DappCon 2023: Building The Next Generation Of Dapps With Universal Profiles - Stephen Horvath

Transcript

hi everybody I'm Steven Horvath and I'm representing this pink mob over here Make Some Noise please and yeah I work for Luxo and I'm the team lead of the browser extension project that we have called the universal profile extension and Luxo was is an ethereum layer one compatible blockchain started by Fabian Vella and marjerie Hernandez um you are probably familiar with some of faan's work and have probably used some of it um here are some of the standards that he created and the technology and margerie is a fashion expert she has uh several recognitions including most

recently she was named as one of the 50 most important Germans in fashion and they came together and created something new they created a blockchain that focuses and targets the creative economy what is the creative economy the creative economy is all about influencers and uh musicians and artists and writers basically anyone creating something new creative Innovative and it's all about everybody who uses those things which is basically everybody blockchain has some history of being very biased toward finance and

toward uh anonymity and those things are very important but they're not the only thing that blockchain can do if we look out in the world people are social they want to they have identities they want to show off their identity they want to get people to know them in different ways so if we want to make blockchain more usable we need to if we want to have more adoption on blockchain we have to look at what what are people doing already what what are they able to do and what are they not able to do these are my parents let's start with what they're not able to do so they're not able to use most crypto

wallets they have to try to attemp they're going to try to attempt to a d app they're going to choose which wallet out of the many presented they have to figure out what they are they have to add that to their browser choose a password figure out what the heck is seed phrases create a seed phrase confirm a seed phrase figure out where to store the seed phrase where no one can find it but themselves then they're presented with gas what is gas where do you buy gas register for a centralized exchange okay now they have to send an ID and they do have to do a face scan and send it to you know some maybe they don't even know

where the geography of the exchange is where they're sending this information to then they can buy some eth figure out what their account number is link their account finally they can transfer eth to their wallet and now they can use it blah it's so much work and you can see why I mean not just you know people in my parents generation but people who are my friends in my generation they're very technical per people but you know they they get stuck at step three you know and I go and I talk with them about blockchain and everything that it can do but they're not able to see the the power of it so what can normal people do what can my parents do they can post on social media they can install an app on their

phone they can very easily sign up for a web 2 account that's not not out of their range they can walk into a cell phone store and they can roughly figure out what kind of data plan that they need they might not know what a gigabyte is but they know that if they're just sending emails they probably just need a little bit of data if they're watching a bunch of videos they need something more more so Luxo was created to solve a lot of these usability problems and the main thing that we're offering are our standards so today I'm going to show you the power of the Luxo standards what you as decentralized application developers can do how how you can use these and I'm

going to show it through the product that I've been working on and my team has been building for the last months which is the universal profile extension so without further Ado here it is this is the universal profile extension you may notice something right away that you don't see tokens on the main page that's because the universal profile extension is not a wallet it's about profiles nothing about nothing wrong about tokens and actually you know there's a whole the finance part is important it's just not the only thing and we and I'll talk a little bit later about um some new standards that we have that actually improve the finance aspect

also but the extension that we offer is profile Centric not token Centric an account on Luxo is more than just a long heximal string an account on Luxo has information about your your name has your bio has an avatar a profile picture it has all of these things so an accountant Luxo Comes Alive here you can see a user she's got three different profiles on the left she's got her personal profile so you can see she's got you know she talks about her fashion she's interested in music and she's a traveler she's got a profile picture in the middle this is

her business profile so uh she's she's involved with a dow and she's an architect and she does her design work and then on the right this is her investment account and here she actually stays she decides to stay completely Anonymous she's got an avatar she doesn't reveal her real name so and none of these accounts are able to be traced to each other the way that we do this is through our standards and one of the standards that we have allows you to actually attach metadata to your account and you can see here there are a lot of different fields like I was saying there's the name and the Avatar and some tags there you can attach limited metadata to your account and the ability

to do this opens up a huge array of possibilities so one of the really powerful standards that we have is what we call our key manager and this allows D apps to actually request control of various parts of the profile or the account in very in very fine grained ways and you can think of this kind of like when you install an app on your phone and the app want wants to access your photos or access your contact list the app actually has to ask permission for you and then you can decide do you want to give that app permission to your photos or your contact list if you trust it if you don't you might not be able to get the photo functionality in there but

you know that you're safe and if you do then you can allow it to happen so we're doing the same thing however we're doing it on chain and you can see here this is what the extension looks like and you can see that there are a number of different D apps in here so we've got a music app we've got a um a dow we've got a recovery service we've got the extension itself um and through the key manager you can create a controller each of these controllers has different permissions that it can request so here you can see some different permissions you can the dep can change the user's profile data it can sign on behalf of the user it can encrypt

decrypt messages on behalf of the user it can transfer tokens on behalf of the user or the native token Lux it can deploy smart contracts on behalf of the user and it can even add additional controllers or edit these permissions itself and more now there are a lot of different use cases that this opens up so you can imagine a music or a game D app that maybe has application data maybe like a playlist or a configuration these can actually be Associated directly on the user's profile and permissions can be granted in a way that allows it to only change the the keys that are relevant to the D

app itself not be able to change the the user's name so those can be requested too multiple devices so in the ethereum world you know we we take seed phrases and if we have uh a wallet on multiple devices we're we're pasting around these seed phrases everywhere well if one of those devices ends up getting compromised and your seat phrase gets lost then you basically lose access everywhere but here we can actually give a different device each device can have its own controller and by default that's how the the extension Works it'll give anytime you install it on a new device it gets its own controller and therefore if one of the devices ends up getting lost you can use another device to

revoke access from that first one account recovery so you can allow third party either a friend or a service to have to if to if you get locked out of your account to give you access back to it again we have this concept of vaults so you can kind of think about this as like if you're in a family and you've got a child and you want to be able to give a certain amount of tokens or a certain type of token to your child for an education platform or a game you can grant your child access to this without having them access access your entire set of funds Dow management so in the Dow there are different types of users you can

have a um a marketing manager for example that is able to change the profile data of the Dow that maybe feeds into the website or a treasury manager that is able to only transfer tokens or only certain types of tokens or you can have an admin that's able to Grant new users access or restrict their access so I said before gas is probably one of the biggest pieces of friction on in the blockchain world and like I said it's it it it's something where you know even very you know very smart people you know anyone who's basically not a geek has trouble here you know um so we've really looked at this and the way that

we fix this at Luxo is through what we call our our transaction relayer and here you can see a view of uh of our D app um you can kind of think of this as like if you go into a cell phone shop and you need a data plan for your phone yeah you get a monthly quota of gas if you use that gas U before the month is over you have to wait until the next month before it to reset um or you can top it up in the meantime so we do the same thing but with guas so we take that we take that the pain out of that users are are still signing their transactions in their in the extension itself but the transactions are run through the relayer and you can you can pay for that with a credit card or with um with

crypto various ways and so we've actually created a standard with this we like you see we have our own our own relayer but we actually invite you as developers to come and compete with us by having diversity it actually improves the ecosystem and it gives users users Choice there are a lot of different types of models and there's a lot of room in business models for how somebody could build a relayer so this is a really great opportunity if someone somebody wants to try this and actually um one of our our team members will we'll be having a Meetup tomorrow in Berlin at our office and one of our team members will be giving a talk um Calum raise your hand tomorrow so if you want to come and learn how to do that come come and check it

out and you can see the extension actually builds natively support for the relayer so you can see there's the quota Mark um the quota amount in there you can see exactly how much quot you have left and you can see the drop down box right above the bar allows the user to select whatever relayer they want you um in the DF can add additional um re uh Rel layers if they like digital assets get an upgrade so this is what I was talking about before so erc20 is is you know super widespread um that's what everybody is using but it has a lot of limitations and so we've been looking at these limitations about

what else can be possible how can we make this a better experience so as you probably all know one of the biggest pieces of friction is if you send your token to an invalid address by accident so this happens all the time you're you think you're on polygon but you're actually on ethereum you've got an ethereum address you try to send some tokens there and but you're actually on polygon and boom your your tokens are lost forever this is happening all the time and I know when I'm whenever I'm sending any significant amount I'm always double triple quadruple checking and I still end up sweating and feeling nervous about sending something so at Luxo what we have is what we call the universal universal receiver and an account can be marked as universal

receiver and then if you try to send a token to that to an account that's not marked as a universal receiver it's actually prevented onchain you can see here um the error that you see in in the extension when this happens you can actually override this so for you know people who know what they're doing maybe they you know it's it's a normal account but they know what they're doing you can override that but that's actually validated on chain you have to say that you force the transaction in order to do that another ability is the ability to add unlimited metadata to both tokens and nfts and if you've ever developed a d app that has nfts or tokens and try to deal with metadata you know this this is a nightmare right now you always have to

rely on a third party to provide this data there are different sometimes the third parties are out of sync you never know who to ask where to get the right data it's very confusing so here on Luxo everything is on chain and everything is associated with the with the asset itself and therefore if you're a token if if you have your own token or you create an nft and you want to change some of that data you just change it on chain and it's updated everywhere and then lastly there is the what we call a token hook so in the ethereum world if you receive a token it you usually have to rely on a third party service to do some sort of polling

there can be mistakes it it's a little it's a pretty clunky experience but what what we have is what we call a token hook so what that means is basically every time a token is either sent or received both the sender or the receiver receives an event to their account and this this first of all adds a way better user experience so you can have notifications whenever you receive something but it also has the ability to programmatically respond to receiving a token so you could do something like if you receive a token from a known address you can forward some percent of that token over to a third address like paying automatic tax payments or paying a contractor something like that you can

also do something where if you receive a token from an an unknown address you can decline to receive that transaction so you so it never ends up in your wallet so you're preventing scam or or spam tokens and lastly I I want to talk about a couple of DFS that are currently building on Luxo and what they're doing so this is universal page and basically Universal page is an all-in-one nft Marketplace and it empowers creators to be able to have their own landing page in order to to uh showcase their work so and it it does three things it gives you a personal Universal page um with with your own link to show off your nfts you can sell

nfts through the platform and you can do drops here as well if you have a collection you can create an account just for your collection and you can host that right here very easily and then the second one is upturn and what these guys are doing is basically it it's like a loyalty program um but on chain so basically you can think of it as if you have um if you go to your local coffee shop and you buy 10 coffees you get a little card when you get your 10th coffee you get a free coffee this is the onchain version of that so basically what they're doing is if you go to some some number of events or you um share some music um on social media then you can

actually get rewarded with with tokens so they're using our our uh our token standards in order to do this and this talk was actually very good timing because for the last weeks our team has been really working hard to launch our beta and it just got released yesterday you can actually go on coindesk and you can see there's an article written about us go and check it out everything that you've seen here is from the beta that you're working on so these are you're seeing some brand new things here um so scan the QR code give the extension of shot and come in our Discord let us know your experience and come build with us [Applause]

thank you so much Stan um does anyone have any questions we have a few minutes for that I mean I have a little bit to add I mean Fabian here I'm actually the founder of Luxo um so like this is basically a whole new account system a smart C based account system this is the alternative account obstru if you will and it's a standard based account obstruction that means it works everywhere uh on every chain but obviously it's will be on Lu so first

because we're having all the the the Chans around it um but it really will change the ux problems that we see in the space you know I mean like the the talk before I mean I wondered that there was not ux as one of the issues talked about uh uh you know of adoption I think that's the main actually issue of all everything and uh we believe we solved that try out the project CH and see how easy it is and you don't need to get luxs or test lucks or anything you just click through and you have your blockchain account and you can go and fly um and this will be launching on Main it uh within the next few weeks and then things start to get very very different in

blockchain thank you um any further questions thank you so much Sten for the great present thank you very much