Privacy Tech in DeFi: It Starts Today

Transcript

We'd like to invite our next speaker, Mr. Edward P. Licker. The floor is yours. Once upon a time, there was privacy. Nature gave it to us and through poor deals and imbalanced decision making, it's being sucked away from us. Today, in the next 20 minutes, which is not a lot of time, I'm going to give you some easy, concrete, and immediate steps that you can take to reclaim your privacy

permanently. So, what is privacy? Privacy is the degree of control you have about the information that other people know about you. If other people know a lot about you, you have a weak position. So the opposite of weakness is strength.

Privacy is strength. Privacy is your power in the social construct. So if you give it away for free, you're doing yourself a bad deal. What is privacy? Private security, private island, private jet. Privacy is valuable. How we measure wealth is actually measured by the level of privacy that you can give yourself.

Privacy is unfathomably valuable. There's actually no limit as to how expensive privacy can be. So think about that. When you use an app for free, when you use an app for free, you are selling privacy which is used to manipulate you. I can control you if I know too much about you. Privacy is your money. If somebody knows how to access your private key or how to access your accounts that store your private key, which happens every day, you lose all your money.

That goes for banks, not only crypto, too. So this is why we have a term called private property in Japanese. There's no word for privacy. So you guys say priv. But I think it'd be really great if you guys had more uh more detail about about this because you know I think it it can be seen as a bit of an individualist construct. 2025 data security equals personal security. If people know too much about you, they have access to your routines, they know where you're going to be, they know what your weakest points are, it's not safe.

So, you might know me through uh your knowledge of the rail gun project. This is financial privacy. Now, I'll just talk a little bit about rail gun. Rail gun is a wallet encryption system. So when you use your Ethereum or your favorite tokens, you can create a rail gun wallet which is called a ZK wallet. This is a big contract series of smart contracts where inside you create your wallet.

It's not a layer two. There's no bridge involved. It's 100% on Ethereum. And when you create your ZK address, no one from the outside world can see what's in it. It is a separate address. It's a whole separate branch of a Merkel tree, but only you can see what's in it and only you can control it. There's no admin key. There's no other person who has access. It's entirely yours. I'll get back onto rail gun a little bit and how you can use that later, but uh I thought since rail gun is written up and down my suit, I should

introduce it for a second. All right, so let's talk about tools. What is the biggest tool that leaks people's information? Usually, it's their web browser. A lot of people have uh things activated on their web browser. They never go into the settings or the privacy settings. You should do that because if not, maybe you don't realize how much is getting leaked from this. When you are dying in the hospital and you call your best friend, what is the first thing you say to them?

This is audience participation. What is the first thing you say to your best friend? Please delete my browser history. It's true because it has a lot of compromising information. And the truth is everybody has something to hide. That's why we wear clothes. That's why we want to live in a single family house. We don't want to share our house with three other random families. That's privacy. We care about that. We care about covering ourselves. We care about putting curtains on our windows. It's important.

So, how do you do this today? Brave browser, right? Brave browser is a browser and it has very very uh comprehensive privacy tools inside it, but you have to activate them. So, when you install Brave browser, make sure you actually go into the settings and turn off uh send user data, right? There's all of these things they try to convince you. Oh, it's just for statistics. Oh, it's just for, you know, this and that. Just turn everything off. It's much easier.

The other one is Libra Wolf, which is a private version of Firefox. I'm not going to talk too much about these, but you can check them out. So, what about wallets, right? Well, you'll be surprised because most wallets are owned by companies. And what do companies do? give you things for free and instead surveil your data and sell that data to other people. Right? So, one option that you have is you can use Brave with Rabby, right? Rabby is an open- source wallet. Brave uh is a privacy focused browser. So, if you use Brave with Rabby, you're you can be pretty safe that you're going to be okay um because Rabby has uh wallet connect. So, you can

use your DeFi with Rabby. So, this is all very DeFi focused, right? I hope you guys like DeFi because you're going to learn a lot about DeFi in a second. So, uh, if you use Brave with Rabbi, Rabbi's open source and you can choose the RPC you use. I'm going to talk about RPC soon because if you don't understand, you're going to need one, right? Second one is Railway Wallet. Now, Railway Wallet actually says we do not take logs. They don't monitor your internet uh activity, your kind of computer you use, what other things you have in your site.

Did you know some browsers and some wallets actually look at your copy and paste clipboard? They can see everything you copied and pasted and they send it back to the company. And guess what? Over a 100,000 people work at Google and Facebook and Microsoft. So everyone who works at those companies can see everything you copied and pasted and looked at. So let's talk about that later, right? Railway wallet, no logs, full privacy. It is a open-source privacy focused wallet. You can use railway wallet. Also railway wallet lets you open a rail gun address. You can create as many rail gun addresses as you want with railway. It costs nothing to open a rail gun address, right? All right. What is an RPC? Aha. A lot of you

already know this, right? If not, please bear with me. But wallets need an Ethereum node to check the balance or do transactions. So, do you run your own Ethereum node? Hands up if you do. Yeah, one person. Wow, that's actually more than I expected. Not many people run their own Ethereum node because it's very, very difficult. So, what do you do? You use something called an RPC. Now, the thing is when you use your wallet, you probably don't know what your RPC is because they don't tell you because the RPC where all of the Ethereum communication goes through, this is your like substitute node, the node that is doing your transactions

because you don't have your own, right? That's what RPC is. So they are monitoring your transactions and taking your IP address and sharing it with all their uh evil friends, right? So oh please ignore the the see that there's like a fox there. I'm not trying to talk about any one particular company. Uh there was like the little villains in the bottom left corner. I'm talking about villains. Okay, great. But yeah, um, your wallet app is secretly putting out everything of yours through the dev's chosen RPC node, right? So, what do you want to do? You want to choose your own RPC. You want to think, you know what, I'm going to find an RPC service that's good

and I'm going to pick them instead. Usually, they cost money. You need to think, do they log IP? If the RPC doesn't say we definitely don't log IP, then they definitely do log your IP. So, you need to make sure that they promise they don't. So, the there's a couple of like companies like one RPC at Alchemy, they run RPC services. I can't recommend them to you right now because you need to check because their policies change all the time. If you're going to use an RPC, you need to check like every few weeks. I know it's a lot of work, but you need to check that they still have a

privacy policy. It can take a long time to read a privacy policy, but it's important, right? Or you could just run your own note. So, how to be private with finance, right? Crypto, Ethereum, fantastic. Ethereum is amazing. Ethereum has so much amazing DeFi applications, right? So, let's look at two private wallets that have DeFi enabled, right? The first is Railway. Railway has DEX swap. So, you can swap uh and do your DeFi trading using Railway. This is a rail gun enabled wallet, right? Secondly, there's a CLI wallet. So, no graphics, only text. Very

good for developers called Terminal. Terminal is a very high security wallet with no graphics. You can type exactly what's happening and learn exactly as it's happening at the time. You can create rail gun addresses with the wallet and you can uh do things like swap and and create liquidity pools and this kind of thing, right? So let's look at terminal. This is what terminal looks like, right? So it is veryformational. It's very hard to make a mistake when you're using terminal. This is security focused, privacy focused. You know exactly what's coming in, what's coming out, right? So on the right you can see this is what happens when you're swapping tokens privately. You know exactly how much is going out. You know

exactly how much is going in, exactly what the gas fee is. This is great for technically minded people, right? Let's look at railway wallet. Railway wallet is a mobile wallet and a desktop wallet. It's fully open source and no lots, right? You can see there's uh railway decks where you can um it interacts with a protocol called Zerox which is a DEX aggregator. So you can uh privately without anybody seeing swap tokens. So let's say you got a coin, let's call it Edwardcoin. I gave you a million Edward coin. My name is Edward by the way.

Let's say you got a million Edward coin and you want to sell it because you decide I want to dump it. Screw Edward. Let's dump Edward coin. Maybe you don't want me to see you dumping the Edward coin. You can make a rail gun address with railway wallet and then you can dump all the Edward coin on railway decks and no one will know it's you because it's a private swap. This is very very handy when you work in DeFi. If you want to make big sales without people noticing with railway, you can also create liquidity pools, add liquidity, remove liquidity. This is all rail gun enabled DeFi. There's a lot of DeFi stuff you can do. You can also um uh so

that's a successful example of a successful swap transaction. Someone's buying rail token uh and uh it's all DEX privately and nobody can see uh who did it from the outside. privacy and anonymity. What else can you do with rail gun? Beefy. You can put uh your money into a uh yieldbearing vault uh privately so nobody knows who that it's you making the money. Um you can add and remove liquidity. This is private finance so no one can see it's you. No one can uh know how much you're doing or what the rest of your balance is. And uh it has the same level of security as Ethereum.

There's no extra validators. There's no extra uh bridges or layer twos, right? So this is all on Ethereum smart contract code. DNS. Now I won't talk for a long time about this, but most people use Google DNS or some other default DNS. If you don't know what DNS is, you will need to look it up after this because I don't have time to explain everything that it is. but it is where your internet traffic is routed from. If you're doing finance and you don't use a private DNS, then everyone can see what time you did a transaction and then just compare it with the blockchain to see what happened at that exact same time and then they know that it was you, right? So, be

careful with DNS. You can use lots of different DNS's. Uh, but um this is just one example. Quad9 is one example of a private DNS that you can use. Um, yeah, if you're using a default DNS that came with your browser, um, then you're going to, uh, uh, have bad time. So, yeah, make sure you choose a private DNS. Mobile phone keyboard. Did you know that the autocorrect on your keyboard goes directly to the company that made the keyboard? So they can read everything that you type and everything that you paste. Yes, today. This is not a dystopian future. This is the dystopian today. But you can fight against it.

Mobile phone keyboard. What kind of keyboard do you have in your phone? Is it the one that your phone came with? Then it's sending everything you type back to the company. And a lot of people work at that company. And not all of those people are good people. So, you're going to need a different mobile phone keyboard. This is one example. Heliboard. Uh there's a lot new of other ones that come out. So, uh you can do a little bit of research, but I'm raising awareness for you. Okay. So, I'm nearly done. So, let's talk about I'm going to actually open up for questions in a second. But yes, privacy helps you protect your earnings. If you lose your privacy, people can take all your money, and they

do all of the time. Private people get hacked less. Private people get robbed less. Private people have better trading. Private people make more money from their investments. It is a fact. This is why a poker player doesn't show you their cards because all of the finance world is a big game of poker. There's a lot you can do to avoid embarrassment and loss today by using better data security. Right?

I don't know about you, but in 2021, I might have bought some NFTts that I am not proud of. So, I'm probably not the only one in the room and I'm not going to tell you what they are and you're never going to find out because I use privacy tools. So, being private with finances today will help you 5 years, 15 years, and 25 years from now. Think about this. When you're applying for a job in 5 years, yeah, sure, they ask you your university, but guess what? They're going to ask you your wallet address, too. What are you going to tell them when you apply to live in an expensive apartment, a nice penthouse?

and they ask you for your wallet address, what are you going to tell them? When you apply for a visa to another country and they ask you for your social media, which they already do, and next year they ask you for your wallet address, what are you going to say when things are all paid in crypto? If you haven't started doing privacy today, then in the future, they're going to know what you were like when you were a uh less experienced person. Let's put it that. So, I'll end it up and hopefully I have a few questions. Put your hands up now if you have a question.

>> The question is what do you think about tour? Uh firstly to good however not necessary if you have the rest of your privacy intact. It it depends what you're up to, but for DeFi, it's not 100% necessary if all of your other privacy is is intact. But yeah, depending on what you do, it is a privacy tool and it's it's useful. Yeah. >> Why do you think so many DeFi size block? Okay, I'm an attorney. I'm a lawyer and I will say a lot of lawyers advise projects to block certain IP addresses

and a lot of time there isn't a wellthoughtout reasoning for it except that they think huh why not so uh the bigger answer there is I'm not sure next question. Yeah. Question. Okay. So, I think we are nearly done. So, I I'll cap it off at this. Let's go back. Check out Rail Gun. Rail gun. Oh, yeah.

A question. Good question. So, Ethereum is the best chain. However, yes, rail gun already is available on Polygon. It's already available on BSC, Binance Smart Chain, and it's on Arbitum, too. So, will it be on other chains? It's up to whoever wants to deploy it on those other chains. Um, and you know, how well that they work within the ecosystem. Rail gun is a uh collection of different smart contracts and ecosystem participants.

For example, broadcasters, people who broadcast your transaction in return for, you know, a small fee, right? Uh there's so many parts of the rail gun ecosystem that work in harmony with each other and uh yeah, the different chains are one of them. Good question. So yeah, rail gun financial privacy, it works. It's been going for four years and it's $130 million in the wallet contracts with about $4 billion going in and out. So the amount of money that goes through becomes your privacy set.

So you are safe knowing that there's a lot of other people uh who use it and you have uh asurances through something called PPOI that there are no hackers or criminals using it too. So that's not the topic of today's uh conversation, but uh let me let you know that there's things to research like PPOI and privacy sets to learn more about rail gun and why it's so popular. So I'm Edward Fricker. Uh I'm an attorney and thanks for talking to me today. And if you want to come and see me after, I'll be right there. Thank you very much.

>> Thank you very much.