#DappCon22 : Day 1 - Privacy As A Public Good, Awa Sun Yin

Transcript

weather speakers usually stand is it over there yeah whatever okay hi everyone my name is AWA I'm one of the co-founders of anoma and namara first a little bit about myself in the past I actually worked in surveillance capitalism in a company called analysis that was actually my first job in the space you might not know a lot about your analysis but she also certainly knows a lot about you and now I work on Goods for the public including anoma and namata and a bunch of other protocols so I always want to start a little bit about privacy because I think we always think about privacy for individuals but

I think not that many people actually talk to think about privacy for nation states and actually very strong arguments of why governments and Sovereign Nation States just start worrying about privacy preserving Technologies that um our existing Financial systems and Mars backbones that are essential for security of every every um every country is at the moment by default transparent and that also includes the decentralized systems as all blockchains all cryptocurrency Protocols are at best pseudonymous and we all know that that is just not private so white privacy for nation states actually the first reason is that it is essential for National Defense as in

financial systems are critical for security for the security of nation states and at the moment there is just no way that it is safe and or insecure enough for to move in and the existing Financial system to the blockchain so in order to for um because what we're doing right now is make it extremely easy not for only other nation states but any any Asian out there that is able to download the data and perform any kind of statistical analysis on the data so basically they're anonymize and figure out what is any other government doing with all the financial data the other reason is that we actually need privacy to safeguard democracy this is a little bit unintuitive it is the fact that most systems and applications

on web 2 are also um transparent by default and this data is can actually be used by other governments to attack your government for example think of for example all the data that we are looking through Facebook that can later on be leveraged by governments like Russia North Korea whatever it is nowadays there's no need really to wage physical Warfare you can actually wage way more damaging or by using information that is all transparent in social media think of for example a really good attack to increase the chances of stochastic terrorism in a nation would be not to start War physically speaking but to say

let's find out through the Facebook groups which ones are those more think of for example Facebook groups where they are veterans of the United States let's say and veterans are operationally capable they might actually and you might be able to find out which groups are like slightly more easy to be radicalized and those people you can actually Target a lot of information around like look this is what under a war are you upset about this and this it doesn't really matter if this doesn't it is not successful with a specific group but if you do this at scale with many groups you can slowly increase chances of one of them actually flipping and then doing something pretty radical um on the ground

so I would say I agree that for National states that that is actually very important for democratic governments like the United States like Europe to actually start adopting privacy preserving Technologies um so previously for individuals and communities I think this is a little bit more obvious as in we need some kind of system that defends individuals or communities against surveillance capitalism this is in the end there are private corporations out there that just want to make a dollar um they they just have profit motive but for as long as there's data it creates opportunities for them to actually monetize and exploit it which leads the next next point which is people actually just want to use these services like

when you pay for coffee or something like that you just wanna you went there to pay for coffee but what happens with existing Financial systems is that there's a lot more and many other externalities happen under the hood which is you pay for coffee but there's also a lot of data that is collected but all this financial intermediaries which later on can be used for um exploiting and extracting value from the users and and it doesn't make sense because you just want to pay for coffee you just want to consume the coffee but in the end there's a legal order so now this will happen from the fact that data was collected and aggregated by intermediaries in the process and in the end I kind of want to remind ourselves that we are all in the space because of the purpose of Building

Systems that can actually be viable Alternatives and better Alternatives like systems including the ones in web 2. and in order to do that we need to enable ones that minimize the externalities for the users in order to enable a more Equitable relationship between the user and the people and the system quick look at the evolution of privacy centralized protocols so unscriptable sermon architectures those are cryptocurrencies primarily usually with Bitcoin and the long tail Forks of Bitcoin the Privacy grantees were limited to pseudonymity um and then with with the past time we start to see other propositions like

Monero that uses ring signatures smaller coin also uses ring signatures or is they cache that uses CK snarks but something that brings them in common is that privacy is usually attached to the monetary policy and the means of exchange which means that if you wanted to pay privately you also had to adopt that monetary policy or that currency and that is something common about all the prospers and protocols that happen ever since Bitcoin and now we start to see on programmable settlement protocols like layer ones like ethereum layer twos like I'm assuming optimism arbit room um and a bunch of other layer to use I started to see dapps deployed to them so we see tornado cash Decay money the

Adaptive specific privacy that are deployed and transparency ones so here we see that um we started we start to decouple a little bit the Privacy from the from the assets and the platforms um and I would like to challenge a little bit the design principles it's like let's forget about blockchain let's forget about cryptocurrencies and let's kind of say if we wanted to bring private supportive and Technologies what are the two principles we should build on top of and the first one is I would say very obvious but not obviously so many it starts with the coupling privacy from the assets but also from the platforms again people want privacy but not necessarily your monetary policy I

think not everyone wants to press the the milk in Bitcoin or and not everyone wants to price the Bitcoin in Zach necessarily and again protocols should not be dramatic about what is the means of exchange like actually people should decide what to use as means of exchange and nobody should enforce anything a big nomadic about another protocol or adapt so that's the first principle like challenge the second one is that so far we have been thinking about privacy as a feature again as an add-on as like this is a button we can make it blue or red but a framework that we like to start establishing um is that I think it's more correct so think of privacy as a public good and public goods and economics have

actually to usually two properties they are non-excludable meaning that nobody is able to deprive access to it access from it and nobody means not other individuals not companies not governments so they have to be at all time successful for it by anyone and they have to be not they're actually non-reverse and Antivirus which is something really unique really specific to privacy sets and privacy if you think about anonymity sets what makes them antivirals is the fact that actually the more people use it the more benefit everyone else gets out of it and yeah I would say if you start

thinking about privacy as a public good we will probably have the right framework and the right design choices and criteria to design privacy preserving Technologies and this is what led us to design the Mata namara is privacy as a public good concretely it is daily one protocol for asset agnostic interchange privacy it provides zcash like Schiller transfers to deploys the gift snacks it reached a point where we can actually start generating proofs on browser also Edge devices on browser or mobile this is for any assets um again decoupling the assets from the Privacy from the platform from the

protocol so it supports this kind of Serial transfers for any kind of assets at the moment in the short term it's going to support different class finality chains ethereum Etc and it applies some cool cryptography that allows all access to share one common anonymity set so think about for example nfcs and fungible assets from ethereum including the the native asset of namara they will all share one unlimited set which is a really desirable property to have for example think of an nft that is very low volume but it's very high value then it really benefits from it looks basically indistinguishable from a transfer from just a base let's say an eth transfer or

a transfer of the Native asset a few second latency and use their fees and it depressed a bunch of interesting mechanisms to find fund privacy as a public good we'll talk a little bit about it later is anonymous first fractal instance what is a Noma uh there's going to be a talk tomorrow about it so check it out here's an Architectural Review I won't go through the details just for you to look into some of the most interesting pieces here and there so at the middle we have the uh the kind of like the base of the Ledger and the protocol so at the bottom peer-to-peer Ledger consensus exclusion governance it actually uses tendon main core

and on top of it um we just valid the predicates which is designed for smart contracts uh this is actually not so important for namara but it will be important for anoma and so a few interesting components that are actually deployed implementers validity predicates are the MSP and convert circuit which is the thing that provides the 100 millimeter set for the prefers sake part the public goods funding mechanisms a bunch of governance features the way it connects to other chains so you can actually get privacy for assets that were generated in order to change which is a very important point for namara namara is not about you create the assets on this chain it is more about the assets were created in auto chains and you want retrofit privacy

somehow so the way it connects to fast mentality bft chains think of Cosmos osmosis whatever chain that uses the cosmos SDK or has a good notion of fast finality we connect with by IBC connectors and in the cases of change that not have not yet the notion of fast penalty we have built some custom Bridges the first one that we built is the custom Bridge with to ethereum and that we decided to build it ourselves because out of all the other architectures out there we wanted one that prioritized most the highest Assurance of security for the user and actually this design just has that that parameter in mind just maximize

that parameter um we also have submitted a proposal to build a custom reach to Z cache that is in the cash governance Forum you can check it out and there might be other changes that we might be looking into uh that might also need a similar um but adapted bridge design and they fully vertically integrated way so um we kind of feel like we hear the tagline of ux is very important which is true and I think like part of the reason why Sheila translated with adopted is due to the ux so the way we are uh going to be launching the Mata is that there's going to be an end user interface that is browser-based uh like the very first versions and you will be able to do

directly shielded transfers for any assets um just using the browser application so there's a few other things that are kind of very interesting to look into we're just talking about the MSP and convert circuit so the MSP provides one-on-imb with every asset it is actually an upgrade to the um sapling circuit and it comes with a second upgrade which is the convert circuit that allows us to create shielded set rewards as in a way to reward people for using shielded transfers over transparent transfers because the mod actually supports both and is up to the user which one they want to use but we are actually able to provide carrots for people who use the anonymity set who do contribute to the

nomita set the perfect mechanism comes with a couple of Innovations it comes with the a variant of the F1 free distribution mechanism that allows you to basically you do not need to spend the network to delegate and delegate and things like that it all happens automatically especially the compounding effect it also comes with cubic slashing to for the ones who are more used to operating validators cubic slashing is just a way to discourage in the case of validators operating multiple nodes with different accounts it's a way to discourage values to operate them in a very similar configuration so try to can have this infrastructure diversity and new setups then we have

um with pgf mechanisms proactive radioactive pgf mechanisms can go a little bit more into later and the and the way it governance works with uh there is actually a treasury dedicated to funding publicates um in the first form of like kind of limited liquid democracy where you we are splitting away from historically governance and sticking has been kind of attached as roles you're delegating to validator implicitly you're also delegating the governance decisions that are validator but on the matter we're actually splitting those roles where you can um you can delegate on one hand for staking and for Securities validators but then you can also delegate to not a third party there's nothing to do with staking

um or to make decisions on the funding for public goods okay so funding premises are probably good um conceptually the way this works is the Nevada protocol generates crates of carrots and those cards get distributed into three buckets the most two interesting most interesting buckets are in the case of the anonymity sets so the shield set incentives um the way this mechanism is designed is that it instant devises only actual contributions to the Privacy set so we have to create a system that this encourages spam um so it it is able to detect for example at what point it actually

contributes not contributes to the premises to think of like for example the very first transactions addition to the um marginal marginal additional privacy sort of said are pretty high but they might be reaching a point where extrapolate through really high values a point where an additional um transaction to it does actually not contribute that much anymore to privacy so this mechanism needs to be able to adjust to that so like the real conditions the volume Etc and the actual value um and it also has to disencourage spam with the public goods funding mechanisms um this is already mentioned uh the fact that we're splitting validators from the the governance Council and and the council that actually decides where to

fund and there's about there's a bunch of things about proactive redactive pgfe pgf there is um the best deep dive for this is on the specs I show you the link later uh there's a few ideas about which categories of things are funded uh can be funded which ones proactively and retroactively portion of periscope to the next security as a proof of stake chain it goes to it goes to validators and delegators so here's the roadmap no matter is launching actually pretty soon we started the development of this protocol at the beginning of this year we announced it really not that long ago we actually operated with a few third-party validators A test net is

working well and we're planned to launch a list of synthesis setup and the public test Nets before the end of the year hopefully no matter goes live by the end of the year if not early next year there are a few other upgrades that we're looking into already which can be really interesting so the thing that I am most excited about is the idea of private Bridges the issue can have the issue five minutes got it okay um the issue you have with having a layer one that has this anonymity to set is that actually anonymity sets among layer ones and competitive so that that this rivalry in there and a way of removing that is by enabling kind of private IVC or private

Bridges so anonymity sets can actually be shared across layer ones and that would be a desirable thing to have for us because otherwise it kind of this one pool but then imagine if something happens to this chain or a validates that kind of sensor transaction something like that ideally you want um make it easy for other for another instance of them are to appear and be operated by different set of validators but then not lose into dynamometer set it might take some time to transfer um to reach the size of the pool but if you enable private Bridges and private ABC that that enemy this is actually shared across all pools so that's something really cool also really fits really well with the idea of privacy probably get

um other versions things like uh like Fairview for censorship resistance as in that prevent avoid the remove the ability for validators to see the constant transaction before it actually gets finalized further implementations that we see in so early ones um and a few other improvements start to get involved if you're interested in in this topic there are soonish ways to get involved first of all to stress the setup as the this is the ceremony that the Auto Brokers have done the cache aspect you need this because we have to deploy in a custom circuit so if you're applying to use Shield transfers ornamara I would really recommend you to actually

participate in the ceremony because then at least you can trust yourself that you actually got rid of the toxic waste and um and then otherwise if you are interested in operating validators then you can also participate in public test Nets there will be also be some programs for end users because you really want to get tested this this vertically integrated um protocol with also the end user interfaces and there might be carrots for both of them namata is built by Helix these are my two co-founders Adrian who's running around here he will be giving the talk about nanoma um Christopher he who is who lives in Berlin you might know Christopher the most for being the architect the designer of the ABC protocol you might

not know Christopher for the wyvern Dex protocol which is actually the set of smart contracts that settles every trade on the openc if you go to each gas station and you search for the ranking the rank number one should still be the vibrant Dex protocol um not a lot of people know about this but it's actually very cool and Helix is a public goods lab and if you are interested in joining the team of about 50 people um we're working on many other protocols in many other areas check out the webs the the jobs page will talk to me later and that is the end of my talk uh there's a few links no matter.net the code base is open source these specs are open source everything's open source

here thank you thank you