The evolution of privacy on Ethereum

Transcript

foreign okay hi hello everyone uh today we're going to be talking to you about the evolution of privacy on ethereum I have a knee issue therefore we are sitting down I hope you don't mind oh yeah so uh my name is Anna I'm the co-host of a show called zero knowledge uh yeah and I'm well you might know me from rhino fight and together we created a company in 2019 at 20 2019 uh ZK validator so zkv is an organization that's focused

and devoted to supporting privacy and use of zero knowledge proofs in ethereum and other blockchains we run validators we participate in governance we build all sorts of tooling and I've also doing a lot of research and educational material as well as early stage funding and grants and also host events including ZK Paris this Thursday um so we're going to be talking uh very briefly about the history of privacy uh in ethereum space um ZK for privacy and scaling privacy use cases that already exist now in ethereum and then privacy looking forward and some of the challenges around adoption and then wrapping up what we won't cover is why privacy and I think that's something that many that we

that we all know already also a lot of talks I think on the topic will help you understand that if not okay so we're going to do the history of privacy uh we're kind of starting this in 2017. obviously privacy had been studied for a long time even privacy and blockchain goes back further than this but since we want to focus on ethereum we felt like around 2017 zcash had launched the ideas that they had put forward could start to be incorporated into the ethereum kind of idea space and around then you started to see some early hackathon projects the ZK Community to me really lives you know in a time frame since 2018 it was around then when we started

the show it was you know that's when I started the ZK Summit Series also z-con and the ZK proofs event series started around then and in that time since 2018 you've had groups like PSE Xerox Park and CK hack another company that we actually initially initiated started as well we believe and this is like kind of an estimate I asked around to figure this out but we think there's over at least over 50 ZK blockchain focused companies and we've also seen large companies like ey Microsoft and meta do ZK experiments in this time frame but a quick point of clarification everything I'm talking about there is ZK uh there's ZK snarks but the zero

knowledge part of ZK snarks is really only used for the Privacy type Tech there's another properties of snarks that are used for scaling and this is sometimes confusing to folks I just want to like note that there's some very you know amazing uh ZK focused or ZK snark focused projects who've contributed a ton to the libraries also libraries that are used in privacy but if you think of ZK EVMS and ZK VMS or a lot of the bridging these are not necessarily I mean they're not really privacy they're using the ZK snark or snark for scaling you also have a ZK based projects that are also focused on scaling but do have some privacy features but privacy isn't

necessarily their primary focus but for this talk we're actually going to be talking about like specific privacy use cases and sharing with you some of the companies and projects you might be familiar with who work on those so there are quite a big range of use cases we want to cover um and we're going to go through some of them pretty fast because there is such a broad use case um but we're going to start off with private transfers yeah so private transfers this was the first use case that was really established zcash was came on the scene trying to do this so when we say private transfers we're thinking like private payments you want to pay somebody you don't want anyone to see it the way they did it is they had a transparent kind of environment where you could see transactions and then a

shielded pool a private area where you couldn't and since zcash you have seen projects like Aztec V1 ZK operu on ethereum also projects like upcoming projects like Nevada that are still kind of in that Spirit of private transfer mixers have really been one of the things that's pushed the ethereum space very much forward in terms of thinking about privacy and tornado cash really has been the the major example that we all know um it was funded by molok Dao and by the ethereum community more generally and really sort of highlighted what was possible on ethereum using zero knowledge proofs um clearly following sanctioning this has led to sort of a bit of a chilling

effect around mixes and I think in many ways mixes were a great example of what was possible but not necessarily creating um the type of wide scale usable privacy that we want to do and so I think it sort of pushed the space forward but to some extent we see other use cases being more interesting going forward yeah almost like there's more there's more yeah it sort of led to an explosion of ideas and maybe we have to think about privacy slightly differently so one in one idea here one use case is the idea of creating an environment for private computation so this was first proposed in 2021 in the zaxi paper where you would find you'd actually be able to enable private smart contracts to be deployed this obviously goes way past

private transfers and I think you know Aztec alien polygon Maiden are three teams that are very focused on that then we have privacy and ID and yeah this I I'm very excited about this use case when you think about privacy and ID though we've seen like different teams approach it in very different ways you can think about combining privacy and identity in the following ways so you could use a real world document like a passport and try to combine that with like link that to some on on-chain address you could use on-chain tokens nfts or soulbound tokens you could use biometric data which I am not a fan of but want to put it on the slide you could also take

a record of activity that you're doing on chain I think this is my one of my favorites because it it tracks like the idea here is that you would actually see what you've done on chain to Define kind of like to build your CV your on-chain CV and that would then be used as a form of identity once you have that you can do very cool things with this so you could create some sort of Ubi or distribution system you could allow for group membership or access you could have certification so maybe you you know earn your degree purely on chain and I think the use case that's probably used the most right now would be something like kycaml there's actually a lot more things that you can do once you have a private

on-chain ID and we're going to mention a few of them later in this presentation but yeah there's some great teams already working on this private voting is something which has been spoken about much more than it's been implemented so far but there are great examples already CLR fund for Grants and fundraising and also some Dows have done examples of private voting it's a use case that really makes sense if you want to for example spend from a treasury and don't want to be front run with on-chain trading or other actions that you might take um yeah just recently there was actually I think Aztec and Aragon collaborated with the nouns Dao so for the first time you're

seeing like an nft Dao actually having some sort of privacy Incorporated games is also a really big area and I think this is something which we've seen some some great fun examples uh many will be familiar with dark Forest CK Holdem or conquest.eth from ether play but there's also very big companies now focused on uh using privacy and gaming um and games generally so multiplayer games if you want to get on chain uh sort of verifiable fairness uh require some level of privacy to prevent people's future turns being revealed before the right at the moment and this is an amazing use case and one which is seeing a lot of activity foreign

and yeah we wanted to talk about private defy there's a small caveat here where like I don't know that all of this Defy is have this private Defy is happening on ethereum but I we felt like it was important to mention as an important use case in the Privacy space so you have things like private dexes where certain parts of a decks maybe not all of it but some part maybe a cat who owns the accounts or those those things could be made private you so you also have private D5 platforms places where you could have defy so this is where like the private computation comes in again you could have dark pools and in the future in the near future we hope to see more like intent Centric architecture also potentially made private Aztec connect is really the uh

great the best example here uh where we were able to Aztec were able to achieve on still keeping on-chain transparent infrastructure which is one of the things we love about ethereum D5 while keeping the user activity uh on on Aztec private when people were interacting with things like uniswap or Lido or other D5 protocols and the last example we wanted to share here was ckml this is a an odd one to include in the you know in privacy on ethereum because a lot of the these two examples aren't necessarily blockchain related at all but so much of the research and activities happening in our space so we felt like we we should mention it so one is to prove the provenance of content without revealing

the original document so say you can take a document go through a number of editing steps you can prove that it comes from a specific document but you don't actually have to show that document it could remain private another one would be to use CK to prove the correctness of private training data in an ml model and there are a few teams that are working on this in blockchain in our space c conduit modulus labs and recently actually one of our co-founders of zkv Kobe and I and Daniel Kang did this attested audio experiment with the podcast audio it's very loose it's not like a full it's sort of like a a demo at this point but it's a I think it's

one of the first times we're seeing that attempt to show provenance through content editing using zkps using and yeah and keeping everything private um so in terms of where we're going now with future use cases um there are sort of extensions of what's already happening and for example privacy of real world assets linking more uh activity from off chain on chain to drill out to be used in defy and in the ethereum ecosystem generally um there's also uh sort of new privacy preserving privacy preserving tools you can use for proof of solvency which has become sort of a very big topic and was much talked about following last year's collapses of various companies um in crypto and then a really big topic

for discussion and uh research is around privacy for Mev protection and also censorship resistance so uh one of the issues we see at the moment is that of course um validated as an ethereum can censor transactions and sometimes do based on OPAC list or other other things and so one protection against this would be using tool things like threshold encryption or other privacy preserving tools for transactions so that validators don't see what's being included until it's included in chain there are other ecosystems where this is also happening and being explored for example osmosis so I asked on Twitter yesterday for more privacy use cases and I got a great list

and won't cover all of these but there were some like Randomness generation was a neat one I think validating web 2 authentication flows in web 3 this kind of cool private storage I mean I wanted to put this up here this might just be inspiration for some hackathons actually some of these there are companies Behind These use cases but yeah I think there's a lot out there and I sort of want to mention a little bit about kind of bringing back to the ZK part of things um what can we actually see going forward right now in our community there's increasing focus on ZK security you know these these systems and these um yeah like kind of research originally research projects are now they've been

developed they're they're coming into the wild and we want to make sure that they're very very secure so that because we see that they're starting already to get a lot of value uh interested in them I also think there's going to be other types of advanced cryptography like FH and NPC really reach the state of being in you know in production state to be able to include to be included with ZK or just kind of yeah it will I think these will enable some really cool other privacy use cases uh specialized Hardware that's already in the works so this would actually accelerate a lot of the ZK that's out there make it faster make it more usable and then also further optimization of CK systems that's always ongoing but I expect that to continue as well

there are still a number of challenges though uh for our ecosystem in terms of Greater privacy adoption and the the biggest and first one is around legal and sort of Regulation and concerns especially following um tornado cash sanctions uh so we're seeing a real chilling effect at the moment there are fewer teams working on privacy based applications there is concern around that and it's something which the Silver Lining has led to more more research and more working groups around how we can have that happen um there's also uh sort of still silos and although we don't although we do have some private applications uh they are um not linked we don't have privacy by

default in a lot of applications and then onboarding is still a challenge in many in many cases yeah so to wrap up scaling has been the focus of a lot of the uh ethereum work and mind share but now is a time to really focus it back on privacy um there's also a lot of technical sort of groundwork that's now been done we have a lot of the tooling to build privacy-based applications but the design space is very Broad and I think what we're looking for now is um systems which are built which really take into account the way that the blockchain is being used the way that D5 Works um and which have very purposeful design

around how we're using privacy so not just mixes but uh all sorts of other applications which maybe have privacy by default yeah there are a lot of directions this can now go I hope this presentation gave you a sense for how many use cases there are how many there could be um yeah that I just put that question out on Twitter yesterday and I got so many answers I feel like there's a big open space there's a lot of opportunity and I hope you'll yeah you'll explore with us do we have our last slide oh yeah thank you get in touch with us if you're building something like this [Applause] foreign