DappCon23: Trustless Collaboration: The Missing Piece To A Better Web - Vijay & Andreas

Transcript

okay while we wait maybe I'll start already um so hi I'm Andreas this is VJ um we're two co-founders of ferse we came here from the two corners of the world to tell you something very specific and that's that um the space is ready for non-financial applications at scale so I know that everyone is uh quite hyperfocused and for good reasons on financial applications in crypto and web 3 but we want to start communicating the idea and build a narrative that non-financial

applications uh are ready because of the stack that has been built for the past 10 years in our space so this includes a bunch of important uh uh Primitives we'll cover those things we'll talk a bit about the narrative and what drives our thinking behind that and then we'll get into the me grey of the topic and talk about how difficult it is uh to build peer-to-peer applications at scale try to explain what are the challenges uh people will face in doing so but leave you on a hopeful note that the space is indeed ready for us to go into the type of applications you use every

day online so one of the main points behind the present that's going to be up any minute now um is that most of the internet traffic today is on social media on if you go on similar web uh today it's a website where you can compare the traffic that goes into different websites you'll see that it's Facebook Tik Tok YouTube Google those types of companies and products that are the main ones that most of the internet traffic is directed towards and we want to say that if we want the space to grow significantly and reach

that uh Holy Grail of a billion users the next billion users we're going to need to be aware of this uh type of traffic and actually try to uh uh build applications uh that work that way so I don't see any slides um so maybe we can uh go with a backup slide that were there originally oh I see a change okay so even without the slides it doesn't matter I'm going to get into it hopefully they amazing okay maybe like that okay we can't move them but already

the title is there which is very cool it helps me at least cover the first point the first point is that we're building for trustless collaboration and this is important because it's not just a niche little problem of our space it's something that can actually set us up for making the web uh more robust and a better place for us to have everyday online experiences okay so uh the next slide is just us presenting ourselves uh it's uh it's quite important to know who is trying to uh uh tell you a little story or sell you something so I want to show that we're not selling something um VJ

and I have been working on a project called fers for a year and a half now uh we've been in the space since 2016 we are gitcoin grantees we've been uh on gitcoin since 2000 no since uh gitcoin round 13 uh represent and we were uh for three rounds consecutively in the top projects behind defil Lama um it was quite encouraging because we saw that people were actually Yay it works okay uh perfect okay it's a bit of the older slide but let's go with that um so this is us we're also uh ethereum Foundation grantees we've been working

on Smart contract recovery and social recovery for uh a few months now VJ the co-organizer of she build. Tech is the biggest non male focused web 3 uh hacking uh hackathon in India uh it's quite an amazing uh feat uh especially if you realize the problem of diversity in our space um I'm completing my PhD in Ai and cyber security at Oxford don't hold it against me uh we've been in crypto for a long time and we like running validators and nodes kind of all over the world so let's get into it um we've been I think one of the most important

things that we're going to do right now in the in the talk at least in the beginning is tell you a bit about the pieces uh the breakthroughs or some technologies that uh we're very hopeful for and that really allow us to build those technologies that we're going to that we call trustless collaboration for who for those who were at safe con yesterday you'll see that the the talk is quite similar although we'll go a bit more into the technical architecture towards the end and the challenges you can face in building those types of Technologies so first thing that I would like to highlight is multisig multisig we consider them as one of the most important breakthroughs uh of our

space it gave us this crazy concept that I'm still trying to communicate to people around me as a a super important piece of technology that evolves makes it possible for internet communities to be much more powerful and have material impact so instead of just having a subreddit group a group of friends on the internet here you have people managing a bank account all together uh even if they don't know each other even if they're some of them are in India the others in Nigeria the others in Lebanon the others in in Tokyo uh and this is incredibly powerful the

example of constitution now is a good example um another thing about multisig is that uh it made our space more robust to compromise keys and fishing and uh uh all types of uh uh problems okay um okay yeah uh Suite of account abstractions that come with safe as well and account recovery or smart contract recovery in case case you lose your key super important it fixes a lot of ux problems that were quite detrimental to our space um the next slide is kind of where we're going with this conversation it's about what if we could use those

multisig for something that was non-financial what if we could use them for public and private uh or personal data so you can think of communities trustless co-owning and managing content file a brand an archive a website a digital Garden the possibilities are endless and this is with security with onchain uh management of your data which means what which means data in computational Integrity now uh non-financial applications in crypto I know it's a blasphemy people don't really like to talk about it for good reasons it's difficult

but what are we observing when we look uh we take a look at the space we see that there is a persistent point of centralization which we don't like uh that has remained unaddressed and that's everyday collaboration and coordination is centralized what does that mean it means that our knowledge base our documentation our public content the things that uh we share with our community and beyond for them to start understanding the space build on the technologies that we've prepared the protocols that we prepared are just one arbitrary decision by one company or an employee going rogue or a bankruptcy or anything like that from

actually having a collapse of our uh uh common knowledge base and wikis and all that and this is catastrophic here I put two examples I love both projects deeply this is the ethereum foundation this is the gitcoin Dow they're both using no to uh communicate essential information about their project and facing uh the the public and the audiences that they're targeting it's a problem you can't use uh you can't be dependent on a server in California if you're going to actually hope that your information is going to be available forever and for everyone and anywhere I'm going to fast forward because we we had some slice

problem this is not just us problem it's a problem for everyone on the web most adults around the world do not trust companies to handle their personal data uh most academics political dissidence journalists are constantly locked out from their Works spaces their collaboration spaces and that's a huge issue those are some of my favorite websites Reddit Wikipedia the internet archive they're amazing examples of commons-based pure production and yet they're all dependent on uh arbitrary decisions from the organizations that provide the the tools that uh that they have uh next slide I don't know why it's going before I click uh the Comm commun

Community computers Revolution uh I'll stop in a bit and give uh uh give the mic back to VJ this is one of my favorite terms I think it really captures something that maybe blockchains uh uh don't especially in Elite little groups or in Academia people don't really like hearing the word blockchain or you know nois or ethereum they you know they get hostile immediately and so I've been trying to use Community computers as an alternative uh uh concept it doesn't come from me it comes from the Kos community at least the first uh first time I saw it from Ethan Bookman especially and he described it describes it as such personal computers Unleashed

un imaginable levels of sovereignty and interoperability for people and Community uh Community computers will do the same for groups I deeply believe in this and I think it is a great point now uh almost done Community computers and the self- sovereignty stack there's been a combination of 10 years of blockchain and cryptography research and development and those elements allow us to actually build what sandep yesterday called trust list applications instead of decentralized applications I quite like the term so we're going to use it here and we're going to show you an example of that the first crucial part of this is crypto wallets we like to consider those things

as uh Rebirth of public key cryptography uh it uh it gives hundreds of millions of people the ability to be aware of their public key and private key is very important because it's the type of uh adoption that pgp never achieve or a bunch of ux problems and more uh smart contracts here I really like this quote I saw by Hudson Jameson on Twitter a few days ago a replacement for intermediaries who would otherwise handle the logic or trust required in a valuable transaction uh or interaction between two or more entities you have also content addressing by rwe or ipfs uh quite an important uh piece of

technology as well that comes in this self- sovereignty stack and that merges amazingly well with Community computers uh what is is it no need to put your trust in where data resides the trust is in the cryptographic identifiers of the data itself so uh I like uh um I like the point from Jay Graber from Blue Sky that you're moving away from client server architectures and you create what she calls user generated Authority final three things multi and smart accounts complexity reduction and security increase l2s and app chain and social Gra s which give you basically the ability uh or the right to exit which is uh

primordial final slide and then we get into the the real business um New Path for crypto adoption and internet Freedom again this is not just a US problem it's something that will make the internet a better place at least this is what we want to present today um and I think one way to think about it is as a new crypto onramp what I mean by that is that we're creating we have the ability now with that stack that I described to uh cater for everyday online activities and interactions not only you know three Unis swap swaps a week with two nft claims and maybe a lens post no we're

talking about I log on to my computer and my workpace my collaboration my file storage everything that I do daily it can be catered to to a uh crypto uh stack so what does that mean it means that um people would not be required to buy tokens um or having tokens to interact with our space this is super important why it's important because we do not force anymore the new entrance into our space to abandon their privacy at the doorsteps of the first uh centralized exchange kyc process uh this is a big problem that we

currently all face I'm a bit ashamed whenever I show to someone new that yeah you first need to show your identity then you need to connect to your bank account then you need to show where you live and you need to tell them how many times a day you go to the toilets and you continue like that it's a problem uh this means that we'll not be locking out 90% of the world because uh space is either too expensive ensive or requires a kyc process that is not possible for them it also means that we can build technologies that are gdpr compliant rather than depending on monopolies to consider yes or no if they're going to going to comply by European Union

regulations and finally we can build tools that your grandparents can actually use use to improve their online experiences and explore the digital uh world uh quick demo it probably won't work it will not work unfortunately uh because of some technical issues so we'll get into okay there are two missing slides as well but VJ will still manage to actually go through uh the architecture okay okay uh I think as devs we all can imagine uh things when I explain right so uh I'll and perfectly summarize like how why we exist is file where Steam and

what we are trying to do where do we fit in into the whole granos scheme of things I'm going to get into like how we do it meaning like what is the the teex stack and what is it that powers that thing we are talking about and here in the demo we were trying to show you how you could use file verse dap through your safe account it could be either using the modules or it could be either using the safe apps uh ecosystem that's there right so I'm going to explain the T list track bear with me no slides so you'll have to work with me right so there are three components that are there uh the first component is the client meaning the website second component that we have is

the Smart contract and third component that we have are the nodes actually uh the website is a statically built website which we pin on RV or ipfs uh the smart contract is the Smart contract that's hosted on the chain like it is for example a piece of soft piece of code that's running uh natively on that and then third thing we have is the nodes so what these nodes help us is uh like in multiple ways some places they help us is store things some places they help us token gate things some places they help us uh coordinate message passing systems that we have built right and all of these nodes are open- sourced on our repo so you can go ahead and run them as well if you want to uh set up

file words from scratch for yourself you using these nodes right now uh the the interesting part about our architecture is not just the basically the three components uh what we use is also something called uans ukan is user control authorization network uh what does that mean it means these are jws that are generated client side and then used by servers for giving permissions or allowing someone to do something on that particular node uh depending on what permission smart contract has has granted to that person that is signing the tokens okay and we also have ENT and encrypted keys that are stored in the on the client and then

everything happens like without even needing any sort of server interaction with us meaning uh our front end talks to the smart contract and then smart contracts stores things uh for us there is a the reason why we are different uh from any other services that you might have used is uh like two parts right first is that we are not using servers to coordinate amongst the clients today whenever you're using any app what you do usually is you talk to a server and that server allows you to either do something with that thing or not allows you to do something with that thing right uh it can be a website or anything that you're interacting with Facebook Instagram or

any of those things so that is the server client architecture but instead of using that we're going with like client uh like we everyone that is helping us coordinate is a client actually and we use servers to facilitate those connection amongst those clients if you want to get more understanding of it I can share the slides after the uh talk and the reason why this architecture is interesting there are there are few challenges that come with this new architecture that I'm talking about like client client architecture instead of using server client architecture uh the three things are like difficulty of building uh the right level like how do you have the good decentralization with good ux right

whenever you are going after decentralization in your stack or onto your website or anything like that the biggest problem that happens is the speed you actually trading speed with decentralization if you involve more people to come to a consensus they need more time right so that is a big problem that we are trying to solve the it's a tug-of war between like what parts can we decentralize and what parts we can't right uh with respect to the ux into the picture and uh the other thing is like how today whatever collaboration infrastructure that we have meaning like difficulty in ex uh extending the uh what yeah difficulty in extending the PE peer-to-peer

infrastructure so today whatever uh like services for example crdts and all the servers realtime collaboration infrastructure that you see is more inclined towards there being a server and all the clients talking to it with respect to the permissions and everything else right but in our case that's not the thing so we need to work on an RTC infrastructure that can work with the clients instead of just having a server that's coordinating amongst those clients right so that's one of the problems that we are trying to solve uh our entire all the services that we are using like those are per to-peer services are ENT to and encrypted and that's the reason why we can be decentralized more decentralized than a

normal server right and uh yeah the final thing is that local first is the next iteration of file ver meaning uh because of our node type architecture or the way that we have implemented these nodes uh you can actually run those nodes on your local system and then connect File versus portal with it without needing to interact with any of our services even the domain names you won't be needing them uh if you are using file West Portal in the next iteration uh so yeah in that the big question is how do you protect privacy and maintain the high availability because whenever you are hosting something on the local uh you uh like how do you make sure that that thing is available whenever the

person needs uh I would now I think that's it uh any further questions that you have feel free to ping me and I'll share the slides because they have more details than what I explain yes thank you very much I'll finish together all right right so we will take questions um if anyone has a question if you could just signify by raising your hands and the microphone will come to you yes uh the gentleman in front Okay I can come closer and listen uh no sorry just one second

there's a question at the back oh uh can you integrate file words to adap and have some kind of private uh collaboration workspace that you can share with other people uh yes so the way that we are doing like the way that we have integrated uh file verse to the safe apps is by using uh like uh I think iframe type architecture we just we have just created it as a safe app same thing can be done and you can integrate the entire uh like website into your uh dap if you want and that would work out of the box if you follow the uh protocol of for example giving it right access related to the wallets giving it all the permissions related to the signatures

and things like that so yes you can okay um the can m in front thank you uh Kudos on the gitcoin grants I've been seeing you up in the charts um basically do you have any plans to treat self- sovereignity of the data and if so uh would you plan also to bring some computation some Access Control some monetization and so on and also uh ipfs is pretty well-known standard for uh content storage do you do you see that being useful for you or

do you plan to integrate or you think that this trustless collaboration system does not necessarily require this standard yeah uh great questions great bunch of uh questions so yes there is already ipfs for Content addressing and storage uh on fvs but we like to give uh our users the option to do it locally do it with r weave not even go through file verse if they want to pin their files uh basically you know there is a default option not to overwhelm basic users but for those really care about uh their privacy or not being reliant on any uh any intermediary you can do that

yourself computation great question it's something that is uh going to come uh it's something where the space is not necessarily very mature yet uh but there are some very interesting uh projects that are working on this issue we're trying to help them out as well uh so that it can fit our specific use case um uh computation you said ipfs uh what else I mean the access control self sovereignity over the data yeah uh for Access Control right now we're um we're basing most of our um our architecture around the smart contract uh it helps us do the access control and

ensuring that uh this process does not break any um uh uh cryptographic assumptions in the interactions between people we use uh something that we call Authority delegation so we're using something from the I think it's the fishing team uh which is called the ukan which is a user control authorization networks and it's an amazing piece of technology it allows us to without break breaking into an encryption give uh temporary or permanent access uh from someone to someone else without necessary sharing uh private keys so this is very cool and you know you have

a whole new world of peer-to-peer interactions that opens up to you uh when you start using those things thank you thanks all right um in the absence of any further question um any more questions please let put our hands together for VJ and Andreas um thank you very much