# Sign in With Ethereum: the Most Powerful Protocol in #Web3? | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 51:15
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-y4Q7Y_8wjAs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Q7Y_8wjAs

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/sign-in-with-ethereum-the-most-powerful-protocol-in-web3/

Sign in with Ethereum is an almost accidental byproduct of #Web3, but is already turning into an incredibly powerful tool for user engagement and convenience. Wallet holders sign into DeFi protocols to manage their money or sales of NFTs but can it be much more than it already is. Linking seams of rich data to an ethereum address is the future of identity, ease and monetisation on the web.  
Join Lang Cui (Struck Capital), Nick Johnson (ENS) Justina Petraitytė (3boxx) & Shiv Malik (Pool Data)

Speaker(s): Shiv Malik, Nick Johnson, Justina Petraityte, Lang Cui
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: Identity,storage,data unions

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

foreign [Music] thanks for joining welcome to uh signing with ethereum uh so my name is Lang I am an investor with strot crypto we are based out of valet a crypto native VC fund to focus on the seed stage I'm joined by an amazing group of panelists today why don't we do a quick round of intros let's learn how what you guys are building and uh let's kick off awesome uh hi everyone it's really great to be here my name is Justina and I am a developer success lead at three boss Labs um three box Labs is a company behind a project called ceramic ceramic is a decentralized data layer that is bringing composable data to birthday applications and we are basically trying to build out the infrastructure and apis that developers can use to easily store access modify their data and the key concept that they are trying to bring to web3 is composable data which means that data that are stored on ceramic Network can easily be repurposed reused for different applications um so yeah specifically about me I lead developer success at three box Labs before joining the team I spent most of my career in data science machine learning and AI applications basically helping open source companies to build tools that enable developers to build Ai and machine Learning Systems without sacrificing their data ownership so super excited to be part of this panel hi um I think we're gonna no we're good with that I thought we're gonna cause a lot of feedback there uh it's gonna go off in everyone's ears so I'm shave Malik I I'm the CEO and co-founder of pool I used to be an investigative journalist for the guardian um for about half a decade uh so a weird sort of intro in a sense uh a route into web three uh but uh been around since about 2017 so I guess I do I get to be an OG now Nick I think so yeah oh wow okay um so I'll tell you a little about Paul what we're doing is we're building out a stack uh for date these things called Data unions which help people Aggregate and share data there's a good number of them around now including uh demo and swash ozone I mean I could just list about 120 of them so and specifically we're also building out an application um an application that can help store your data in a data wallet if you want I think sort of eoa wallets as they exist at the moment are you know sort of level 1.0 they're a bit they're a bit dumb as applications can we make them more intelligent and obviously signing in with ethereum becomes that gateway to opening out that information sharing uh hi I'm Nick Johnson uh founder and lead developer of the ethereum name service ens which helped fund uh sign in with ethereum and started the whole process going so ens has been evolving from purely a name lookup service into a your decentralized web3 profile so we're very very interested in pushing that forward with things like sign in with ethereum perfect thank you all right so why don't we kick off with some you know history behind signing with ethereum and maybe compare and contrast with the our web 2 counterparts and signing with Google and Facebook and and the like let's start with Nick yeah so uh Simon with ethereum status and if it uh between ens and the ethereum foundation we sort of identified the need for a native sign-in protocol whether there were dozens of different implementations of signing in using signing a message with your wallet they were all different mini head security issues many had usability issues and we sort of thought you know this would be an awful lot better if it was consistent and and identical across all systems wallets would be able to build and support for it with better ux for users sites would be able to use reusable components and so we got together with the ethereum foundation to to get that going we put out an RFP got a number of submissions and Spruce were the ones who won the RFP and they've done an outstanding job the building was standard and and getting it out there perfect perfect let's maybe double click on that a little bit more in terms of comparing contrasting like you know the back end with you know the data analytics and what happens behind the scenes uh sure do you want to take that one well actually it was going to come at a slightly different angle which is from the in fact the exact opposite end the ux side of things um and it's worth remembering obviously we you know a lot of people here have signed in with Google signed in with Facebook I don't think it's kind of a pleasurable experience because you're sort of wary of the fact that yeah you know someone else is a centralized party in all of this someone you might not appreciate but yeah it's so convenient right it's so much more convenient than signing in with your email and then trying to remember that damn password for that specific application and if obviously you want to have uh any sort of security over passwords it's it's uh you're then left with like 15 20 50 passwords right and that becomes a problem massive problem in and of itself so I remember this moment when I could sign in with ethereum with uni swap I think that was my first time when I really appreciated what was going on and I was like my God this is exactly what I've always wanted right it's this really happy moment where you're like it's my wallet and someone else is is recognizing my wallet address and somehow now I've kind of been on boarded in this decentralized fashion and it's brilliant it's just brilliant and it was just like that and I just thought God this is definitely the future and this is really in a sense underrated protocol where can it go next in terms of maybe interoperability and multi-chain and kind of carrying that you know ens Name Across multiple domains and and you know wrapping your identity and kind of self sovereignty with that could you talk to maybe what are the possibilities here in terms of use cases and just you know what are we building towards right now let's start with that just you know um yeah overall we do see um a lot of interest in terms of building more secure applications in general so um any kind of I would say data layer provider including ceramic I think they should definitely consider using uh sign in with ethereum as one of the options that they can provide for the users of the applications that are built on these projects because if we are I think we're still in quite early stages of where web3 data is especially if we go beyond just like Financial transactions so if we are building this layer right now we really have to think about how that relates to decentralized identity security and things like that and sign in with ethereum has a lot of advantages in that area I think we'll cover that a little bit more as well but um we do see a lot of interest and use cases from verifiable credentials and and reputation side of things for example git coin they just quite recently released GetGo and password and they're also leveraging sign in with ethereum to allow users to sign in what I'm specifically quite excited about is sign in with ethereum overall the way it handles uh this generation and identity overall it can be paired with additional tools that enable session management and I believe that that opens so many opportunities for a bit more mature and more interactive applications to be to be built out there so I really hope that we will see some really interesting use cases in web3 gaming also webview social that require a little bit more user interaction and we sign in with ethereum you don't really have to and session management you don't have to approve every single action that you run on while interacting with the application so I think that will be super interesting to see and another thing that is really nice to see as well is that we see some web to Native applications adopting a sign in with ethereum as well for example discourse forums they are already have a plugin that users can use basically to sign in with their ethereum wallet which is great and I just really hope that we will see more this webtoonative applications as well using it because it's a great standard to adopt we achieve anything to add to that oh I mean so many things um the picking up on that point about session management it's so important when you know it's worth going back maybe in history to kind of Netscape and then creating the cookie right in order to get some kind of user convenience in regards to session management and if you think about it cookies have been I mean they've just been terrible there as a piece of technology they are they are awful they don't actually really do the job then they've also been employed to do which is basically kind of spying by proxy and of course now third-party cookies are being shut down by Chrome in you know will they be delayed it twice now so web 2's got this problem too and in fact just generally speaking you know in terms of the the internet at large not just uh web3 we've had this issue of you know what is my identity on the internet uh is it my email is it my mobile number like you know uh or is it some centralized identity via Google and Facebook and I think this is really the perfect solution which is via sign in with ethereum here's my wallet address right it's something I own it's something I port with me and it actually works on both sides of that relationship because obviously Publishers websites want to know well who are you who are you are you the same person that showed up before in which case at least in the very least this is going to make this convenient for you because we can pull up all that session management stuff from before right here are your preferences great um so I I think it's just there's just so much opportunity as well with cookies disappearing right this is the replacement in that sense for that identity aspect of cookies and session management it's very exciting take anything else I guess it's worth drilling down a little bit on why we need something like cyan was ethereum in the first place because uh you know ethereum uh serverless apps you know your typical smart contract interaction you don't need to authenticate yourself to the app because you're authenticating yourself with the transactions you make so it's only when things with back-end services that aren't the chain uh become important that you start to need the sign-in thing and so I think you know this wasn't a part of the core ethereum layer simply because initially apps were very focused on directly their Unchained back-ends and as apps have become more sophisticated they've wanted to have integrate other systems authenticate with Legacy systems and so on to become more and more important to do this but because it wasn't built in the initial solution was very ad hoc and and so forth and so we needed a sort of a standardization moment to help move that forward um I guess talking about the cross chain thing too um you know the the ens as well suited to the integration here and obviously I'm going to show UNS but um because ens supports multi-chain identities and so forth so you can authenticate using Signum as ethereum and you import your profile which has addresses for whatever chain you're using or none at all so why don't we talk through uh some some of the additional traction currently and maybe some barriers to adoption you know why hasn't some things picked up you know what are some major hurdles we have to work through uh start which is you know um yeah so in general it's fairly newish concept so obviously I think we will see more more adoption and more traction in web3 first I also think that um for especially for let's say bigger institutions to adopt something like sign in with ethereum there are quite a few things they in general I think still need a little bit more conviction that these kind of Protocols are reliable and scalable and and safe especially I'm just thinking what would it take for a big let's say Healthcare company or in insurance company to adopt something like that to allow users to log into their systems and there are a few things yeah I think they still need a little bit more conviction that these systems are secure reliable and also I think that is still an unsolved problem of users managing their keys so we obviously shift so much responsibility to the user and then not not to do some silly things with their private keys so having good Solutions there and and having reliable experience for both um let's say companies and the users is important and yeah overall that also boils down to in general I think education for people to understand let's say if you speak about Mass adoption um understanding why they should care should care what happens with your data when they they sign into application using their Facebook or Google account like what does it mean for for their identity their data that they share online um and and the last thing that I think I would like to mention is user experience um this is super important and as she mentioned that's one of the biggest advantages that uh that to single sign-on methods have it's so simple so easy you just click a few buttons and you're in and it's great so we have to make sure that for web 3 Solutions we strive for at least similar experience or even better so I think overall the standardized message that sign in with theorem produces it's already a really great step towards that direction it's easy to understand for the user they know what kind of things they are signing up for or what what permissions they're giving to the application so yeah we just really have to make sure that overall ux improves and is as good as web 2 or even better as well do you have anything else yeah um obviously the title of this talk is the most powerful protocol in web3 question mark because I think it's obviously really underrated in terms of use cases right now um like it's worth asking the audience who's signed in with ethereum uh in the last like I don't know week or ever it was a frequent daily user wow that's pretty good okay that's good that's I guess it's how it should be for a conference where everyone presumably has got an ethereum address um I mean in terms of usage right now I mean this morning just taking today for me I signed in to um Ave uh in a sense and I was able to to realize that my health Factor uh was was really low and I might need to borrow some money um to prop up my Margin Call and then the second thing I did was to sign into the the app for this conference which was great uh uh and obviously now it remembers uh and I'm able to personalize that experience right that's sort of brilliant and I do you know various things like that on a regular basis um but where this goes I mean Justina mentioned Key Management um it's it was listening to a podcast and I think they were there's still eight addresses which have never pulled out their ethereum from the original crowd sale and that's because they lost their keys so if ethereum devs right back in whenever it was 2015 can't manage their keys how do we like expect Ordinary People to do it um so that's a huge problem but I think I'd like to see the stage where you know people are signing into let's say the Wall Street Journal and uh and they're able to make micropayments right because they're on an L2 for paying for an article and I want that to be on that list of options right sign in with Google Facebook and seaweed right sign in with ethereum I just want it to be there that that's I think and in a sense I don't see why we're not too far off of that once you've got the ability to make micropayments then the other side have got an incentive to start installing uh the sdks that kind of make this happen in a sense yeah I think I I just want to Echo that like the the getting more integration of webto apps is going to be a huge step forward um but also just the browser ux sign in with ethereum's uh protocol was specifically designed so that the message you sign would mean mean something to a human you'd be able to read it and tell exactly what's going on but also that it would be formatted so it'd be easy for a machine to pass and so there's a lot of opportunity for wallets you know metamask rainbow everyone else to identify sign in with Theory messages and show a nice user-friendly dialogue that says you know this is what you need to know we've checked it's a real message you know here's what you're signing in with here's what permissions you're giving them same as you would see with like an oauth dialogue for GitHub or Google or whatnot and I think that will that's a big step forward from the text-based you know sign this message window right I wanted to uh touch point on the institutional partnership side I mean the short term medium term is there a way that you know we work together with a lot of the large you know tech companies or you know fintech tradify or is this more kind of our siled you know Bottoms Up kind of way of of starting a new movement here um so it was just you know um yeah no I I I really hope that it's not gonna be siled and that we can collaborate um with them and yeah I really do think it's really about understanding the challenges um like again as I mentioned about like for example um even Healthcare which I think would be massive um thing to potentially um about these kind of methods um we would be dealing with extremely sensitive data so these kind of Institutions they have another set of challenges that they have to solve also we have data regulations that we have to take into account and like what does it mean then that users use their let's say with three wallets and then these kind of protocols and so on so um yeah I hope that we can collaborate on understanding what kind of issues we have to address and find Solutions on that end and Implement them um and yeah I think that's really the only way how we can see more adoption on the institutional level so actually we're working with ceramic so our vision is so the wallet is just in a sense the application right the private key and the mechanism for signing are the protocol and that's really where the I think the power lies uh how good can you make the application though so as I said at the moment I think wallets are actually going to be crude but just they're pretty dumb at the moment smart contract well let's take you a step up right because then you kind of yes you can get subscriptions and things like direct debits right more kind of refined modes of payment um not just single transactions um but now imagine and this is why we're working with ceramic um being able to put data into effectively a storage Vault if you want where you're also using the same private key as you would for your wallet to permission reads for that Vault so now you're entering a world in which you've basically got a big digital backpack so your wallets now a data wallet it's a digital backpack so you can take that anywhere and then people go look well who are you have you turned up before I want to like help you with session management or maybe I want to read your data because I want to serve you ads and you can go yes or no right now you've created this entirely different way of doing the same things but it's decentralized right you're as the user in control because you have that private key to say yes or no right to to people's requests out there which is sort of in a sense what Apple are trying to do saying I do want to be tracked but of course they're managing all of those permissions and it's not interoperable right and they've kind of locking out everyone else right centralized the question is then how do you fill up those data vaults and and that's the question question that we've been working on at pool with a lot of other data unions you know how do you structure the that data because you can't just expect people to dump stuff into there um and then of course that becomes an even more valuable propositions for huge Enterprises out there who go oh right now you're turning now you're creating humans who we think are verified they're turning up with data we can tell a story from them right we they can also pay from the same application we're jumping into web3 right it's not just this is crypto we could make some money off some speculation or nfts that's nice you know this is It's like a 10x proposition right when you come to a data wallet Nick anything else that um yeah I think you know you asked originally about like do we you know is this a silo thing is this you know just us and I think we only really succeed if it's not you know Ian s's vision is is a web 3 identity for the for everything and I think that works best and and sign in with therm workspace if it's everywhere you know ideally the ux improves and the the number of users using web 3 wallets improves to the point where this is people's preferential sign-in compared to Google or Twitter or whatnot because it's actually you have control of your data you have control of your identity you're not relying on a third-party identity provider to to do it for you and to decide that you're allowed to continue to have an identity makes sense um so I wanted to touch on that the Privacy piece a little bit you mentioned a little bit about that you know we have a lot of sensitive data a lot of kind of identity and credentials to to think through here as well especially with use cases in you know supply chain in hospitals things like that could you talk through maybe some of the techniques we're using currently including maybe zero knowledge proofs and other techniques that you know how are we working towards that right now um yeah so overall um like sign in with ethereum overall is offers a much more secure way to sign applications because they have a standardized message that it produces and overall it makes it much harder to run phishing attacks so so that's definitely a big Improvement and yeah we really have to think about how we can pair that with other options like zero knowledge proof where users don't really have to prove that they like who they really are but we can only use for example their address or or details that are stored in in their decentralized identifier so I think overall the advantage of signing with ethereum is that every single user that owns a wallet they have a did which then can be used to build out these kind of systems so maybe you can add a little bit more as well in the technicalities uh yeah I think you covered it pretty pretty thoroughly really um I haven't dealt with zkps and so on they seem like a good application here but I don't have deep experience so I won't embarrass myself just briefly for me then I would say look if you're going to carry a data wallet around let's say the middle of us then you know you can start to see how zero knowledge proofs protect uh users privacy uh so for one show example if you let's say you've managed to Port all of your financial transaction data but actually most people on the other side just want to know how much you earn in a year they don't want to know every single transaction you've made and actually they don't want to even keep that data anymore it's just so much of a hassle from a gdpr perspective or CCPA um so zero knowledge proof simply says look I you know what is that number at the end of the day right is it 70k is it 20K whatever it is right I just want to know and that's that's it that's one application I think we're starting I know vitalik's very enthusiastic about um so knowledge proofs in their applications but it was still at the beginnings of this I think we're still building out actually the raw layer for a data wallet in this thing in this example for example uh survey I also wanted to ask you about the idea of data unions and kind of zero party data could you elaborate a little bit more on that and what you guys are working on there um yeah so in a sense again I mentioned data eatings very briefly before um zero party data is in a sense uh it very much aligns with it sort of all sorts of kind of web3 uh Notions um so if you want the non-plitcher goes first party data is data that a website has about you right it's their data you turn up at their website they know who you are and you know they have a again you know an identification about you and then they're like oh look they spent this much time on a website this is what they read this is what they did et cetera Etc third-party data is basically people spying on you um no one is proud of what's been created but it's a huge ecosystem but it's a it's been closed down literally as we speak so for example you know if you anyone with an iPhone will have seen the update is 14.5 where they said do you want this app to track you and I'm pretty certain that I mean can I ask the audience like who said yes to that who said yes to being tracked okay literally no one one person oh one but that one guy there always a control pound it out of this conference um so you know that turned out that cost Facebook for example 10 billion dollars um because they've been locked out by Apple and apple is like rubbing their hands with Glee going privacy is great because now we can increase our advertising uh revenue from 5 billion to 30 billion so it's just a big play right but that's what they're using so that's a state of third party zero party uh it says this which is why don't we just work in conjunction with people who actually want to share and be pragmatic about sharing and monetizing their information so as I said there were about 120 data unions probably about 30 to 40 of them are a position where they're they're monetizing their data now so they've got I mean I'll give you one example like sweatcoin is kind of interesting um they're actually doing it in inverse and they're about to start monetizing their data uh of their users they've got 120 million downloads 25 million sort of active users uh Pogo is another really great example they're in the web most of them Traverse web 2 and web three um I know Lyndon one of the founders of ozone is around uh you know so they're collecting all sorts of data Wellness data click stream data and and actually that whole Space is about to open up massively in 2024 March 2024 put it in your diary um the EU is about to give real-time portability rights to everyone that's 450 million people in Europe so you can Port your Google Facebook Amazon Apple data and more and LinkedIn because it's Microsoft um and that's just about to explode that ecosystem so people can now say this is my data I'm porting it to a data Union that data Union is going to be a fiduciary for me this is zero party data now it's coming direct from Source let's monetize it yeah could you talk to some of what you're working on as well at Ceramic around this run uh yeah yeah of course um yeah so as I mentioned ceramic is a decentralized Data Network and we really try to build out the infrastructure that developers can use to store manage user data so just like should mentioned it's like becomes your data backpack so I think this is probably where I would definitely put ceramic we definitely spend a lot of time thinking about how we can build it in a secure way so that a user is the owner and has the ownership of their data they can manage it so the centralized identifiers are at the core of how ceramic works and then when users interact with applications that are built on ceramic then did is really the linking point that connects a user to the data streams that they have generating while interacting with the applications right now we are making some quite exciting updates to ceramic so I will just quickly mention we just released a developer preview of compose DB so we are expanding the capabilities of what ceramic offers in terms of building applications in an easier way so now users can developers can Define their application schemas using graphql that also opens more opportunities to actually interact with their data by curing the data using graphql apis we are adding indexing and relation so that you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of how developers can can interact with the data that is stored on on ceramic um and yeah we also doubling down on making sure that data that is stored on ceramic is composable so what that means for a developer um like if you build on ceramic and you build a data model so basically Define the scheme of the model you can share the model on what we call model Discovery so that other developers that are potentially building similar application or something that they just simply need a specific feature or the model that already exists they don't have to build it from scratch they can take something that exists on a Model Discovery platform and and use it for their application or if they need some additional functionality there they can update the models and then also share with the community so we really try to make more that development more Community Driven and allow developers to help each other to build faster and and better applications um and yeah also data interoperability as well as something that we really take seriously and make sure that data for example if user created a profile on an application that was built on ceramic because their data is linked to their decentralized identifier that means that they can take their profile or let's say I don't know if it's a web 3 social application they are followers and bring kids to a different application that runs on ceramic as well so those are the things that they were working on some of them are early stages we love developers to try it out share feedback and help us build it better exciting stuff um I was going to say if people don't know the secret source of ceramic really is certainly from our perspective is that you can deal in real-time data so you like ipfs is great for static stuff right one off like I'm going to store this that's great if you want a persistent stream then you've got a different problem right because you're gonna have to kind of rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and that's going to cost a lot and it's horribly inefficient obviously so that's for us at least that's like the basic thing for why ceramic is really a huge Way Forward in all of this perfect um let's let's talk about uh on the consumer end with monetization of data and after sign in and you know kind of that whole user experience from end to end what's like the I guess the Grand Ridge I know you guys talked about this a little bit but you know with VNS let's say and cross chain and monetization with Brands let's say you know how do you think about that kind of like blue blue sky vision I guess monetization is kind of furthest from uh from our minds in some respects we've always built ens with sort of building a public good in mind and so you know we're aware that people monetize things but we try and keep it as you know as as decentralized and independent as possible um so we sort of it's more a platform that people can build monetizable ideas on than something monetizable in and of itself um I think when it comes with signing to sign in with ethereum it you know provides access to all these platforms as well but it hasn't been our core focused historically look can I ask Nick a question yes yes um as you can say just you know obviously you were one of the original authors of what is it EIP is it 3165 possibly there's so many of them you can't remember no as in this original sort of seaweed protocol right yes yes okay um as it stands at the moment how where do you see it going in terms of it needing updating refreshing you know coming back to it and you know what is flaws um I think like it was built with extensibility in mind reasonably well you know the the format of the message you sign allows optional Fields allows apps to specify individual things wallets can then support those as time goes on so I'm hopeful that the way it will be updated is by publishing additional speaks that add functionality through those mechanisms we already have rather than needing changes to the base protocol at least if we did our job that will be you know the gold is always the possibility of ce2 but maintaining backward compatibility I think is really important because in some sense whenever you don't you start from scratch you know quite as hard as the first time but you spend an awful lot of effort just getting back to where you were in terms of adoption and so on you know whenever you release something new that everyone has to support so I want to Pivot slightly towards uh the idea of you know sawbound tokens and kind of how we can compare and contrast between signing with ethereum and and you know italics as we talk and approach do you want to talk about that God yeah this is so sobound tokens is obviously um you know is put forward by vitalik and Glenn Weil and one other author Priyanka I think it's Priyanka I forget her name this is really terrible um it's always the third person who drops off that list in terms of you remembering um and I don't know I I don't know if it's a very so the idea is basically you have tokens that are um inherently bound Soul bound uh to someone's address right so they in a sense in essence can't really be transferred uh become meaningless after that I don't know Nick if you want to kind of elaborate more on a technical perspective um and and that is in essence wrapped up with your identities and I think from like if you take a kind of you know uh a much higher perspective just sort of step out it's good at recording moments in a sense it's not too different from poapps if people know the value of that where you're like taking a um from a from a storytelling perspective you're like you're capturing a photo and you're like here's this moment it's perfectly captured great and it says something about you at that moment what it isn't really doing it's sort of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for other people to then put together a story and and in this end it's not too different from um I mean it's got other applications but this is from a kind of data perspective or from an identity perspective people's identities are far more fluid and actually involve a you know a good many more things and and you know so if you just told your story if you want through photographs to carry on that metaphor you'd end up with kind of you know instagram-ish world but that doesn't really tell the richness in terms of digitally digital storytelling perspective of everything that's going on all the stuff that you wouldn't in fact actually really capture um and and the humdrum of data that's produced about people is sometimes incredibly useful uh not just to external parties but to you right very few applications anyway I won't go down that route but I think that's the difference between this kind of Soul band token approach which has crossovers with powerapps nfts Etc and something may be a bit richer which is let's take real-time continuous information from the applications that people use and then and then store that in a Ceramics style Data Vault right I think that's that's for me a much more holistic approach to that I don't know yeah I guess the the most basic version the most basic view of the Soul down token is just it's an nft that can't be transferred but that falls for the you know a couple of common misapprehensions that uh an ethereum address uniquely represents a user and that never changes and neither of those is true you know all of us here probably have multiple wallets uh probably most or all of us here have the experience of moving from one main wallet to another and if you have a truly like um non-transferable token then you leave your identity behind when you do that and from a security point of view the last thing we want to do is discourage people from making advisable updates and moving to more secure wallets and and key storage and stuff um but I think the more sophisticated view of the sold down token is that it is effectively non-separable so if you have one that represents uh you know your your national identity and one that represents your membership of an association and so forth you can't transfer one to one place and another to another place you can move but you have to move as a whole you know you can't split your identity into pieces um and a different approach to that uh which I'm quite fond of is that his stations and particularly if you tie them to an identity such as an ens name because you can transfer the ens name to a new account and all of your attestations come with you because they're pointing at you know that this name is over 18 this name is a citizen of New Zealand and so on and so forth and the attestations are cheaper too because you don't need to put them on chain you can put revocations on chain but you just need to sign message that says this authorities asserted that this fact is true about this ens name and you can collect them and you can hand them out and you can have privacy over them as well in a sense you know again it comes out of the fundaments of what identity is how we not only want to build it but like what is it like going back they're like who are people people are complicated things and and to kind of you know are we taking this kind of um almost stochastic approach uh or are we going to have continuous streams where we realize yes you know these things are sort of fluid and uh but we can tell a kind of more interesting uh story and obviously people yeah do want to shift people's identities inherently do change we're not static beings in that sense um and I guess you know it's a good I felt like the whole the the Soul band tokens are incredibly good theoretical exercise but from a ux perspective just like the worst in a sense to implement because humans are complicated in that sense right right um just could you talk to maybe some of the use cases with let's say AI or advertisers and you know um just different ways to to kind of combine um you know signing in and artificial intelligence yeah I mean overall um that's a massive topic entire hour to talk about that um like overall um I'll try to make this quick and short um I think most of people here are familiar with um problems with AI and and driving insights from data in in web 2 I'm speaking about users giving up their data ownership these big companies that have algorithms that are being trained on their data do most of their work in a closed source so there is no way to really tell what is happening behind that and then again like if you use traditional sign-in methods you give out like entire network of your interactions with different applications then on the other side there is another challenge for developers specifically in web 2 that I've seen so many times like if you are a smaller company and you don't have massive user base like for example Google or or Facebook um you have two main problems one of them you might not have a big enough team to build out these Advanced systems and another problem is that most of the data is extremely siled so if you don't have access to these massive data pools you are quite Limited in terms of how good those ml or AI systems can be but at the same time let's be honest these algorithms that we interact with on a daily basis like for example YouTube recommendation algorithm that gives you suggestions for the next video to watch they are pretty good and I'm sure that everyone appreciates the experience that they provide so overall I think looking at web 3 and like for example these assignment methods from ethereum side I think that it's a really great opportunity to do these kind of things a little bit better although although at the same time I I feel like it's really early days um because um applications that are currently on web3 they are not very feature Rich and to train those kind of systems obviously you need data but what I'm really hopeful with signing with ethereum about again I mentioned that session management which should open up the doors for more feature-rich applications again I mentioned gaming applications web 3 social and that should allow more web 3 apps to potentially have some kind of sprinkle of machine learning systems that improve user experience and then at the same time there is a massive interest right now in decentralized finance decentralized machine learning as well and there are some methods there already that should allow users to interact with these machine learning systems based built on a blockchain without giving out their data and instead for example um sharing the weights of the model that is being trained I will not go too much detail into technical details there but basically I think that our opportunities there to hopefully get to at least similar user experience in web3 as well compared to web 2 or maybe even better but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to enable developers to build these quite Advanced and feature-rich applications on web3 but sign in with your Miss I think is getting us there I won't add much I know we've got to ask the my when I asked the audience a bunch of questions or they might have questions for us um I should say uh I I just had this I think I don't really think you get AI and something like the metaverse serving Humanity unless you have if you want decentralized session management and sign in with ethereum uh I I think it just the that Vision just goes um into a really dark place unless you have that base layer sorted in terms of the protocol perfect anything yeah no okay uh is there any questions in the audience just wanted to check we have about five minutes remaining yes right there uh can we bring the mic uh I have a quick question for Nick uh are we going to support automatic renewal for ANS uh or no sorry automatic uh renewable of uh specific ens ah um the the problems of that are in terms of getting user authorization and payment from the wallet um it's possible but a bit awkward I'd be happy to chat with you about it out of band though yes sir success anyone else have a question right here a quick question about uh I think the legal side uh have any of you spoken to governments um discussed I guess legislation that could help uh I want to say release this data and information so that we can bring in onto ethereum um I can take that briefly which is say this is how sad I am during the pandemic uh so right at the start May 2020 um I was in just talking to a lot of people from Brussels because their worries were they realized basically gdpr didn't do the other bit which they hoped it would do which is to break the back of kind of Google and Facebook's Monopoly because from their perspective these are these Silicon Valley companies and it's not really their Vision either of a bit more of a decentralized or kind of you know where the power is spread at least to some European companies um so the rules that are now coming out in March 2024 were kind of a result of that lots of other people actually even a few people from web3 were involved in those discussions so that's now resulted in real-time data portability being a right so at the moment it's just portability rather than retail real-time portability so people can now instead of sending an email saying I want to get all my data and then it comes back 30 days later in a Json file it's like sign in to a third party use OA or oauth in a sense you in fact use their tools against them it's great and then you'll be able to Port your data to a third party to whomever you nominate and so that's at least what's come as a result of that um which is bloody fantastic uh it means the silos for Google and Facebook are about to be in a sense ripped down we're about to witness a you know a vast experiment uh certainly in Europe and then they can't imagine like Americans standing by going oh yeah all these Europeans can do all this stuff with their data and like we just have to like lump it um you know at least at least I'm not American so I don't know how let's see how that goes down steer anything out there yeah no that's a great question I think overall um like we didn't speak too much about like technical details of signing with ethereum but I think it does uh make it easier to follow certain legislations and think about like what will be happening with user data um because again like user becomes the owner of their decentralized identifier which then when linked with let's say data storage systems still allows them to manage their data in a way and it's not being shared with like anyone online so I think these kind of methods that we have being implemented should make it easier and the same apply so for example and if these are quite often also used for as decentralized identifiers but the problem is that they are public they are on chain so with options like sign in with ethereum we can now leverage more of off-chain applications as well for data storage and so on so that makes it I think in general easier to be compliant with registrations and and rules out there yeah I guess uh you know things like GDP are all about how companies that have your data can share it with third parties and things like sign in with ethereum and decentralized profiles give you that control so in a way they obsolete it and they they're very good way to be compliant with it like the zero party data you were talking about Chev anything else from the honest yes one more hi oh cool two questions um first one for people who want to contribute to sign in with ethereum what is a good Hub to like reach out and help build it and second question is the word ethereum a limiting factor for adoption and maybe like sign in with a private key or self-sovereign identity a more appealing button to add next to sign in with Google or something yeah um yeah no that's a really good question in terms of contributing um Spruce uh are good people to talk to and the sign in with ethereum site which I think is seaweed.eth as well as there's a non-decentralized version uh has a lot of information about how the contribution get involved um I agree it's like it's a difficult thing because technically you're not signing in with ethereum you're signing in with your crypto identity which happens to be the one that we use for ethereum and so forth but I guess it's difficult to compress that into a four-letter acronym and we're we're kind of stuck with it for now but um you're right it's much broader than just ethereum I think we should be like super proud of that right like and we can call it seaweed and we haven't been calling it CB on stage maybe we should have done that a bit more um but no I'm like you know I want to know from websites as soon as I had that uni swap experience and the RV experience I was like why isn't every other website like that like I want to know like and prod them and go why why can't I just sign in with my wallet I don't want you to make me use Google right that sucks it really sucks I feel bad it's a bad experience and I get nothing out of it totally agreed all right looks like we're out of time today thank you so much for coming out and let's give it up for our panel [Applause]