Ethereum Is Decentralized. Your Access Isn’t.

Transcript

[music] [music] testing. Hi everybody. Hey. Today I'm going to be talking to you about a very important topic. We're going to be talking about building bridges. And if we don't build the right type of bridges, maybe the entire mission of Ethereum will be a failure. Now, I know probably that doesn't make much sense to you that much that much sense to you right now, but by the end of this, you'll be on this mission with me and we'll be building the right kind of bridges. I hope we get some help from you guys.

Ethereum wallet and take a look at your balance. Yes, you too, Boris. Think about it as you're looking at that balance. Did you give up any of the freedoms that like we care so much about in Ethereum? Did you have to ask for anyone's permission to look at that balance? Do you even know if that balance is correct? Is anyone tracking you when you look at that balance? Well, maybe, right? It's just you and Ethereum. That's what you think. It's you have this app. You're doing everything right. You're being your own bank.

Unfortunately, you that is not the case. Does anyone even know what server just sent you that um that number you see on your screen? Raise your hand if you know what server actually sent it to you. We got a couple. We got like four hands up. Yeah, exactly. It's like the the the properties that make Ethereum unique like aren't even getting to you when you open up your phone and you look at that balance. Um Okay. Well, in order to kind of um explain what just happened here, let's take a step back and we are now going to enter story time with Jason.

Now, I want you to imagine that Ethereum is actually a city. And within these within this city, there's thousands of validators and nodes that make sure three key properties are always kept. The first one is censorship resistance. No one can ever stop you from accessing your money. No one can ever block you from accessing applications. The second one is verifiability. You know what you're doing and you can verify that you are actually doing that. An app can't lie to you. Um someone showing you your balance can't lie to you. You can verify it. And the last property you can see is a little under construction there. It's privacy.

Soon you won't have to reveal more information than you actually need to to complete certain actions. Unfortunately, there's a problem. That's that's you right there. You don't live in that city with all of those properties. And in between you and the city, there is an ocean filled with dangers and it's cold. Like you can't you can't swim there. It's too far. Sorry. But a company comes along and builds you a bridge and it's super convenient. you can just walk across this bridge and enter into the Ethereum city. But um to cross this bridge, you actually just have to pass a couple checkpoints. Not not a big deal, right? Let's walk across this bridge.

And there we go. Okay. The first checkpoint that you reach is the ID verification. Um they're checking to see your IP address and they're tracking it. They now know like roughly where you're located and what your like um internet address is. The next checkpoint is the search check. They're they're recording what you're actually asking. They now see what what that you want to know that address XYZ has balance of whatever and they're keeping track of all your asks. The next checkpoint is the trust check.

um instead of actually getting to look at the city's ledger itself when you're when you're asking for your balance, they just hand you a little piece of paper and they say, "Your balance is 1.25E. Trust me, bro." And lastly, we have the access check. They have the final say to see if you can actually enter the city or not. And sometimes they might just decide someone from your country is not allowed to access. Um or maybe they're not even being malicious. Maybe they just have their um their servers hosted on something like Cloudflare and Cloudflare goes down.

So every time that you actually want to enter the city and check your Ethereum balance, you have to pass these four checkpoints which are just actually eroding the three promises that the city offers in the first place. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Jason, cool, but like on Ethereum, we can run our own nodes and I could actually build a boat and I'm going to avoid that checkpoint myself. And yeah, you're right, you can do that. But the reality is you can't do that on your phone and you can't do that from like a laptop that you have in your house. You have to have enough storage in order to do that. You have to make sure that you have enough internet and you have to make sure that you're running the night right node software.

And I want to give a quick history lesson because we've actually seen something similar happen um like this in the past. Now as you can see that city is no longer Ethereum. The city is actually the open web and this is 30 years ago. And they promised the same thing. They said hey we're going to build this amazing ecosystem where um everyone has this freedom and you're not like um trapped by any companies and all you have to do is run your own server and it's not that bad. you just get a computer and make sure it's running, made sure it's sync synced correctly. But nobody wanted to do it. And companies came and they built bridges.

And then over time, some of those bridges got really big and everyone kept taking the same bridges and next thing you know, they put up walled gardens and you couldn't leave and you lost the freedoms that actually make the open web unique in the first place. You're trapped outside. You're looking into the open web city. Um, also it created a massive honeypot for hackers and we see this happening where like um a website might get hacked and you their your data is now on their server and they go and sell it and in Ethereum land this is even worse because that honeypot is actually your value. Okay, now I want to do a quick another experiment. Who in this room actually runs a node in their home? Please put a hand up. Okay, everyone look around and see how many

hands up. Leave your hand up. Yeah. a a a couple people in a room of Ethereum conference nerds. If there's just a couple people in this room, how could we expect anyone else to actually run their own nodes? You could see here that guy, he's on his boat. He's trying he's fighting to be alive to get the values. And like, yeah, everyone else is in the nice cities that little do they know they're they're trapped. Like, we can't make the same mistake. Ethereum was supposed to be a way out, but we're rebuilding the same walled gardens.

But all hope is not is not lost. I have a blueprint to for another way. We could actually build another bridge. And by we, I mean the people in this room. Um, everyone watching online, the people that have contributed to Ethereum over the past decade. Like, let's not sell ourselves short. Over the past decade, we built something really beautiful. This city, this internet of value that has all those properties. The early web would have loved this. And we actually have a powerful tool that they don't have. We have the power of cryptography. We can tap into open standards and coordinate. We can tap into existing decentralized networks.

And we could build this bridge. And the Ethereum Foundation actually has a name for this bridge. It's called a zero option. This bridge actually has no intermediaries along the way. Now, you could tell it's a little windy and it has some stairs, so it might not be as fast as the nice bridge that the company built, but you can get there with no intermediaries. And that's like very a powerful a very powerful thing. Oh, sorry. Uh, but the reality is that that bridge I really killed that uh like reveal, but anyways. Um the reality is that that bridge is actually not built yet for most actions that all actions you take on Ethereum. The reality is that today Ethereum is decentralized but your access isn't.

Now again all hope is not lost. I have a blueprint that I want to share with you guys on how we can go about and build that zero option. First, we map out the path like before we saw on on the path to reading Ethereum and we look at all the intermediaries along the way. Next, we look at all the intermediaries and we say, "What power does it have over you? Can it track you? Can it lie to you? Can it block you?" And then we look at each intermediary and what they can do and consider them an engineering problem. How can we build a solution around them? Um, and we don't have to wait for everything to be finished. Once we kind of engineer a solution around one intermediary, boom, you just gained a little bit of independence. And then once we um engineer a solution around

all of them, we have created the zero option. But there's two important rules. Rule number one, no new gatekeepers. If we're just replacing one company with another potential bottleneck, well, we've kind of defeated the purpose there. And rule number two, it has to stay usable from a normal phone or a normal computer. Um, like we just showed in this room, we are not expert sailor here. This has to be practical for the average person. And it's okay if it takes a little slower, but like waiting hours is not okay. People will just go back to the company bridge.

Okay, so let's actually plan this out here. We're going back to reading your balance. And you can see there's four different gates and they also have different powers over you. The first one is tracking you. The second one is also tracking you, but the first one's your IP. The second one is what you're asking. The third one can lie to you. And the fourth one has the ability to block you. Now, just quickly, I'm going to walk you through how to get around gate number one. Um, and this is the exercise that we're going to do to get around all of these. So, the first one, gate number one, where they're actually tracking your IP and your location. Well, what we could do is actually tap into existing decentralized networks that offer IP privacy. Today, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Uh you may have

heard of tour and yeah we can access that and that's awesome right? Well one quick problem with that is it creates a new potential bottleneck and we certainly don't want that. So one to two one standard that we're building at the Ethereum Foundation is called a nonRPC and it allows different anonymity networks to build a worker so different wallets and apps can easily connect to them and switch between them so you're not locked into tour. And this is live today. If you want to go to an app like privacy pools v2 or a nonwallet, you could test it out with um anonymity networks like tour and nim that's in mixnet and there's more coming too. So boom, we've now set up the first bypass.

You can now get around him and now you've gained independence from your IP. Um and there's now just three more gatekeepers in your way. And we do the same process for the next ones. The search check, we do something called private queries. we actually hide what we're asking. So instead of them knowing that we're looking for the balance of address XYZ, they have no idea what they're giving up and they can still serve you the correct information. It uses Jedi magic aka cryptography called PI and I'm not a cryptographer. If you want to learn more about that, go to Kiw's presentation on Friday. That should be really cool. Um up next and and by the way, that is still in the research phase. It's still being developed. um that is not live on

Ethereum today, but we have the blueprint. Up next is a truth check. Instead of getting that trust me blow bro sticker on your phone or on your computer, you can actually run a like client and say, "Hey, trust me bro sticker is not okay." You have to provide a proof. And that like client can make sure the number they give you is actually accurate. And there's like clients live today. Um you may have heard of Helios or Kibbri. Um and so they just need more adoption. If you're a wallet or an app, like please adopt them. I don't want trust me bro stickers anymore. And next is the assets check. Instead of access check, instead of actually just going to an RPC provider where there's a bottleneck and they can block you, what if you could actually reach the peer-to-peer network and um just the thousands of nodes that already

exist and they can serve you this um and clients are actually actively developing this today. Like I um this one is also not production ready, but um it's teams are working on it and it's demo ready. And once we've bypassed all of the gatekeepers, we have created this zero option, a way that you can actually access read your balance from Ethereum and not go through any intermediaries. Um, some of the pieces are ready today, some are still being built, but we know how to build each and every one of them.

But what I just showed you was just for reading your balance. You can do more on Ethereum. You can write to the chain. You can prove something about yourself. You can delegate your access to your account to something like an AI agent. You can even exit. And I don't have two hours. I'm actually running out of time now. So, we are just going to do a quick another example of bypassing one of the gatekeepers on the right path, the app interface. Now, similarly, when you asked, you looked at your phone and you saw a number on your screen and you weren't actually reading from Ethereum. It was just a server that gave you that number. that actually works the same when you're actually using an application today. When you go and you go to I'm going to say like

Ethereum swap.xyz and you set up the swap, you're not actually getting like the transaction that um there's no way to verify that you're actually like getting the transaction that you think you are. Well, there is, but I'm going to get that in a minute. Um anyways, um you just get like this raw hex code and you sign it and you trust that you're actually doing what you think you're going to do. Um, and so that interface is a massive gatekeeper. They have the ability to lie to you and potentially um not do an action that you think you're doing. And they also can track you and they also have the ability to block you.

Now, let's get around that gate. Oh, by the way, that this is not theoretical, too. This has actually happened to one of the largest exchanges called Bybit. They asked um an application and say, "Hey, I actually want to send some money from one wallet to another. can you send me the hex in order to do that application said sure here you go sign this hex trust me bro like all great just going to another wallet but what they were actually signing was something to send their money to a hacker that interface got hacked and they weren't signing what they thought they were $1.5 billion gone now let's get around this gate first how can we make sure that they don't lie to us well we can do that via something

like clear signing a way for instead of just blind signing those random numbers and letters, you can actually see what you're signing. So if an interface does get hacked or someone tries to lie to you, you can verify, hey, this is not what I want to do. I do not want to send my money to hackers. And um Ledger started this work, but now teams like Sourceify, Treasure, Cipher, and Zama are working alongside others um as well as the Ethereum Foundation to build it. Now that removed the ability to lie, but that remember that's just one like power they have over us. We have to remove all the powers and that includes the privacy aspect and the ability for them to deny you access like to block you or maybe

they're down. And we could do that today with things like decentralized frontends and in the future maybe even local AI where you could ask your AI to build something locally, make sure use clear signing to make sure you're doing what you actually think and then go directly to the chain in order to do that. And there we bypassed the both gates. So now the app interface has no power to lie to us and we could actually get around it. So they can't track us or they can't um block access for us. And so everything I've just walked you through is not a thought experiment. It's actually how a whole new cluster at the Ethereum Foundation works. Early this earlier this year, the EF reorganized and one of the new clusters is called the access layer. And our guiding principle is for everything you

do on Ethereum, a credible way. There needs to be a credible way to do it without an intermediary. And we do exactly what you just saw. We take the different um kind of things that you can do on Ethereum, reading, writing, proving, delegating, and exiting. We map out all the intermediaries along the way. We name the powers that each one has over you. And then we engineer a solution to get around them. And we make sure that these solutions actually get into people's hands. Now, in an earlier version of this talk, I actually walked through more of what we're building. I talked about Kawaku, which can build bring privacy of um privacy private transactions directly into your Ethereum wallet in an easy way. I talked about ZK API, which allows you to pay for

services like AI inference or really anything on the web and actually keep your privacy um while you do that. So, the API is not like revealing your information every single time. Um, I talked about postquantum stealth addresses and postquantum privacy pools. So, we know this zero option bridge can actually be strong forever against quantum, but we don't have two hours. And you guys get the point. Gate by gate, power by power, we take down intermediaries until what's left is you and independence. That zero option. So, here's the thing. The Ethereum Foundation can't build these bridges alone. That in itself would be a bottleneck. We would become one of the

like a central point of failure that I talked about earlier. That's one of those rules that we want to prevent. We need you in this room. We need people watching the live stream. We need everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem to work on this together because Ethereum Foundation can't do this alone. We we need your help. So, if you're a user, please like demand these um services get built into wallets so you actually have the properties that make Ethereum unique. go all the way to users. If you're a builder, build these properties into your um actual applications. If you're a researcher, help us figure out ways to engineer solutions to get around these gatekeepers.

Because here's why this matters so much. People can already feel that there's something wrong with the internet. They can feel that their feeds are making them anxious. They can feel that they're addicted to their phones. They hate that these companies are tracking them and targeting them with ads that are just there to manipulate them. They just don't have the words for why yet. But one day they will. One day they'll look up for that walled garden. One day they'll see the city of Ethereum that offers censorship resistance, verifiability, and privacy. And they will realize this is a way out from these companies that are taking advantage of them. but they'll look out

and they'll see is the zero option bridge ready because like we determined earlier they're not going to be building a boat and swimming across and um right now if we're being honest we are not ready. We have a lot of promises and those promises don't actually reach the users and maybe that's why the future that we always talk about isn't actually here yet. So let's build those bridges now. Let's build them before they're ready. Not for just the experts in the like the expert technical people, but for everyone because the truth is Ethereum is decentralized. Your access isn't yet. Thank you.

[applause] That was amazing. And that gives us exactly five minutes for questions as well. Um the first one that has quite a few uploads is if Ethereum is permissionless, how do we prevent uh wallet providers from having too much control over which addresses users can interact with? >> Yeah, that is a fantastic question. Um and the key is to um go through the three steps that I talked about earlier. So um let's say you're either reading or writing from Ethereum and you have to go through a wallet. map out which intermediaries you go through see and see their power over you um and then determine how we can engineer a solution

around them. So like I walked us through one example with writing where like we integrate network privacy via a nonRPC um we make sure that it's hidden um what you're asking for via PI. We make sure that they can't lie to you because we have light clients running in and you can verify them themselves. and we make sure that um you could actually connect to the peer-to-p peer network itself. So you don't have to rely on an RPC and you can get around that. And we have to do that same exercise for everything you do via a wallet and then we have to make sure that we're actually adopting these technologies.

>> Awesome. Um our next question is can we build reliable malicious address warning systems without centralized providers? And if yes, what challenges must be addressed? If not, then what's stopping us? Um yes we can and like we are something like clear signing is a part of that. Um like when I walked through that by bit example earlier where it was a raw hex string and they had no idea what they were signing and they were actually signing away all of their money 1.5 billion to a hacker. Um we built a solution to that that is decentralized called clear signing. Um we just need people to adopt it. If you're a smart contract developer, please send the um

update the clear signing registry with all of the functions that users can do. So that way users can actually take advantage of it. And then secondly, we need apps to adopt this, wallets to adopt this. So if you're a wallet, integrate clear signing. Um we have the ability to like shine light on um on the negative things that these actors can do. We just have to like accept that we want this reality. >> Awesome. Our next question is about the last mile for users. Um if you know all browsers and app stores currently still belong to gatekeepers, how do we address kind of this last mile of access um where if we solve the bridging um we still have the question of uh we still have the problem with these gatekeepers.

>> Yeah. Um I hope I understand this question right. Um if I didn't find me after and I can answer uh what you intended to ask. Okay. Um, but I think it's a a great question. Um, it's hard to make sure that like everything is fully independent. Like you can always work your way down. Like is is the hardware even fully aligned with me? Vitalic had a a great talk um at the beginning where he he said like unless you can verify actually the hardware is doing what it's doing. Well then that kind of is a potential bottleneck where it's not the um the full zero option. Um, how can we make sure that we're not relying on like the big internet services themselves? Um, like I talked about earlier, if Cloudflare goes down and people lose access to Ethereum, like

that that's a huge bottleneck. Um, so this it's a good question. Um, the zero option extends to like I when I just walked through um those examples, I think you were right to call out that I was just looking at like the Ethereum kind of interaction, but we should think about the entire thing. We should think about the supply chain. We should think about the internet. we should think about the hardware. Um, yeah, great question. >> And then I think we still have time for one more question. So, we're going to go to the next one. Can Ethereum achieve true decentralization without users running their own nodes?

>> Um, so one thing that is really powerful is that is that like not only will we achieve true decentralization without users running their own nodes, we'll achieve decentralization greater than we actually have today. um that world is actually not here. But there's very powerful technologies that can be built into your phones or your or your computers where you won't even know that you're running a node and you'll be contributing to the safety of Ethereum. And that's so powerful and in some ways you'll actually be contributing to the scaling as well. The more users we have running these nodes in the background that they don't even realize, the more scale that we get. So it's it's very powerful that actually the like blue

road map of Ethereum it gets stronger the more people that we have like running these nodes and the beauty is they won't even realize it. So we need to engineer that world and we need to adopt that world but um yeah we will be able to achieve true decentralization. [music]