podcasts
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Collection for podcasts • 511 items • Updated • 2
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A | Probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now in audio content, it's probably all legitimate, most likely not AI generated in the next few years. You can kind of see how that can start to flip. One of the things that we think about is like right now, if you just, if you take some historical co... |
B | Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan. Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The Ethereum attestation service, a new ... |
C | The arc of crypto is just iteration and unlock after iteration and unlock. And I think this identity primitive of the attestation is a big unlock. I think a lot of projects, there's been a lot of teams and organizations out there that have gone straight for the identity golden goose, and they're skipping a step, they'r... |
B | We have nothing to disclose for this episode, but of course you can always check out bankless disclosures@bankless.com. disclosures guys, we're getting it right to the episode. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. Bankless nation, we are super excited to introduce you to Bryce, Patri... |
A | Thanks. |
D | Thank you. Thank you Ryan and David. It's a pleasure to be on the show. We've been a longtime listener, so to have the opportunity to come up is, it's great. We're excited to chat, help educate more about attestations and yeah, looking forward to the call. |
B | I do think that this is going to be an educational episode for everybody, including David and myself because part of the reason we're having this conversation is of course the bankless nation knows that identity is very important to David and myself. We often say first we solve money and then we solve identity. That's ... |
A | Absolutely, yeah. |
D | Great. |
B | Okay, we'll start here. Can you tell us? It's in the name Ethereum attestation service. What is an attestation, and what on earth does that have to do with the identity? |
A | All right, so basically, simply speaking, an attestation is simply an entity making a signed statement about something. In the case of eas, you're able to make an attestation about literally anything. And, you know, that might not be, you know, the reason why that's important might not be immediately obvious, but that'... |
D | Yeah. And it's not that all the identity protocols are moving in the wrong direction. It's just that because there hasn't been this primitive base layer, everyone's building their own solution towards it, and they're just one aspect of an identity. Realize, if you actually want to be able to solve reputation, digital i... |
C | When you guys say that attestations are primitive really gets me excited, especially when you define the primitive so easily as just a statement that someone attests to something else. And when a statement like this is so simple, you can get this instinct that the expression of this primitive can be massive. And I thin... |
D | Yeah, if we check ourselves out of blockchain altogether and we just think about how we interact with each other offline and in the real world, there's a lot of interactions that we have together. Imagine just like getting a loan for something. You might go to Ryan and say, hey, Ryan, I need to borrow $5,000. Well, a s... |
C | Is this just an identity conversation? Is this a conversation specifically, attestations, what do they do? They give us our identities? Or is there something grander here? |
A | So attestations can be used for a lot more than identity. We talk about identity first because we like to explain how, like, you can take such a really complex idea and describe it with something so simple. But at the stations, because they're simply essentially signed statements of entities saying things about things,... |
D | Yeah. If we think of like a notary service, if you were to sign like a mortgage document or some sort of important document, typically you have to get it notarized in front of someone. That notary is essentially attesting that you were the person that signed that document. But we don't have a way to actually have a way... |
B | Okay, so I'm trying to, like, put, put this together, make this make sense in my own mind. So a few things maybe have been talked about. The first I just want to make concrete is this idea of an attestation. It's somebody saying a thing about someone else or making some claim on chain. What this mechanically looks like... |
A | Yep. Yes. Yes. But it's structured in a particular way using the EAS standard. But yes, every attestation is signed with a wallet with a private key. So you have the authenticity knowing that this attestation came from the entity that's claiming. |
B | And so it's coming from the entity that owns those private keys, that has, like, physical access to those private keys. |
A | Or a smart contract. It can even be a smart contract at a test, perhaps the smart contract receives some sort of inputs that it validates, and then once it gets these proper inputs, it attests to the entity that they've passed some sort of thing. |
B | Okay. |
D | And, Ryan, so, like, with social media today, when you're posting something, you're essentially just attesting to the post, right? And then if David likes your post, he's attesting that he likes your statement. But we haven't had, like, a core building block to be able to do that. And I think one thing that we realized... |
B | Okay. Okay. I want to get into eas, but, yeah, that's an interesting point. I guess all a tweet is an attestation that my account, the person who holds my username and password and is two factor authenticated into my Twitter account, is saying this thing that establishes my online Twitter reputation, basically, and is ... |
A | So it's not the claims so much that is your identity. It's how the entity looking at those claims values, those attestations. So, for example, if I show you an attestation from Vitalik claiming that he believes that I'm a good person or something, and, you know, it was signed from him, you might find value in that. But... |
C | Yeah, there's been a number of attempts at identity ever, honestly, even ever since the bitcoin talk forums, like, the early people coming into this industry realize the relationship between private keys and identity. You know, if you sign a message and you are known to be the bearer of these private keys, and everyone... |
A | Right? |
C | Like, worldcoin, for example, comes to mind, which is recently going through the crypto meta. But even before that, right circles, it was another attempt. Bright id. You guys listed them, and these are all, like, identity apps. And like, that one comic, that one XKCD comic comes to mind where, like, there's 14 standard... |
D | Yeah, and as I mentioned before, like, all these identity solutions, they're all moving in the right direction and people will value. Like, even with world coin, right? People have. There's two schools of camp. One is, like, very, like, some people don't care to have their eyeballs scanned, and then the other people do... |
A | One of the things I want to add is, in response to your question, is that with these companies, if you don't have a base primitive, you end up having to presuppose a lot about what identity is. I think this is, like, one of the biggest fails of, like, uport. They built in all of these presuppositions about what identit... |
C | Okay, so what actually, is it so easy? It's not just another identity play. It's something, we've been using this primitive word, but what. What actually is the thing? Like, what actually is eas? Is it an ERC standard? Like, what actually is the thing? |
A | Yeah. So EAs has two basic parts to it. There's two smart contracts. One of them is called the schema registry, and it allows anyone to register any type of attestation that might want to be made. So, for example, there would be a schema for voting, a schema for attesting to whether you trust someone, a schema for test... |
C | And then there's these are, these are types of attestations. Attestation, form factors. |
A | Yeah. So it's the form factor, essentially, it's a form factor registry for attestations. And then you have the attestation ledger, smart contract, which just has a ledger of attestations, each referencing a particular schema. So, like, you know, you have, you want to make an attestation, you have to first reference a ... |
D | And one key thing with attestations is that they don't always have a recipient or someone on the other end. Like, you don't always have to say something about someone else. You could be self attesting, more or less. So imagine banklist eth. If they wanted to attest to the authenticity of this episode, you could generat... |
C | So this was great. And I think a lot of people will start to have their imaginations start to go now, and they'll start to see this world open up. And just to maybe double down on some points that y'all made specifically about the form factor of attestations, maybe to put this into the trad world or the world that we c... |
D | Yeah, I think on the web three side, like the crypto native side, the reason why we want to put something on chain is so smart contracts can interact with it and maybe greater transparency for, especially in decentralized communities where you might want the governance of the community more transparent, like how funds ... |
B | So you said there was two smart contract registries, like one for the schemas and one for the individual, the attestations themselves. So the schemas that David was describing, that's completely permissionless, right? Anybody could propose whatever schema they want, and if they can organize enough people to sort of par... |
D | Yeah, you're spot on, because I think one of the challenges for a lot of, like, previous attempts at creating some sort of diploma schema and stuff, people assume way too much in the fields that are required in the schema, and you actually just need to allow the community to come together to develop the right schema ov... |
B | This is so interesting because I almost feel like I'm learning about HTTP for the first time, HTML for the first time, because it feels like it's so flexible and can do so many things at once. I don't even know where to start or, like, what to do with it first because it feels like it's like not, you know, turing could... |
C | People are like, yeah, I don't get it. |
D | You know what I mean? |
B | It feels like it's that it's this type of conversation that we're having. It's like, attestations can do basically anything. I mean, they are the primitive building blocks to reputation, to identity, to, like, the way everything is organized across society. |
C | And attestations do everything. All right, that's the other thing. |
B | Yeah. |
D | Okay. |
B | I'm like, okay, so what do we do first? Like, it could do so many things at once. Are you guys worried at all that we're kind of, like, boiling the ocean with this approach? I totally see the merits of what you're saying is, hey, all of these other on chain identity solutions are starting almost at the application laye... |
A | I don't think we're boiling the ocean. I think this is just. This is just the case with this technology that, like, now there's a new technology that allows for things that couldn't exist before, and so there are infinite possibilities. The cool thing, though, is it doesn't necessarily require, like, a massive network ... |
D | It is a concern for a lot of people. If you can do so much with something, you almost feel like you can't start with anything. And I think that what we've really tried to lean into is just where the ecosystem narratives have been. EAS is not an identity protocol, even though identity things can be built on it. But we'v... |
C | I think there's something pretty refreshing about having a team on here that doesn't have a token, that doesn't have venture funding or doesn't have any of the incentives that some of the other, like startups that might have that play in this space. Whereas every single startup is trying to scale and grow and grow and ... |
A | Yeah, totally. Like I think we definitely, we don't want to own anything, right? Like we're just creating this base layer infrastructure for anybody to use. But it would be cool, I think, and it would be great for the world if we were all attesting using the same technology because it would just make all these attestat... |
D | And I think the world is, we're looking for a more trust full online experience. So whether it's on chain or online, I mean if you go onto any platform today, it's filled with mistrust, misinformation, fraud, scams, right? Like every click is a risk, every download is a risk. And like if we can actually use digital sig... |
C | Yeah, Bryce, you started to paint that picture. Let's keep going with that. Why do we need attestations in this digital age when we daydream about the future world that eas could bring? Why do we need it in the Internet to progress forward as our next steps as a species? |
D | I'll let Steve talk about relative trust networks. I think what we're noticing is with this rise in AI generated content, it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove the authenticity of what we're consuming online and interacting with if we can actually use digital signatures. I'll use the bankless example. Bankle... |
A | One of the examples I like to give about this whole, like, AI situation that's coming and how eas can be useful is just like, think about right now, like, probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now and audio content, it's probably all legitimate, most likely not AI generated. But in the nex... |
D | And that reality is here. We were talking to a team that we won't disclose, but they were saying that they jumped onto a Zoom call and the CEO of this node project was actually, the Zoom CEO was like a fake fraudster. And in the web, two worlds, we've all received the CEO emails and employees saying, hey, I need a gift... |
B | So what role does Ethereum really play in all of this? Is Ethereum sort of, or like blockchain in general, just kind of, I guess, seeding this infrastructure for digital signatures. Because to your point, I don't necessarily need to do the attestation on chain. I don't necessarily need to update a smart contract, do I?... |
A | Eas is completely Evm based. One of the important things that does need to be on chain, it technically doesn't have to be. But the fact that there's a schema registry on chain, that anytime you see an attestation, whether it's off chain or on chain, you're able to instantly know what it's about by like instantly checki... |
B | I guess I'm also asking. So I think the world is looking outside looking and kind of mainstream is sort of like, yeah, crypto, where's your use case? You keep saying you're good for the world, and we keep being like, yeah, but store of value, right? And they're like, but we have the dollar and we have a bank and we're ... |
D | I'd love for Steve to also give his opinion, just because when we've like Ethereum or just in general, in the past ten years, we've really focused on decentralizing assets. But there's like this in the real world, there's so many other things like information and like non financial use cases that we just haven't been a... |
A | Yeah, one of the things now is that like, you know, because so many people now have these private keys, you know, private key, private keys in possession, and people have used nfTs, now is a really good time for entities to be able to just start to get into like identity. You know, I actually got so I was in the space ... |
C | Yeah, I would imagine the big signal that this is actually being adopted are non crypto institutions are testing to non crypto people about stuff. I would imagine that that would be a huge sign of success. Maybe we've gotten there. I don't know. I'll ask you guys that later in the show. But for right now, what projects... |
D | Yeah, so one of the, when we're building a standard, as you're describing for, like, how do we just end up not being, like, another standard that tried to become a standard? You know, that's. That was a real fear in the early, like, beginnings because we were building eas and then optimism was building there at to stat... |
C | You guys want a thumb war with optimism? |
D | A code thumb war, for sure. But today they adopted us as two, so we're integrated into the native code base as two special addresses. So anytime a new chain gets deployed on the op stack, they automatically inherit the EAS contracts. And that was a really big win for us because optimism is like really trying to push th... |
C | This really just goes back to the power of credible neutrality in public goods. Wins you hearts and minds. It sounds like what you guys in optimism were trying to build was the same thing, but maybe they were kind of trying. They were trying to roll their own identity, and you guys had already been thinking about this.... |
A | Correct. Yeah. |
B | What kind of attestations are people doing in optimism right now? What are they attesting to? |
D | The use cases are a lot of like, there are people experimenting around like governance related things, attesting to roles in a DAO as an example. There's people attesting to like there's a project that's attesting to like, optimism domains and like different aspects of like a domain registry, quadratic voting. |
A | We got, we have this dev folio for all their hackathons. Now they use eas for, at the end of the hackathon, all the teams get to vote using eas quadratically. And then anybody can tally up the votes and verify, you know, who gets paid out. |
D | There's also gitcoin. So gitcoin passport stamps, we reached out to them. We were talking, hey, these stamps are essentially just attestations and they've been very welcoming to us as well. And so Gitcoin passport stamps are migrating to be attestations as a primitive because what that does is it also unlocks them to b... |
C | So when gitcoin stamps becomes eas compliant with the standard, I don't know if that's the right word or not. What does this do? Does this just help with like discoverability? I don't know if there's like a search engine for eas attestations out there, but what does actually coming into the fold and being compliant wit... |
A | So just like other platforms like Gitcoin passport is like its own siloed little ecosystem. So if you want to implement gitcoin passports, you have to understand their docs, you have to implement their SDK, and it's not super interoperable. So say you want to make a smart contract that cares about a bitcoin passport. Y... |
B | I remember probably the most interesting attestation I've done recently, maybe in the past couple of weeks. I guess this would be an attestation is actually, it's an op stack chain. I guess the application is on top of it. Friend tech, the thing that everyone's doing these days, in order to start your friend tech profi... |
A | It's an attestation, but technically, because Twitter can just go into your account and make you attest to whatever you want. It's not. |
D | Or buy your x dump. Yeah, or buy your. |
A | Or like lock you out, block you. You know, it's not permissionless and it's certainly not, you know, like using any kind of private key infrastructure. So, like, you know, ultimately, like someone is in control of your, of your keys, not your keys, not your attestation. |
D | It's also, it doesn't participate in the interoperability. If you actually did use it like a base layer where if, if friend tech attested to this person, passing some sort of verification, other people could start to build like their own parts of a social graph, knowing that they were verified in this way. Similar to h... |
B | So how would you prefer a friend? What's a better design for a friend tech to kind of attest to my, that I own this, this Twitter account? Like, what would it be a better way? |
A | It's literally, it's literally the only way, though, right? Like you do, you would have to make some sort of post from Twitter that references your address because you need the two way attestation. Because I can just say I own, you know, David's Twitter account, but if there's no way to, like, reverse it and say, like,... |
D | Here's a way, though, because, or a potential alternative, I think if the requirement for you to sign up with friend tech was for you to have a verified Twitter account, right? Well, that's what Gitcoin passport's doing. They're providing the Oauth to allow that a Gitcoin passport stamp for your Twitter account is. If ... |
C | I think maybe that starts to illustrate the role that many attestations might play in the world of the attestation landscape. As soon as you have more and more and more data about, you know, different attestations, all of a sudden it paints the picture of identity not just for you, but for everyone. Steve, going back t... |
A | Imagine in the future. You can look at any address that you're, like, going to do business with or operate with, and you can instantly see all the attestations related to them. And you can see, like, well, how. How is this entity relative to me? So, like, for example, has Bryce attested them? Has Bryce's friend atteste... |
C | Attestation. Degrees of separation. |
A | Degrees of. Degrees of attestation? Separation. Like, how far away? Yes, it's the das, of course, the degrees of fit. So you'll be able to build, like, a really true, true decentralized reputation. Like, right now, if a friend of mine asks me, like, in West Palm beach where I live, and they say, like, hey, do you know ... |
D | Imagine in the. In the near term future where, like, the web of trust gets more, you know, visual, and you put on, like, your apple, you know, vision pro, and they're just navigating your different web of trust. But the difference is, like, in the real world today, we get assigned a trust score, right? Like your credit... |
A | Imagine this, like, imagine you start like, this brand new, like, decentralized trust network. And everybody you look at in the network, it starts with a zero. Everybody's just a zero. And then you say, you know, like, well, let me, like, initiate my weights. Like, I'm gonna give my mom, like, a high rating. I'll give ... |
C | I think that starts to really illustrate the need for an application layer on top of eas. As soon as the number of attestations out there starts to get pretty unwieldy, all of a sudden we're going to need, like, attestation service providers to help recoaless all of the 10,000 different attestation that are made every ... |
A | Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a huge thing. And we're working with a few different teams. That's their thing. They've typically looked at on chain data for all sorts of Defi platforms and aggregated and come up with all sorts of scoring. But now if everybody starts testing about all sorts of things, you can start to defin... |
B | It's interesting how, you know, on kind of the web, the Internet, which is a web of trust, I guess a lot of the attestations that we're doing kind of happen in the background as we're consuming content. So, you know, I consume someone's content, I might decide to follow them, so I get more of their content, right? Well... |
A | If you take a look, we've actually built some really cool things on top of east. One of the things that we created as an example is called Speaketh eth, or, sorry, speaketh.org. and essentially, it's like a decentralized social network, similar to a Twitter, where every post is an attestation, every like is an attestat... |
C | Is that just what Twitter is? Whenever I tweet something, I just attest to the fact that, yes, everything's God is just attestation. |
B | Attestations all the way down. |
D | And even. Even the community note feature, right, like now in Twitter, you can have, like, these arbiters of truth that say whether something's, like, trustworthy or not, like the piece of content. So people could, you know, attest their voice, that this content is credible. Well, in the decentralized world, even Wikip... |
B | The problem with all of these attestations, though, right, in web two, is that they're all kind of siloed. And so there's no way to export the social graph of attestations outside of Twitter. And this community notes feature, as grand as it is, it's just like, just locked inside of one ecosystem, which is, which is Twi... |
A | I, like, bring up the example of, like, eBay. Like, there's like, people who build up, like, a really good reputation on eBay and then they want to sell something on, like, Amazon. |
B | They got nothing. |
C | They start from zero. |
D | Yeah. |
A | Yeah. Why are you. Why am I nobody? Why can't I bring my attestations with me? And also, what's cool about this is like, say someone builds, like, a Twitter on top of attestations and then, like, that's the front end goes down, or someone wants to make a better version. They don't have to start, like a completely new n... |
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