Disrupting ownership: towards more scalable societies

Transcript

all right cool good morning yeah good that you all recovered from the party i guess um yeah i'm lucas um from safe maybe you're wondering what's what's safe we used to be called gnosis safe we we're currently going through like a little bit of like an identity crisis uh reason being we spun out of gnosis uh gnosis is now uh solely going to be gnosis chain and we want to kind of prevent this confusion like i'm building on those this what i'm actually building on is no safe no strain labar so yeah the best we could up come up with is just keep out the noses for now

let's see i mean we're techies we're not branding geniuses that's best we could do so yeah that we just run with it um i'm going to talk a bit about ownership um it's an important topic for for web3 and actually a little bit about kind of the past the history of ownership because ownership is really kind of this this important social primitive that we have that really enables us to to transact to interact with each other to coordinate value to really have economies and it's not kind of like this just one type of ownership um this is like a problem that has been with uh human

humans since since since ages this is like 5 000 years ago how people kind of signaled and showed ownership in uh have cattle branding by the way that's also where the term brand is actually coming from from kind of showing this cattle belongs to me i have ownership over this and like every family had their own uh brand which they have burned into the the cattle um but that's how we kind of signaled ownership in the past um and there's kind of like different frameworks you can use to to first kind of define ownership uh to kind of signal to other people uh that you interact with like what do you own uh like who owns uh certain assets whether tangible or intangible but also how

this ownership is then enforced how you can can kind of use it to coordinate so three major frameworks that we use as humans is kind of the the physical ownership so me having kind of physical possession over over thing over an asset and this kind of giving me the rights the titles over this assets um you might think this is kind of a an antique way to to define ownership but unfortunately still today some nation states think that just kind of having physical possession over some some land actually grants you the the ownership and the the the rights for it so it's kind of it's still used by by humans to have

signal ownership and to enforce it just by have the right of the stronger the mightiest right kind of perspective but then there's also kind of like a social way to own things so having social contracts uh with each other kind of a social framework where this really allows me then to not just do bargaining with each other which is kind of what they do when you just rely on physical ownership so i have this asset you have this asset let's just switch but this enables even more uh coordination on value like i can give you something and i know you give it back to me because uh i'm the owner you know i'm the owner and if you wouldn't give it back to me we kind

of have some problem there and like our kind of social contract doesn't work out uh that's also why it's possible for us to uh yeah someone pays for it for someone else's food and next time they pay back kind of this reciprocity of like just having value being defined through kind of social bonds and uh if you kind of conflict with these the the enforcement would be just kind of exclusion from from this like community or from this uh social circle like have the the one ownership which probably most people are thinking of if they they hear about ownership is like the legal aspect or the legal perspective which is like we define whether in whatever form verbally in

inviting the ownership and like how certain titles to different assets are defined and distributed and this is really how yeah as as we as as humans and as society scaled we became more more global we interacted with more people that uh we don't necessarily know who they are or like uh have a social bond with them and that's how we were able to scale by having this framework of like legal ownership uh that that allow us to to interact with people that might be across the country even across the globe and have this certainty that allows us to uh to do transactions to have an economy together so kind of these frameworks became

increasingly trustless and increasingly scalable just as as we as a society did and now we're kind of in this new paradigm and this like digital environment which have puts goes even further it's even more global it's even more fast paced uh there's assets that can be created at the click of a button um like you interact with people you don't even know if they are human or not um so have everything have put to an extreme so yeah kind of we don't know kind of the the party that's on the other side uh especially for us in uh like this this is also the case where have being anon is even like something you you should kind of strive towards um

so yeah we we need some new framework there uh to define ownership at the kind of goes with the time because how so far in a digital environment we defined ownership was have we relied on this legal contract aspect so and this is not really scalable if you kind of do peer-to-peer you don't want to kind of set up a like have a legal framework with everyone you're interacting with if you're doing like uh thousands of like micro transactions per day and like uh interacting with people you don't know who's on the other end so we kind of relied on these intermediaries this this middle man that we just had like a legal relationship with they kind of handled these

transactions between parties uh but this kind of is not native to the internet it's not how the internet is built up to be uh which is really kind of this decentralized peer-to-peer way to to interact with other people and that's where we then came to like smart contracts blockchain a way to define ownership in a way that doesn't rely on like a legal framework or doesn't rely on like the intermediary and by the way these things also aren't mutually exclusive so obviously the they are coexisting and i also think that smart contracts and legal contracts have a way to kind of integrate with each other but they're definitely taking or

filling a hole in this this digital environment and here really the enforcement mechanism is the code uh it's it's how in the end these these contracts are getting executed um and this just is a new way a new kind of ownership framework which is even more trustless and scalable and kind of digital native um so yeah there's a lot of talk about kind of ownership in in web3 and how people are being made from from being a user of a platform to actually be an owner and uh kind of taking back ownership over your data and identities and and assets and i'm a big fan of kind of the narrative of of variant

with kind of this ownership economy and this really being what what makes webfree what's what's this new generation of of the internet um but we do have a problem uh that there's we have all these ways to define these coordination mechanisms in like marketplaces and uh yeah amms and everything and kind of uh define the ownership on that side but on the other side they still have this single private key which is the access to your account which then you do all the transactions with um and this reminds me a little bit of like this kind of physical possession where it's really the

whoever has access to this private key kind of inherits the the rights to to the assets on your account so it's like yeah just taking away someone's car and suddenly being the owner of it which obviously it's the conflict with kind of the legal perspective of it but it's it's kind of how the systems work today so users really have this kind of dilemma here whether they want to yeah take care of the private key management themselves and getting wrecked or whether they want to rely on a custodian and getting wrecked um so that's where we are right now i mean a little bit put to the extreme but

uh we we really need to kind of fix also this side of the equation where these these single private keys should also be replaced by by code and enable more flexible ways to to manage these accounts and that's what really what safe is about most people know safe as a way to do multi-sig meaning i can have multiple keys that control my account i can have threshold i can have my co-founders and myself to kind of be together managing this account but really it's it's so much more because it's essentially a way to to program your account into any kind of access control scheme you want it to be and uh really

fit to your use cases and yeah if you take one thing from from today i would just uh say this should be it that knows this uh safe is much more than just yeah will take some time to get used to this gnosis kind of thing um yeah safe is much more than just multisig that's the tip of the iceberg but there's many more ways how you can program your account whether it's doing uh like token voting that's how what they can do right now by saying a snapshot space should control my safe uh it can be spending limits where you can say you have a multisig but some like party external party internal party

can have a budget every month every week and they don't require the confirmations from other people they can just use assets on your account it can be hybrid custody so you can work together with a custodian and share responsibility to an account to kind of safe keep the assets uh in a hybrid custodial way you can do recovery mechanisms whether that's a social recovery whether that's like a third-party custodian that's acting as a as a recover you can implement hierarchies so you might have different roles within an organization that have different access rights you have uh ways to restrict the the capabilities of your account we can say you're safe it's only

enabled to interact with these types of protocols or it's not allowed to interact with these these addresses that are somehow related to some malicious activity or something like that so you can do all these nice things and that really enables us this kind of programmable way to define your account this enables new ways to coordinate value like constitution dao which kind of emerged uh in a few weeks and they just coordinated a bunch of people together that let's buy this this constitution uh they failed but was a good try um and you kept that that shows you how how this new way to define ownership is much

more scalable and trustless because it was people that didn't knew each other they didn't set up a legal contract how to manage these assets but they just had uh they actually used safe uh as a way to also define uh who has what rights over the assets and they just shared uh this uh yeah shared this this treasury or this this yeah these assets to say we're gonna invest this into the constitution and then it didn't work out and they had other ways to manage these assets a similar thing also happened with ukraine now where overnight group of people came together they coordinated assets invested them in different ways to to support the situation in ukraine not the most recent one is a group of

people trying to buy a dinosaur why not yeah also cool project that's building on safe is prison uh they do uh yeah i mean many nfts just became way too expensive for one person to to afford uh so they won't enable group of people to come together and say let's buy together a crypto punk i couldn't afford it you could afford it let's but together we we could maybe um and yeah they're also using safe to kind of do this coordination and these people again you wouldn't need to know who's on the other party because the the rights over these assets are enforced by code everyone can see them things are clear from from the beginning uh yeah can be

yeah also radical is interesting also built uh on safe uh they allow you to own uh code repositories in a decentralized way uh with some people that might be unknown people online uh but you still wanna uh share the responsibility of like the the code ownership um especially interesting for for daos that wanna uh yeah just kind of say uh own these repositories and then maybe a little bit kind of forward-looking uh what potential safe is still going to unfold um one interesting thing for me is in the nft space where

a single asset might have like many different rights or titles and you don't necessarily want to give away the the asset in order to allow someone to use these titles or you want to have the assets super secure in a very secure setup but you might want to use it on a regular basis to do to get entrance to an event to uh to lock into a game without losing the security that you initially had um so their safe is gonna play a role in like uh allowing to keep your keep your crypto punk secure but still use it for certain activities in a way that you can just delegate these rights to to the parties other to other accounts that are

more easily like a software wallet more easily accessible to you um yeah we're there talking to some teams that are looking to implement that also i mentioned hybrid custody for me a field that has a lot of potential like most users probably in the future they don't want to take care of the full key management themselves they might want to have have the benefits of self-custody so yeah being able to do whatever you want with your assets to not being locked into some platform but they don't necessarily want to have the risks associated with it so you might think of of solutions that have you being the the owner of a safe

but have another third party being able to recover access if you if you lose your keys for example or you have a partnership with an insurance they might say we you can do transactions as you want but if it's a transaction that we didn't agree with we we don't insure it so you can just choose yourself you want to be risk-taking or not and if it's so the insurance always kind of gives the sign off for each transaction kind of like a multi-six or another signature but uh if they say this is something we cannot estimate the risk with uh it's kind of is off unchained proofable that we didn't agree with it um so like there's different

ways how kind of you can play together with external parties and and share responsibility or just have a more sophisticated setup then yeah i mean that's the the last slide already maybe the second takeaway next to safe not being just multisig is that safe is also not just a product we do have a ui that we built as the core team web interface and the mobile app but really what we're after is to build this ecosystem that's leveraging the safe protocol uh our mission is that at some point every every transaction is made from a smart contract account

that's like a long uh vision of like many possible core developers uh that every account on the firm should be a smart contract account uh like account abstraction and such uh and we think that there needs to be someone that's really pushing this in a coordinated way and that's building an ecosystem as there's clearly network effects and like building up this around one shared protocol because there's like developer tooling emerging infrastructure emerging just shared standards emerging and if this is not somehow coordinated this won't probably ever happen and for us to get really get to a more secure and more accessible web free we think

smart contract account adoption is is crucial so we have 30 plus teams that are building on safe right now and this was very organically emerged so we didn't do too much business development or like ecosystem development so far from from our side but that shows already that there's this fight already starting to burn and now it's just for us to kind of keep it going and then to help this team so safe is really an ecosystem where we're supporting other teams we're kind of sparking some fires here and there so if you have some idea how you can leverage this this primitive of like a programmable account comes to to speak

to me if you want to get in touch with any of these teams let me know or yep anything else you can either ask now or after thank you [Applause] hello uh so as a part of this rebranding you know from nazis safe to safe have you also deployed like a new set of smart contracts and if yes like what are the things we can do with safe now which we could not do you know with gnosis safe earlier so no we didn't deploy a new set of

smart contracts um so far and so the rebranding didn't really have an effect in that sense it was really just that there was like some brand confusion around and we are aware that like safe is like the worst thing to do for like search engine optimization and like there's this scrum framework and like there's a lot of issues with it but like yeah what should we do and uh one follow-up question like is uh are safe you know smart contract uh account abstraction compatible you know with this eip 4337 yeah so that there has been like many different ways our counter selection was have proposed in the past uh the newest iteration of the dap we have some internal prototypes and we're kind of exploring uh the ways to

do that um richard i don't know if he's in the back he's probably the the expert to talk to our techlee um yeah but this is definitely something we're keeping an eye on and trying to see how we can fit together with these proposals thank you so while i'm here i'll take advantage of that i'm working on the bls wallet project which is um like i spoke with nurses a little while ago about integrating that because we're looking um at uh yeah four three three seven as well um we're working with them in defining that so the contracts for that are getting audited this was again um you know part of the af project so um yeah i'll continue the conversation was it richard at the back yeah okay i'll reach out again thanks yeah thanks hey man uh love safe i love your work

thanks for what you're doing um so recently you raised quite a bit of funding i was wondering if you were preparing any grants program for people willing to build integrate safe yeah yeah that's good i actually forgot to mention that uh so um yeah i mean that's really the goal we we did raise the the money 100 million not because we want to sustain ourselves for the next 50 years we want to invest this back into the ecosystem this is going to be through like bounties grants maybe also investments we need to kind of set up now the processes and

structures like what can we do how should it work so we'll take some time maybe uh q4 q34 where there's like some uh some more information on that but this is really the goal like we wanna the majority of the funds we raise is going back into the ecosystem thanks alright thank you you