DAPPCON 2025: Ethereum Privacy Journey - Antonio

Transcript

[Applause] Okay, great. Uh, first of all, uh, thanks you for having me here. I'm Antonio, co-founder at Fluid Key. And, uh, before entering in my in our, uh, journey, um, a couple of things, you know, first of all, uh, if I ask you what is, uh, an Ethereum transaction, 10 of you probably at the end, we probably can get to a point where we agree on what an Ethereum transaction is. Now if I ask you what is privacy for you I'm sure you can debate days and we will never end up to a single common answer of what privacy is this because it's a wide concept and that's the first thing

I want to keep in mind the second this is a journey and I want to show you how all of you are uh part of uh our like many other product journey and play probably the most crucial role in the whole journey. Each journey starts with a problem. Uh you will be able probably to figure out a lot of problems. Problems are everywhere every day. Problems are the reason why there are products often solving your uh your problem. For us, the problem was that uh everything on a blockchain is public. A kind of a known problem around the around the ecosystem. So balances are

exposed, history is permanent. That's I think even more worries than the balance is exposing the history is permanent connected to one address and the analysis of the data is super cheap requires no effort. One link to open ether scan and you get it. In 2023 when we start working on fluid key the beginning of our journey these were the vibes around privacy. There was no clear UX path on how someone can get privacy. There was tornado cash that got banned less than one year ago and was scaring everyone that was investing and building privacy because it was not clear what was accepted and what was risking to bring you in jail. And there was a lot of confusion around ZK. I I

heard once people say, "Oh, there's a ZK roll up, so there's privacy. Wait, time out." No, that doesn't work like that automatically. Okay. So in this environment once I got a friend tell me but what do you need to build what you are building just use a centralized exchange. No you will solve your problem of privacy. And to me uh this should have been uh like a gif. Imagine that it's like you know keeping everything and put under a carpet. Okay this is not how the problem should be solved.

And this brings sooner after to the ne next phase often very connected. we might have a solution and I could have asked a better talk before mine the one that Cassandra gave a second minutes ago is because I'm quoting the same we didn't we didn't uh talk before I'm quoting the same article he mentioned and also if you it's little I can read one of the uh thanks to Vic said is for example to Bendy Franchesco Bendy Franchesco is one of the co-founder at Umbra cash a product that inspired us a lot and fluid key would not exist if Uber caches probably didn't start what they did. Okay, just to give you know how these connections are all super

important still were a known solution. We didn't no one invented them. At least none of these people that you see invented them in terms of concept. The first one time we were mentioning I remember reading were in Bitcoin forum and they're easily applicable to the cryptography also that applies to the EVM that we are not all familiar with. The next part of we might have a solution now h as uh saltishes were known I knew them but one day Moritz my co-founder posted this on on on uh on forecast I didn't know him yet and it's like what if instead of EOAs we consider those addresses owner of smart accounts we get a guest sponsorship we get

batching we get a lot of benefits of treating them smart accounts rather than EOAs in terms of UX and UX is going to be good part of my talk and this connection these ideas this connecting the dots brought us to the next phase of our journey still the very beginning this was uh mid 2023 uh in terms of timing but does it work and I want to introduce like a core piece in every every process of building a product in web3 agathons is where the magic happens I say it's where you are forced to focus on an idea on building an idea. You have two days and uh you need to figure it out how to

solve the problem with the idea you had in mind and for us worked. We had an encouraging outcome. We got support from safe and we got positive feedback from participants. Probably you haven't noticed but you are part of this journey rate twice. The problem is something that communities people find out and we get positive feedback from by if everyone was saying oh what you're building is useless we would have done that anytime more we got encouraging it was not your what you're doing is perfect that's not okay but that was like an important role for us communities

this brings though I still remember that day Uh it was not a specific day but the period as a reality check cold shower. Okay, we were super happy about the hackathon but the majority of users won't care about privacy if UX isn't great. What does it mean? Outside of the hackathon bubble the time was uh it global in Paris no wallet cued to integrate us. We thought we had like like a super cool solution with smart accounts. We could build something to simplify that and no one wanted to integrate that in in in their system.

So we took a decision. We need to bring privacy with good UX. I've always been a kind of a person that I like privacy. I before UX whatever I used to call it practical privacy. What does that mean? uh means that uh is something that we need to be able to use it easily. If we build privacy in a way that only engineers can use it, we are not building it for the masses. And if you're not building something for the masses, sooner or later the standard of the masses will be imposed to us too.

Okay, that's I think something important. Okay, and uh this doesn't mean that we need to build uh tools that don't follow our principles. No, but we might have to find a common uh ground that make sure that we build privacy but we build privacy with great UX. Again, UX was mentioned in the talk before and we didn't talk before preparing uh this uh this slides. How we solve this problem? Back to Aaton and this scenario we were lucky. We were lucky because uh uh it was a good moment. There were uh there was happening Ethma ENS was sponsoring ship and ENS was launching a

feature called ENS offchain resolver. Yeah, we have been lucky we if we had come up with this idea one year before we didn't have all the support to find a good solution for providing acceptable nice user experience. So fluid key is and I'm start using the name of uh our product is an ENS that hides an infinite amount of addresses that are not yet deployed smart accounts that never are returned twice and from the address you cannot go back to the ENS. So kind of privacy is protect protected but for DNS you can get to the address. So this was able to I can have an ENS I can share with anyone even if I

post the CNS on a social media and I can start collecting uh uh payments who is paying it of course see who paid but cannot say how much I made out of this donation and this has been used actually in real cases for donations because uh I can collect donation without uh showing everyone how much I am uh I'm collecting. It's also great for uh use cases where you know there's my sensible privacy uh on on scenarios like that. I don't want to know connect all this donation to a public wallet that probably I I own before till now we found a feature we didn't found a product hackathons are not to

make products hackathons are are where you start working on features ideas that solve problems this is a feature now for us the journey will start to be crucial like okay now is where you start you need to start have necessity of having money because there's development that needs to be done around that. The easiest way in this moment of of your path and we are speaking about path for a privacy solution is to collect feedbacks, ship a lot of small features and understand what I did is the right step or was I doing a step uh in a pond and have to go back and try another path and this is you again in the journey

that need to test help and support with feedback and The current phase is what we are it's called commonly change product market fit this morning here and I if you didn't listen to that I kindly advise you to go there was a great talk on this by Alan from rail gun okay I kind they kind of found productive fit yeah I I would say yes recently but it was not an obvious path for them they started before the nest and I don't want to repeat what he said because I think I would like to quote the wall uh speech which he did here. Promotative fit means revenue. Revenue means more features and

more features means a better product. Problemat fit is not magic. It's work. It's feedback and it's support from who? From communities, but also for foundations. being here for me to speak now is a great support that I got from the guys from web3 privacy now versus what what we are doing and I'm grateful for that honestly me and all the other people at fluid key and pro market fit is building what users and communities want not what we as developer think might be funny to build that's a probably a side project not a real product but the question is like what is mean

revenue you for privacy. I think that privacy and profitability are not enemies. This means of course uh monetize without spining. That's just very basic example. Transparent business logic. But if we want a privacy focused product to have success, we have to accept that they must make money because at the beginning probably they need to have to raise capital and that capital cannot come just from grants or succeeding. who puts money that wants a return into the money. That's the world we are in. We don't have to be hypocrisies around that. And so we need to accept this concept and but building in a way that is fair, sustainable and transparent

because we can have a lot of different opinions from privacy but that the transparency uh connects strictly with privacy. I think that's something that we most of us probably agree on that. So what's then? Okay, I don't want like to close this talk just speaking about like a generic uh path uh for a product building in Ethereum over privacy. we touched a lot of uh parts the problem uh the hackathons the role the role of communities but then if we go down to the single individuals so you I would say I think that now it's important of what you we as users can do because I'm

a builder in fluid key but I'm a user in hundreds of other solutions test support share feedback you have no idea how many hours a month we spend to discuss the feedbacks we collect from users and this every project a serious project does that builders are humans not superheroes okay so sometimes we are not able to integrate feedbacks uh right away especially we're a team of three four uh people working on that and uh please keep complaining about your problems the more you hear them the more faster we probably are going to solve it of They make sense for it's

just one person saying one problem might affect the prioritization but it's crucial for us to listen what are the problems kind not oh someone just said I don't have to repeat no repeat it it's important it's another voice saying we need that this is not working this can be done differently this is not enough private for me that's all feedback that we we think are important and uh please vote be selfish vote to distribute grants There are a lot of programs who has things like quadratic founding to understand where people want money to go which are the products that you want to go. Go on this platform be selfish and vote the products that

solves your personal problems and help and this is like a huge help uh over that. So before closing and we will have uh time for few questions uh that as as you have seen I haven't touched the technology under flicky was more important around the journey but happy to discuss and explore more around that if you're interested the main takeaways that I want to leave you from this talk are that for me once you identify a problems hackathons are the best play to build a feature the worst to build a product you build products there. You just figured out how to solve a problems. Foundations are

those entities with the role to facilitate the transition from ideas to products. They have expertise. Not all the actors are entrepreneurs. They need to be guided into that. And this is crucial be be um know guided in what can be a mistake and and what is not. communities, users, you we uh need to ask, request, test, uh criticize uh what has been built. And finally, builders have the responsibility to recognize that the product is the results of many contributors. So when the product finds product market fit,

for example, don't have to forget. And there's a uh thing that I think is super important. It's give back. Give back to the community that help you uh reaching that that scenario. Support other project that are at the beginning of of the path that you have been doing a lot. Even a simple feedback, even a simple let's do a 30 minutes uh call together is really a light in the dark for a project. From my side, it's all happy to answer your question. Uh thank you. And if you want uh to try fluid key uh this is code you can scan go on fluidkey.com and uh yep this is us the three of us working on build the flick key

thank you I would open one from my side if it's kind of like information don't want to disclose it's all right. um how were you from the start uh pressured from lack of finances and how you approached the kind like sort of like investment game versus grants game versus other financial sources. So at the very beginning we were super lucky to get rents from safe uh from ENS I can mention them and that was like life saving. So first months we were relying heavily on that but soon we realized that to get a product we need proper uh proper capital and uh we

decide to go for a small pre-shit that was allowing us to build a product because I think that is personally a mistake is that each of us has a limited amount of time and that time has value. So even if it's your project this doesn't mean that you need to be like overpay yourself and not saying that but it's important to give value to your time and to say okay if I have to do this and will take one year what where can the resources come from if I want to take it seriously okay and and that was the the path I went still looking at the support from grants from uh uh foundation being able to be to speak at events and collect feedbacks uh so do that in a very um you know way that is

not like over always maybe mainstream questions. I have a question. One second. Mike, mic. So yeah, I have uh one question uh which is uh and it's great to meet you and talk to you and I think what you guys are doing is amazing by the way, but one one thing I've always wondered about if I'm the more uh I guess what would you call it? Paranoid type of user here. The one piece in your stack that I've always uh wondered about is the fact that I think you got this amazing amazing UX from this as well, which is the fact that there's some off-chain

infrastructure in order that powers this, right? These off-chain ENS resolvers. So yeah, sort of what are your thoughts on that or and are there any is there any path to sort of shore up that infrastructure for a paranoid user like me to feel like um I'm not relying on infra being run by one particular team in order for this uh approach to privacy to keep living on. Yeah. No, great question because today at lunch I was speaking with Tony Vashad that was one of the other in the paper that we we mentioned and um it was it was discussing about like how to make sure that this centralized dependencies on generation of the addresses can be as much as possible the centralized in a

way where UX is not affected but uh uh also we don't collect a lot of data because trust me um we don't collect a lot of data but we have the address is generated for a user because we need to index them and that on that size and if I don't have them I would be I would sleep much better overnight and that's a problem also for us uh and we are working on that for example one will be in uh offer a non-chain resolution that the address return is owned by the user and it's something we're already working on that this still doesn't solve the problem that we have indexing them for that start to be a little bit more when it when it comes to okay I want maybe some autom automations around that we have feature that uh in a permissionless

way we automate since there are smart accounts for our users like okay I receive money on one chain automatically is sent to another chain where I want to collect of this money but I think that we can propose a trade-off where if you accept not to have all this probably automation we can get to a point where the decentralization like the data we collect is completely like we just act as an anonymous indexer yeah index data for you but we don't know your index data for you. Okay. Another pro piece of the puzzle to solve this is needed by the uh foundational standard because you mentioned for example the event emitted on chain. One reason why we went to this user experience is because I don't want

anyone to be forced to use fluid key to send money to another fluid key account. I want to send money directly from MetaMask but I don't want to go on a website connect MetaMask and send. just want to send your ether and so embedding that into wallets probably like this solution emitting an event while doing a payment there was a proposal of doing that as an ENS standard for example if NS returns as record okay then I have to emit this event as a wallet yeah once we have that we will be more than happy just to change this way of uh generating stadium more uh even more permissionless way of generating We have a few minutes more before Julio anymore. I would ask the one that we

cannot keep talking about because um at the conference people try to flex confidence and they're the geniuses but I would rather ask you what things about the business about the marketing about the uh building relationship as foundation you didn't knew two years ago that were really critical on your journey sort of like the new skills you gain the new habits you build and stuff like that I've was always been on the other side no of of the game so sharing feedback and on the other side it was like oh I tell that I tell that but when you move on this side I think that speaking with everyone from at any level on the stack from the VC to users to

foundations gives you a completely better view of what you are building and this is a kind of a skill because it's not just listening it's also listen and make the right question back again to the user. This is I think the most important skill that personally at least I learn is questioning back the user not in a in a in a way to argue with him but just to really understand where is the problem you're seeing and where we can help out figure it out. So not being afraid of asking that's I think in short the best uh thing I learned so far.