DAPPCON 2024: Open Money, Open World: Building a Better Financial System - Lefteris

Transcript

hey good morning uh good to see some people at least today here because uh I guess the first talk is always the Hard One to wake up to so um I'll talk about open Money open World um what we are building in in crypto and um what is crypto good for anyway so um first off for those that don't know me I'm leis I've been in ethereum since 2014 working for the foundation uh back then in solidity compiler and C++ client I created along with Christoph yens um the Dao and then helped with the cleanup afterwards I'm sorry for that um then I worked in Ryden which is um something like the lightning

network is to bitcoin that was for ethereum and I'm the founder of rodkey um an application that uh manages your portfolio so what's crypto good for anyway right so when somebody asks what is crypto they all think of this guy the crypto King so everybody says crypto is just um scums um you see you you ask let's say I talk with my mom and she says oh yeah I saw this dog coins or yes this hack that's crypto you you just go there and lose money it's all about gambling everything is hyper financialized everything is a Casino what's worse and what has attracted them uh the eye of uh

of and the big reach of the US is uh criminal Enterprises using crypto in order to Lo their money so this is the image of crypto outside and it we are all to blame because we have things like FTX and Celsius and Nexus all of these centralized extendes that somehow have been um identified to be a crypto um then we have influencers like bit boy B yeah bit boy whatever his name is uh friend Tech where you buy and sell shares of your friends for For Heaven's Sake then we have hacks and fishing scams this is what crypto is to the average person outside of this room whenever you talk to someone that has no idea about what this field is this is what they will tell you and and this is

this is really bad um then what is crypto good for anyway actually what what what are we here for well it's a permissionless and Unstoppable Ledger th those two words are the very essence of crypto permissionless and Unstoppable this unlocks so many applications uh we can do zero fee cross B payments with crypto um sounds boring but it's actually extremely powerful we can have transparency in government and it helps with with coordination I'm going to visit those um uh one by one and talk about permissionless and Unstoppable which is what is uh some that I'm really passionate

about you talk with everybody in the street and also in Twitter crypto Twitter and they tell you you do not need this we have laws we are we are lawful citizens we have governments they protect us um the problem is even in Western democracies um we are all one election or maybe two elections away from a totalitarian dictatorship being installed in our country and uh having every part of our Lives controlled even liberal governments uh just like too in Canada have gone to extreme uh such as freezing bank accounts of um of uh their uh their citizens just to punish them for um protesting you should never need

permission to use your own money this is something that crypto is is built upon and something that is really unlocked through crypto uh you probably have bank accounts you've had a transfer or two being blocked getting an email getting a phone call what are you spending this money on why are you doing this transfer we have blocked it because we want to ask you some questions this is extremely common in the banking industry and it's scary as hell what's worse many in um uh many in crypto especially we have had to face our bank accounts being closed because they are associated with crypto and um it's too risky for them so they can just tell you okay we no longer service

you you you you can't have access to your money and in general you should never ever beeld hostage uh and be told how your money should be used like with the cbdc dream that um central banks have that um you will have a quot and depending maybe on your um sexual orientation your race or whatever you will be able to spend a specific amount of money or not something that is also really really important in crypto but boring and people don't don't don't even think about it whenever I talk to outside they say payments payments are solved you just make a sepa transfer what what more do you need cool yeah the sepa network is something that's really beautiful um

but the world is bigger than uh Europe when um when you want to pay someone outside as had we in Rodi for example with someone in Nepal um for for a freelance contract uh you start to figure out that you know it's not easy if they don't accept crypto what do you do you try to find does my bank sent to this country no okay PayPal then 6% fee what are you are you serious okay then you know more research more research there is something called wise 1 to 2% okay this is this this kind of works um but then to send something on the amount of I don't know uh 2 or 3K um about a month of support requests

back and forth with them actually unleashing this money from our bank account to the GU Bank account one month with crypto I would have paid no fees and I would have sent an instant transaction this is extremely powerful and uh though payments are boring I really think that this is probably the biggest power uh of of of crypto so government transparency in government is something that is really powerful in crypto because you can have um you cannot hide anything in the public blockchains um this is B for individuals but it's great for for for government you can um uh see where is your tax uh funding being spent uh you can do

bureaucratic stuff like get a notorized document that I don't know you're married to someone or that you're uh the birth certificate of your child all online like this is all ideals this doesn't exist right now if you have had to deal with bureaucracy of in the EU or if you live in one was born in another got married in another one like me then this nightm of multimon uh talking to various arms um could be solved in a nice and transparent way and could eliminate corruption because when you can see um how funding is spent and how decisions are made then nobody can hide and the problem of coordination here we famously in crypto say we slay we are here to slay Moc right the god of

coordination failure we have various um onchain mechanisms that are uh transparent and through the use of various incentives U try to all coordinate together to solve problems like you can see the various daos the governance systems that we have created and it's all being experimented on okay so that's great this sounds very promising all these four bullet points why why why isn't it used by people outside why every time it's the same phis we I I've been in this field like 2014 10 10 years right why has haven't general public actually started using it well we are all to blame

because what most people actually do here is they normalize scami Behavior to L rule lure retail this is so standard in in this field instead of focusing on the four bullet points that I talked before we seem to just um focus on I don't know Meme coins um points now this is the the new thing uh uh social media that is all based on tips so you just go and beg for please give me DJ please give me DJ oh good deep 10 D um so we have a culture of like talking a lot if you go in CT uh in crypto Twitter everybody's talking and saying oh yeah

yeah we are here for this we are here for that we are all so so so passionate about this but when you actually look at their actions you see that it's all just we talk the talk but not walk the walk and this has made regulations that are hostile against us and governments that see crypto as just scums and this is something that's a a feedback loop that is getting worse and worse um what's what's even more dangerous is the that the the four bullet points that I showed actually have um a problematic side so uh flood protocol design of Base protocols that can lead to eventual centralization and capture is one and second that um when everything is open

this is good for for transparent governance right but it's terrible for individual uh privacy everything is open and it's a totalitarian regime s dream what do I mean when I say fla design centralization so you've probably had and seen about the the various uh complaints in crypto Twitter lately about um especially this thread uh this this thread by by Peter about how um small decisions here and there uh seem to gather and we end up with um a protocol that we want it to design in a way that is good and helpful for the people but uh when you start taking every single shortcut that you can uh

like he mentions here like if if is the hardware comment is going up okay we just go to Data Centers uh gigas then MV no problem we just use M boost uh we democratize it it um other thing is uh gas high remove uh logs we just go to sadow logs um instead of actually building something that is useful we just try to serve the needs of the few which is the stakers just be as as as as fast as possible don't care about decentralization don't care who will use this later but um if you move a lot of the important functionality of um of ethereum to centralized services you

will end up with trfi and this is something extremely dangerous because it's not one decision but if every time that you have a technical decision you have okay shortcut or actually do it the hard way and you take the shortcut every single time you will end up with a worse system than uh trfy so what can we do um uh we can try to think in in a long term right we we should go back to the cipher Punk rots of of of crypto those people in the '90s who weren't here for the mem coins or for the number go up culture which is cringe as hell today um we should use long-term design thinking when designing protocols not not what will make the price of ether go up in the next months

who the cares about the price of e in the next month this is ridiculous um don't take shortcuts um there was a discussion between idealism and pragmatism uh there should be balance for sure but um if you take the shortcut every single time that you're given a decision you are creating uh a flood system that's worse than what you're trying to replace and we need to have um uh people that work for the protocol be well compensated I'm not going to go to discussion in Twitter about the uh the advisor ships and stuff but we have systems we have the ethereum foundation that can and should um uh handle its researchers and Mone pay them very well

but we also have systems like like the protocol guilt that are built to help um fund the ethereum development as um in a credibly neutral way speak up don't think about your bugs all the time if your bugs go up or down in the next year you you shouldn't care this is we we're building something for the next 100 years um so walk the walk and don't just talk the talk um yesterday I sent to f as a donation to protocol Guild this is a dune Analytics dashboard where they have the V2 thing it's their V2 contract that splits it for 4 years vesting to 173 researchers I'm not IG layer but um if everybody in this room everybody that

looks from the stream slowly gives a bit if you're a Staker I mean you're making if every day right just give as much as you can afford so that we have a credibly neutral uh protocol development team the protocol guil is doing an amazing work and I think that it's one of the solutions to um staying credibly neutral in the um protocol layer um yeah so this was the number this was all about the one problem that we have in blockchain then the other thing is privacy it's scary as hell how everything is visible on chain um everything your own is visible uh once I know a name for an address

you're done they are criminalizing um the ways that we have in order to um hide this so um if you want to hide you normally use a mixer right if you want to okay this address is docks I want to move it to somewhere else and not have everybody in this room everybody out there know what address this is but this is actually now being criminalized [Music] um so this this is something that is really scary and the lack of privacy is getting worse with um the centralization in the protocol design the more stuff you move outside to centralize servers you leak more metadata this is a famous example

um I think that um Sebastian will talk more about this with innos VPN later but if you know someone's address you can do this night neat trick do you know what a pixel a tracking pixel is um when they send you an email and they have a one pixel um image and they can Le you lick your IP basically so you have an address that's active and you want to see what um where what's their IP you send them an nft that nft is rented by malicious server and that server actually um when um when you open your R key or your your um wallet or whatever you will um try to render the image and in doing so just uh leing your IP so decisions that end up centralizing uh the protocols also end up leading

metadata and uh losing privacy what can we do we can normalize and user privacy so H privacy is not only for the paranoid and privacy is not only for criminals everybody here has the right to have their public personal on chain and their um and their private personal on chain you should design software with privacy in mind um use and support privacy first approaches like uh uh like what we're building at R for example or um the Theos VPN hoer everything that to enable us to be um uh to to maintain our privacy really really important support those who fight the legal battles to

normalize privacy there's multiple battlefields right now being fought one in the Netherlands that we lost a very big battle with the indictment of Alexi and uh also with the Romans in the US very soon their trial is is on so this will set precedents that will echo in the next decades and will affect our field uh very very much it should not be a crime to write open source code so again uh walk the walk don't just talk the talk this is um the defense fund for Alexi and Roman um here I also donated to e uh if uh you want to help privacy this is a very good um uh thing to

donate to all right so having presented the problems I want to go to more Dev related Solutions because well I'm a develop I'm a developer I don't just talk so I think that the solution to going forward is is having applications what I call Self Sovereign what does that mean uh we have the dabs right the open source web three dabs and all but when the app is running in a server it's not as good for you as you may think we want something that self sing that is basically giving you so ownership over all the data an agency so you can decide what will be sh how much and with whom

you also wanted the ability to audit the code right you want to be able to understand what it does and um uh to see if the developer is bullshitting the way to achieve this is with local fair software uh this a seminal paper by Martin kman wait this is B yeah okay uh bo bo this Martin kman really cool guy they have a event next week here I don't have a ticket everything is sold out I'm really sad if you have a ticket please send me one um it's a set of principles for software that enables collaboration and ownership for users the tldr is this this is Martin kman um this uh we keep the majority of the functionality local all the data is stored locally you focus on privacy and

security for the user and it's not like you don't contact the network it like this is impossible in this day and age but not every single keystroke will be round trip to a server um selfing applications also should be open source because open source is Magic open source is amazing what does open source give you it gives you transparency so you can actually read and understand what the code does and be sure that the developer is not lying to you this is also given to you by Source available code not just open source open source also allows for community evolvement and attraction of talent because you can um not only just see the code but you can Fork it you can edit it you can republish it you you can

actually build on it this is what's different between open source and Source available and this way you get a lot of people involved we at RI have had so many people write code on the app that are not part of the external team and this is just beautiful this would not have been able to happen if it was a source available nobody just goes and gives code to someone that doesn't allow uh forking um with open source you do not have also data capture or and vendor lock in so you don't build World Gardens and you encourage in inovation and generally open source takes the world forward um if everybody wrote open source uh I think that we would be in a much much better world uh I was talking with um there is a lot of discussion

right now in optimism what is open source um does the whole thing need to be open source uh does one license only um satisfy the needs it just like with decentralization it's not um black or white thing there can be parts that are closed in a codebase there can be parts that are s available it really depends on a Case by case basis you can't just look at uh file um at the license file and say okay this this good open source this bad not open source it's unfortunately not as simple as that um yeah so now I will go for more concrete examples and talk about what uh my team and I are building um we are building rodkey Ry is a portfolio

management tool that uh protects your privacy it's a self- soverign local first open source application dldr everything is open source whatever I say about Ro you can verify if I'm lying just go and look at the code and tell me where um we focus on uh the data being all local it's a local application everything is owned by you it gives you a bir eye view of the portfolio you see this A B logo so so B IE view um it can um track multiple exchanges like here um we have like Kraken coinbase binance Etc and it can also track multiple

chains and protocols such as you know like staing eum eum normal nosis chain arbit even nonm like PKA do Kama Etc we also can trct additional Finance but this is not as um nicely made because it's more manual you just need to track your atfs on your own you know like add them add the banks manually but we want to to to create a tool that is um basically allowing to manage your entire Financial portfolio and customizability is really important to us because everybody in this room everybody that's looking uh from from home is uh unique and has unique needs and unfortunately

there is no one tool that will work well for everybody so the point is to have a tool that will allow you to customize as much as possible so that it can do as good work for you as possible and we also have some uh p&l functionality um the history is a beautiful part of of um uh of rki so it takes analyzes all of your history in all of the evm chains all of the exchanges all of the non evm chains like Bitcoin substrate chains uh avalance and so on and so forth and we have a set of open- source decoders that anybody can contribute to and they are very modular um and people can add more and more and according to these decoders we decode um the the activity of what you did like I

don't know like ah yeah claiming the donut thing and sending uh spending it for um um what did I do [Music] here ah yeah dumping op yeah um and you can customize it so if Ro he doesn't understand what I did I can just go and edit the event and write okay I did this um it's and it's not just um uh evm events as I said it's like substrate it you can see your um uh exchange transactions uh other events such as uh fing and so on and so forth we also do a profit loss um calculation so after processing all the events you can get um uh how much you

had a profit uh or or loss depending on what you did and a per asset cost basis you can take all this and Export it in a CSV and import it in um in a spreadsheet and then massage the data because it won't be 100% correct and even share it with an accountant the point as I said for S sing apps is to take control so you can customize uh how much privacy you want or or or don't want if you run your own node you can you can you can put it you can put it somewhere somewhere here if um you want other nodes to be quer you can put them and you can also say with what probability like uh 20% this 20% that and the same for every single chain that we we can support um you can also customize where

do you get prices from uh such as um I don't know coin gecko so first if you have a manual price just just query the manual price then coin gecko then def Lama or um what not you can just uh customize the order the point is to own the data so everything is local but we don't we're not a world Garden you can um manage the backups you can export everything at any point uh and it will be so basically everything is inside the database then you can also export the history data as a CSV you can export the pnls a CSV there was I was talking with with a friend here and he was telling me I don't want my data to be with ro I want to be able to take it with me wherever

and whenever I want this is something that's really important to us and if you have a premium subscription we also allow you to sync your database all encrypted we don't see anything um and be able to Sy between uh your laptop let's say and your desktop computer or various devices so what's the vision for rki I am forced to make this slide and I will have to be repeating this slide I guess for years now because uh we are not a tax tool it's my fault for introducing it first as something that I make I made my taxes with and then everybody says okay taxes that's what Ro is for this is not what we are for um the vision is one

of a management application but also taxes are so hard and so difficult and there is so many jurisdictions because we have users worldwide uh that it's basically impossible to tackle in in my humble opinion um so what's the vision then you remember m in German it's a very bad word but so it's not it's not a really good word to give to an application but um the Mist browser was basically something that uh really echoed with me it was way way too early it it was way too early back then it got discontinued it had many flaws but the vision of having a local application that explores the decentralized world and interacts

with it this is what I'm trying to build um right now you see Rodi is more as a portfolio tracker but we want to be an overall tool that manages both your Defi and CI positions um but also an explorer that shows you the history of your own address is much much better than a blockchain Explorer would because the BL the blockchain Explorer does not have uh the specific information that you as a as an individual has so this is the the this the vision there is many ways that we can do it I just put some protocols that I like a lot so how can you also combine um you know trfi with CI uh if you know monium it's also what powers gnosis pay underneath uh it

allows you this is how the interface looks like it allows you to move um Euro from the chain to the bank or from the bank to the chain it has no fees at least yet um and it all happens on chain normally when you open the blockchain Explorer all you see is just uh how how does it appear like from the zero address to your address uh there is some EUR inted if you open Rod key and you connect it with monium you see something different you basically see something like okay this address sent 2,400 Eur VI bank transfer to R Solutions G Bea this iban and the memo for the um transfer was this so we get a lot more data

because we have context um for everything so you can actually see all of the extra data that sepa has on top of your RM transactions um gsis paid this like they have a stun here um it's a self sovering Bank it uses the safe you can just take Euro outside of um def and just put it into a grocery store it's it's beautiful um this is how it looks like in their dashboard but in R right now it looks like this so it doesn't have much more different than it would look like uh when you have um when you open the blockchain Explorer but we are working with their team to get an API to be able to S also the Medan data inside Rodi so

again one place where everything um you do with uh your finances is manageable from and it's local and private you are not using using another server your data is not on someone's server you are not in danger there and this is extremely important with every like literally every single other application nobody's crazy enough to actually make local apps anymore we are and why because they are needed I would never ever trust this data with any centralized application so the future of Rodi as I said active management what does that mean we do stuff from inside the app this is like a a concept from inside up like you want to sell it for Euro then RI because it

has access to the exchanges and has access to the chain it can say Okay Kraken has this price coinbase this kosis sa this and then you just execute the the trade and it can um it will be able to this is not yet available um do the swap for you better integration with staty um connect with actual Banks but in the meantime we can start slower with monum this is actually possible I can just make a PR and make it work today um to just see okay this is my monium account this is my iban uh this is my transactions so a special monum view inside the app and to be able to actually do transfers in sepa sepa transfers from inside Rodi this this is basically the vision of course more chains more protocols and performance

and um speed improvements so I'm generally running out of time uh so I'm just going to close with a call to action um if you like what you heard here um if if you identify with the vision that I I amum I'm talking about and if you also like to walk the walk and not just talk um then we are hiring we're mostly hiring python developers but we are looking at other languages like rust because we such a complicated system needs multiple demons um so please um uh apply you don't need to start by applying actually the best the the place where we get the most um uh applicants from is our open source contributors

it's open just come to our Discord we have a special Channel where you you get help to develop um we will show you how to start with a code base we really welcome excellent contributors um yeah we're a small team uh so we don't have a marketing guy I'm the guy I guess uh we don't have a marketing department so all of you here and uh everybody watching from the stream you are our marketing so if you like Rod key use it daily and spread the word talk about it to other people this is how this kind of organic marketing is how we get more and more users um and we also have this premium uh subscription on Ry that unlocks these extra features

like monium and all that and um unlocks also limits and uh it's still quite cheap I think1 per month uh this will change soon so if you want to um buy a subscription now is the best time um and buying a premium subscription really helps us because it both validates our messages and um gives us well funding to keep Building open source uh local F privacy uh tools for you uh that's all I guess thank you very much l thank you for your great talk can you hear me okay thank you for your great talk thank you for all that you do are

there questions uh for leus we have a few minutes over here thank you so much for the presentation um my question is okay uh was very clear the open finance where we are going um so what I'm seeing here is in the crypto space is that a lot of like non- crypto people are coming close to crypto with uh centralized Solutions such as like revolute or these kind of stuffs like Expo having exposure to this word but um not being at least yet so much active in defi space or crypto like space so my

question is what is in your opinion the uh main drivers for or or the main products that can bring to a mass adoption uh within the crypto okay good question so what what are the products that can um bring more adaption in in crypto so I don't think that anything like I don't know I don't know what Revol does with crypto but if it's something like n26 that just allows you to in your bank also buy some uh crypto and not even be able to take it out that's that's that's not helping at all that is I mean just gambling basically and I I I don't think this is good so I actually really like the idea of

combining like bridging between uh traditional finance and and and um uh defi like agnosis pain monum does I think that this is actually a very nice onramp both in the financial sense but also in the user sense because it's easier to understand okay so I I I I I swiped my card oh I now actually made a payment on chain what is on chain okay so I can see it on the blockchain Explorer or I can see it on my rod key H okay now I understand so this is probably a way to start and then uh from there and on try to see those those those four bullet points in the beginning that I said why are we here because this this is the this is the juice of what we are here

for but unfortunately I'm really not the marketing guy I I I don't know how to do that well but probably going between those uh onramps like gnosis pain monium can really help get new users other questions for Le up here hi um you had this nice slide with uh we can outed the code and so on um point I see the user cannot audit the code like you cannot dismantle the engine when you barely can count the

cylinders how can we uh convince the user or show the user that our app has Integrity that uh it works correctly and so on any ideas on that so um how can so if the user cannot audit the code how can they um be able to to know that it is indeed doing what it says that's a good question um the always the always answer that I give to this is maybe the ad user can't but they should then um find someone who can actually audit the code enough when enough people actually use something there is way too many people actually looking this code we we are not a huge application we have like I don't know 5K

maybe 10 K users we it's we don't have trting so I can't really tell you these are just from various analytics that we tried to do but even this kind of people there so many issues have been made in our repository saying hey here in this code you are actually the bullet so the this setting was set to true and you actually made an external connection while this setting was supposed to protect it um you are lying here please fix it so people are looking at code as long as there is users if there isn't users nobody will look at it but um you as a user don't need to be able to personally look at it but others will this is this is what uh

the transparency of Open Source is about that's all the time we have for questions please use Rocky it's an amazing tool thank you so much leus please give it up