DAPPCON 2025: Rotki vs The Cloud Empire: an Aligned App Manifesto - Lefteris

Transcript

Hey everybody, good morning. Can you guys hear me? Well, great. So, good morning. I'm going to make a talk about something that has been really bothering me lately that uh most of the apps that we use do not serve us, but instead uh they serve their creators or worse their investors. Um, so we're going to talk about a new kind of app, the concept of an aligned app such as uh ROKI, which is something that I'm working on. Um, so Rodki versus the cloud empire and an aligned app manifesto.

Um, so the status quo today is quite simple. Almost all of the apps that we use are misaligned. They run on somebody else's cloud. They are um not open source, not transparent. You don't know what they do. They uh mind your data, they sell it or worse uh they exploit it. Be it uh from Instagram to uh a wallet with hidden telemetry. This is unfortunately the status quo today. This this is your red pill moment. It hasn't been uh only this year. I mean has been happening and getting worse and worse every year. But even in the crypto field we have um we we like to say that

we are creating this this new utopia and that everything is on our control. May maybe the keys that we use are self- custoded but your history uh your your data your infrastructure your indexes everything is centralized somewhere else. Somebody can just cut you off at any point. Even in web 3 we we are becoming the product and we are no longer the users. Um when we started this like when we were building Ethereum in the like more than 10 years ago we were like 20 guys in a room thinking of you know we want to create something different. We want to um get rid of the fallible and corruptible systems of the old world and create this new system that is um

creating so sovereignty for the user decentralization transparency empower the user. But today today unfortunately this is what we have ended up with. We have Defi in um quotes that is almost all of it hosted on AWS. It's most of the times closed source using a lot of closed APIs. It's basically a black box. So what does that leave us with? That leaves us with um essentially having managed to recreate the web two stack, the exploitative web two stack, but it's even slower and it's a lot worse uh UX to go towards the Star Wars narrative.

What we are right now, we are the rebels that we we've been dreaming of of um changing the world and defeating the evil cloud empire. But um we decided to do so by just setting up our base inside the Death Star. This is where we are today. Instead of um actually building stuff that empower our users, we have started to collaborate with the Imperials. So how can we fix this? How can we um get out of the Death Star? By using apps that u respect the user's data, apps that don't track you and especially apps that would uh run locally, empower the user by making them

own their data and apps that can survive their creators. This is what I called aligned apps and it's not about some uh you know vague values. It's aligned with the Ethereum values or aligned with whatever uh cyberpunk values. They're apps that are aligned with you. Apps that are aligned with the user's interest. That is what alignment is about. So what makes an app an aligned app? Four key principles. The app needs to be open source. It needs to transparently explain to the user what it does and to be able to be um understood and to prove that uh the claims that the uh creators

uh are saying about the app are true. It needs to be local first. That means that uh the majority of the functionality runs locally and not everything is a round trip through a server. Privacy should be paramount. Without privacy, the user runs into too many dangers as we're going to see later. Uh and the business model should be uh sustainable and not based on exploiting the users. Alignment is a spectrum. It's not binary. On the far left we have uh full cloud uh capitalism. Think the metas and the Googles of the world. Then as you go towards the right you start to have some more attributes. It's not a great example but imagine that telegram also allows encrypted communication but it's

not by default. There is false advertising and the more you go towards the right the more you end up with um transparent open source apps like rod key. your job as users and your job as builders of apps is to go more towards the right of this particular spectrum. Um, enter roadki. Rodki is something that my team and I have been building um that empowers you to own your data. It runs on your machine. Rodi is an aligned app. It's an app that's built for you guys. It's not built uh for a VC to do a 100x return on their investment.

What are the credentials that make Rody an aligned app? As we mentioned before, local storage of data. That means that you are in control of your data as the user. It's transparent thanks to being open source. Everything that I claim about the app all of these years can be confirmed has been confirmed by just looking at the code. I I can't lie to you. You don't need to trust me. This is really important. There is no hidden uh phone home features or any hidden telemetry. It can run offline with a big asterisk that many of you that may have tried it sometimes things break. We need to improve there and it's funded by you guys by the users not by exploiting you.

Then um let's seek bit in action. So it's a portfolio tracking accounting and management tool. This is the dashboard. You can connect it and you know connect it to centralized exchanges like rack and buy bit. You can connect it to all of uh the various chains all of the EVM chains. uh the arbitum, Ethereum and so on and so forth, a substrate chains, uh bitcoin chains, even connect to um manually connect basically to a bank so that you can also track your bank accounts and then you have this beautiful graph on top that shows you how your net worth has um uh evolved over time.

The heart and soul of ROKI is its history events. The history view is really the core of the app. Rodi pulls data from all of the exchanges from all of the chains, combines it with data that you input and then forwards it all into the uh the decoding engines that we have that try to make it into a human readable format and understand what it does. What comes at the end is basically a list of history events like this which you can filter with many filters that can be combined. you know filter by an address, filter by a particular asset, by a particular protocol. You can limit the time range of your history. Say I want to just check the last month or the

last year for my accounting. And best of all, you can export any particular filter history of events u with your accountant manually work on it later or um uh just import it into any other tool. It's important that an app doesn't limit you to only work in it. you can take your data away whenever you want. Uh we have a lot of statistics that basically operate on top of this data such as the net value over time. Uh the for each asset you can see how the amount and value over time has um evolved u distribution by location, distribution by asset. I somehow cut it in the slide. And um we have various um protocol analysis such as for Ethereum

staking. Of course, since it is an Ethereum conference, you can analyze your validators um how their performance has been uh for all of your validators. How much you earned in um rewards split uh in execution and consensus layer. For consensus layer, you can see how much have the MEV been or how much is pure block rewards. And here too you can filter and um see uh for example the rewards only in the last year or only for a particular validator. More exciting and much more recently we have gone towards management from inside rod key. So you can even today if you open your roy you can interact with the chain directly from inside the app. send

ETH, send tokens, send XDI, anything you want for EVM chains only for now. Um without leaving the app. Um the plan is to go also towards um providing the ability to do swaps uh select D5 protocols from inside the app. If any of you uh remember like very long ago missed so a local browser and local wallet that allowed you to interact with um with the chain. This is kind of the vision that we are trying to go for.

So this is a really silly comparison of rod key versus your typical cloud app. And I say silly because this is what you would see in a typical pitch deck. You know this is my app. These are the attributes. Check mark for all of the attributes. Our competitors very very bad. Very bad. Um please uh invest all your money in us because look at this comparison. This kind of the opposite. An investor would try to see for ways to um take advantage of the user. If they don't see that they won't invest you like a typical investor, a typical I want 100x VC. There are many good angels. There are even uh good VC firms.

Um but so for example, let's let's look at uh the typical cloud app. Everything is in the cloud. Your data will be leaked. Your data will be um exploited. Roki, everything is local. You can take it with you. Nobody takes it away from you. Uh your typical cloud app will tell you that they are private, that they respect like they respect your privacy. This is like very very typical. And they have a privacy policy. So this is very important but in reality there is no privacy there in rot key everything is local you we can't see what you are doing this is also difficult because sometimes we need to see to help you but privacy by default is important

your typical cloud app is intransparent it's closed source you can't know what they do and how and uh while with an open source app like rodkkey you can understand what they do see how they calculate calcated what they calculated and this is extremely important especially for something like accounting because I've checked many of our competitors and the results are so wrong that it's not even funny. We also make mistakes. But then we can look at the code with the user, show them why. Sometimes it surprises them why the result is as it is.

Making money. Your typical cloud app will uh exploit the out of your data. U sour you with ads. They will do everything they can to milk you for profit. While um an aligned app like Roki just really tries to provide value to the user and from that make money. A typical cloud app will track everything they can about you. The metadata that they are gathering is insane. If you have ever looked at what uh an app gathers from their users, we don't like it's provable that uh for example if you look at the code you can see what kind of um uh server seat contacts and so on and so forth. So when a VC sees this they're like no I'll pass

because there is no mode that they can create around this. that there is no way to milk the user prof for profit and keep them in it. It's not aligned with the VC's interest, but it is aligned with your interest with the interest of the users. Uh but building an aligned app is not easy. As you grow, as you gain more users, as your um app gains traction, you will have uh a lot more feature requests. you will um need to provide support, create many many more stuff that means resources, that means funding and then you will get tempted. You will say hm maybe I should close source part of the code or create a wall garden around this part of the ecosystem or you

know maybe somehow monetize because this is what uh my VC told me would um uh guarantee my next funding round. Alignment is fragile and the dark side is tempting. So we really should be vigilant and be careful not to fall into this trap because uh the costs of misalignment are very very steep. It has very steep consequences from uh lost funds when an exchange uh collapses or gets hacked to data leaks when an app that supposedly is self-custodial and doesn't have any of these data ends up exposing the seed phrases of the user via email. I I don't know how that even happened to sensoring. Uh it has become

kind of a standard but four years ago uh unis swap started sharing um the IP addresses and the wallet addresses and god knows what else with friendly nar like TRM labs for compliance and risk reasons. Uh more severe of all the consequences is the loss of privacy. The loss of privacy leads to violence as we have unfortunately seen uh very recently many times this year in France and uh violence can lead to loss of life. So misalignment with the user's interests can lead to uh loss of life and misalignment is extremely uh dangerous.

So how can we u stop this misalignment and really build for the users? In the title of the app there was like the word manifesto. So here it is um this v1 I guess because I had to make the slides fast. Your data your device point one you should try to um empower the user to own their data inside their devices. The code should be open source or get the out. There is really like nothing I would do with an app that is not open source. Bullet point three, uh, privacy is the default. As we saw, privacy is very important. It loss of privacy can lead to violence and harassment and loss of life. So, this is an extremely

important bullet point. Local first, cloud last. Doesn't mean that you won't use cloud for some reason. Doesn't mean that uh there won't be network connections. I mean like of course we we live in an interconnected world but try to do everything that you can locally build for your users not for your investors and that uh finally your business model should focus on sustainability and not exploit the users. We are thankfully not alone. There is many aligned apps and this is just some that I um thought of when I was making this slide. We have signal like the end to end encrypted communication, right?

Uh we have our friends at filever that are building an aligned version of the Google doc suite. We have um notes app like standard notes or obsidian. We have password managers like keep us x or bit warden. And even for something that you know sounds as misaligned like analytics. Why would you want analytics? You do want analytics. You need to know what your users do. But when you uh analyze their data, you need to do it in a privacy preserving manner like Mammy Analytics does. So talk to me if you're building aligned apps. Let's build a movement around aligned apps together.

So let's go to call to action. Uh for the users, it all starts with you guys. Vote with your feet. Use aligned apps over the surveillance alternatives. Support them in any way you can. Um use them. uh buy them if they have a subscription program or uh anything lifetime subscription um donate to them, evangelize them, support them. If you're a developer, also make PRs for them, make issues, give feedback in general. Question what apps do with your data.

Don't just accept them. Think where does your data go and ask the developers what do they do with your data? This may push them to build more aligned apps. Build something that's more aligned with you guys. Be vigilant. Don't just accept the situation as it is. To the builders here, uh some things to keep in mind. Would you use your app as a user if you knew how it exploits the user's data? Probably not, right? Try to provide value to the user. Uh don't take advantage of them. Providing value is much more sustainable long term. So strive for sustainability. You need to make money. The poor open source dev um idea is fun and all, but after a

year you will burn out. Think of your business model. Really try to make money. Everything that I'm saying here is about not being exploitative. You do need to make money because otherwise your users will suffer. Uh again, be vigilant. And closing um alignment is actually punk. Alignment is rebellion. It's not rebellion against uh banks or regulators or something boring like that, but it's rebellion against corporations, against VCs that would want you to build software that exploits the user um and milks the data for profit. So yeah, stay aligned and

if you want to work with an aligned app like Rodkkey, we're hiring. We do welcome open source contributors. And if you want to work with us, probably you should start by uh doing quite a few open source contributions because we have so many applications that only those stand out that have already contributed. As a user, use Rodkkey daily. Spread the word. Uh buy our premium subscription. Um engage with us and talk about aligned apps. Uh that's all. Thank you and stay aligned. [Applause]