Zupass, identity and credentials beyond proof of personhood by Rob Knight | Devcon SEA

[Music] um I hope by now most of you are familiar with what zass is you will have used it to check in uh for this event and I can see some of you have collected some frog hats so you've been playing frog crypto um so you're kind of basically familiar with uh with what zass is um originally I had a slide here where I was going to talk about um you know Zupas is a kind of uh zero knowledge data manager for your personal crypto graphic secrets and and and that kind of thing but um I think it's just easier to talk about some of the things you can use zup pass for um so we have here uh eth Berlin the voting for The hackathon so you prove that you're an attendee at eth Berlin uh and you can anonymously vote uh for the winner of the hackathon and that was used to award prizes uh you used it to check in at Devcon uh you used it to play frog crypto and you won uh some some frog merch uh maybe you were at devc connect and you sent anonymous messages to the telegram Group by proving that you are a ticket holder and then the bot would anonymously send your message uh if you're at zoo connect you might have participated in a distributed clinical trial using uh a data Gathering device that would then store that data and then anonymously uh prove that you participated in the trial when you submit it um maybe you were at Edge as morala and you participated in the Run Club using straa and you were able to uh compete anonymously with other people to see who could get the uh could cover the most miles um maybe you voted in the quadratic funding round for the Zulu community and again you you will have used zass to prove that you are a member of the Zulu ecosystem that You' had attended previous events um and here at Devcon you might have also participated in the speaker Q&A so again you're proving that you're an attendee of the event and then participating by creating questions and getting answers from the speakers so zpass is is basically all of these things it enables all of these things to happen um and I kind of want to give a bit of a philosophical reason for why Zupas does things the way that it does so rather than going into how it works if you're interested in how it works we're doing a CLS on that tomorrow um but if if you want to know why uh ZK and why uh decentralized data um this is a sort of philosophical background so there's this concept um called conviviality and conviviality means living together from the Latin you know con and VV means together living and it kind of connotes this idea that we create our our our lives together we we collaborate in creating the meanings uh that our lives are made up from and this book uh by aan ilich I think written in the 70s um applies this view to technology so he he has this idea of tools for conviviality where a convivial tool is is something where the user of that tool is empowered to find their own use for it the tool doesn't tell them what to do it gives them options and they figure out about what those options mean and how they want to uh how they want to make use of them so we regard Zupas as being in that sense a tool for conviviality it's a tool that doesn't tell you who you are or what it means to be a person it's a tool that lets you collect data and decide within your community what that data means so there's a bunch of philosophers uh throughout history who've thought about this stuff um one of two of my favorites are alist McIntyre and Michael walzer um McIntyre thought about this question uh he wrote a book called who's Justice which rationality which again was on this question of meanings like what does it mean for something who gets to decide the rules uh of what things mean and what actions are possible what what exists what's real um and his view was that different Traditions do this in a way that is kind of in sort of incommensurable meaning that you can't have one system that incorporates all Traditions every tradition has its own notion of what constitutes truth goodness Beauty and they need to find their own representations for those things um similarly in spheres of Justice Michael walzer uh he makes this defense of pluralism and equality um and he's arguing against a view of kind of egalitarianism where what's fair is that everybody has the same thing and instead he's saying like what's fair is that uh everybody is part of a community that gets to determine its own sense of what's valuable and its own sense of what's good so instead of being put in a single Global hierarchy you have many different hierarchies and people get to have a leading role in their in their own kind of smaller community and then finally uh just two more references uh so one is the Society of the spectacle by G Bard uh written in the 60s um and he talked a lot about this concept of order givers and Order takers and how Society is divided into people who tell other people what to do and then people who have to do what they're told um so the people at the bottom take orders and and and they receive not just orders not just being told where to go and what to do but they receive an order they receive a system they receive a whole idea about who they are and what their role in society is that is given to them is not something that they develop for themselves um so he was very much in favor of the idea of people creating and co-creating U that that sense of meaning um from from their own interactions um and another very recent book came out in the last year called the the ordinal Society by Maran fard and Kieran Healey um they kind of apply that sort of analysis to computers and they look at the ways in which computer systems provide order they they they take the chaos of of life and they produce numbers and facts and figures and databases that kind of we are we use to understand what's going on around us um in fact um I was going to ask if we have any french speakers here um because I in French the word for computer is ordinator uh which means it it it gives order it ordains things in in pretty much the same way that God ordains things um and so that idea that that something being in the computer makes it real that idea that the computer says what is real or says what should happen um is kind of built right into the word at least in French um so so how do we live in a world where we can co-create these um these these orders ourselves um so naturally this is where I transition into talking about Zupas again um so we have these three things um that are kind of new and are kind of interesting uh called pod GPC and zapi um there's a QR code for the the documentation site there um and pod stands for provable object data uh so it's a basically a data format a very flexible data format GPC stands for general purpose circuits um which is a flexible system for making ZK proofs and zapi is a new thing that we've recently built U that enables you embed Zupas functionality directly into your own apps um so pod lets you create your own data structures you know if we think of of an order sort of a system of of understanding as being made up of structure you know ontology what's real and logic that tells you what you can do with those things pod lets you define the structure so here we're defining a frog if you've played frog crypto you've interacted with this structure um and it it tells you what's real in the world of frogs it tells you what exists um but you can create these yourselves so you can issue your own frogs um you can extend this you can add a frog that has some extra attribute that other frogs don't have um you can uh verify the signatures on frogs so anybody can issue them and verify you know have a list of maybe valid issuers that they would accept as as real so it's a very it's a very flexible thing that is in under your control rather than being issued by a central Authority and then GPC lets you create your own logic and this is where things start to get interesting because the question of what does it mean to have a frog is determined by what you can do with it and what you can do with it in at least in zass is determine what by what kind of proofs you can make so if I can prove that I have a frog of a particular type maybe in some space in some community that allows me to do something if I can prove that I have three frogs maybe that proves something else if I can prove I have a frog and a ticket maybe that has a different meaning and these are kind of contrived examples but you could imagine doing this with any kind of data typee you like again with pod you can make your own data um so you can kind of reinvent this system however you like and then zapi lets you embed this directly into web applications so this is zero knowled this is cryptographic data and zero knowledge proofs directly in the browser in something that looks like a basic standard ordinary web app again you've probably already interacted with some of them while you were here so frog crypto uh would be one miacat would be another so if you've submitted uh any q&as during any of the talks uh you will have interacted with an app that does this and it it uses pods it uses GPC proofs uh and it it also gives you pods back um for for participating in that um there's a kind of cool one there shulan engineering I think is is new so that's again it's a community project uh I think that came out today which lets you take two frogs extract Venom from them and create a psychedelic substance so again the meaning of of these things is in the hands of the developers it's in the hands of the communities that that want to kind of figure out what we can do with this stuff for themselves um so thank you very much uh for listening me to me ramble about philosophy uh as say if you want to learn more about how this stuff works on a technical level we have a CLS tomorrow uh be very happy to see all of you there um we also have documentation website which has a link to a telegram group if you want to come and talk to us in the telegram group uh please do thank you very much thank you rob ni