset bridging uh most of those pieces are already present in our constellation the last thing I put on here is compliance support it's also important I think this ethos or this idea of having a fully private fully Cypher Punk thing that nobody can you know learn anything about or that doesn't it doesn't play well with compliance at all it doesn't work out so uh today many blockchains already have things like viewing Keys which secret Network already allows for uh so we believe this is also an important piece uh of a healthy privacy ecosystem right uh so benefits of joining the constellation for project are here so it's a shared gateway to other ecosystem shared security uh so say new app Chains would be able to just use secret networks valid daters to secure uh their Network economic ties between the networks through tokenomics uh exchanges or through paying gas in one token or uh rewarding validators uh existing users existing tooling and the constellation is as I mentioned suitable for L1 and L2 uh chains in the future and uh to end we believe that privacy is one of the key catalyzers of the next buol run right along with the user experience um along with account abstraction uh I think uh today's great Defi and other products they hit a certain glass ceiling in terms of adoption just because they're not private and big players cannot really live with all their uh trades strategies and other things that they do that it all is an open book and everybody can do and copy that's it thank you very much please join our Twitter app and uh Telegram and if there are any questions happy to [Applause] [Music] answer