From Panopticon to Autonomy: Privacy as d/acc for Individual Sovereignty

Transcript

[music] [applause] Hi everybody. Um, thank you for the introduction. Uh, yes. So, my name is Seth. I am the CEO and co-founder of the Aztec Network. We are a privacy preserving lady for Ethereum. Um, and today I want to talk about uh a bit a bit off the beaten track instead of the shipping aspect which is normally what I do for my day job these days. I want to talk more generally about privacy technology and how it's um can be

utilized within webspree not just to deliver like meaningful value and useful activities but also in my opinion >> um I feel like privacy is a essential value of blockchain in general uh and is necessary to create what I would call a spiritual revival of blockchain and I want to talk a little bit about what that is and why that is. So the years, you know, we're in 2025. Blockchain has been around for a long time now. Ethereum is almost 10 years old. Uh or is it 10 years? I can't remember. I'm old. Um what is blockchain cannon? So by canon, I mean what are what are the the shared myths um the stories and the frameworks that people

in this community use to understand the world and drive change. Um to give an example uh if I you know if we if I say Silicon Valley technologist um that that kind of like an image of someone that shared a necessities so what is what is that image for for blockchain um and to ask that question about what it is in 2025 let's go back to what it used to be so back to you know 2008 with Bitcoin 2015 with Ethereum what are the what are the original values in tenants where 1 because it's very distant to what we have today. You know, it was much it was very um anarchist code. It was quite aggressively anti- athoritarian, but

more generally as the authority, the original goal of Bitcoin was to create an alternative um means of payment. It was it was to create a form of money which directly contested fiat issued by nation states. Uh and then you had um people using Bitcoin to as payment networks for platforms like the Silk Road which uh was a very spicy website uh particularly in Singapore. I'm not going to claim that this was a legitimate website. Um but it but it speaks to the values of some of the people that live as and and honestly extremism.

Um you had things like the Dow for a sense where there were these very grand ambitious goals of you know creating these decentralized organizations that were acting like companies um or like investment funds but where individuals boarding was quite themselves as individuals. And you had organizations like cookies which use bitcoin um as kind of a polyonomous donation system uh and to to uh to enable information be leaked and shared outside of you know sensitive organizations. Um and now if you now let's go back flash forward to today and things are very different.

you know, uh, Bitcoin is not an alternate of of payment, uh, although it did succeed as a form of digital nom, but the modern, uh, trends that we're seeing in blockchain today are much more around things like the institutionalization of blockchain where you have entities like the London Stock Exchange um, creating uh, this digital market. have uh last year um you had here only only uh only NASDAQ you had um uh Ethereum uh ETF being approved uh there's much more focus on emphasis on infrastructure layers uh and honestly on pure technology instead of instead of uh designs uh for example you know um my ticket

community is very much they uh you know with the so much focus on the zik the CPA mat has been a huge narrative but what is it four as in ZK is just the tool in the first country is just the tool and sometimes the desired outcomes get get lost in many ways. Um you have stable coins as a four years piss where stable coins as an idea didn't exist you know in 2015 um and you the original stable coins were fully decentralized things like make it a where the idea is you collateralize a stable coin based off of uh decentralized crypto assets that's largely gone away and now you have um centralized coins where effectively you sort of proxies treasuries >> and that's a core using Ethereum

>> and you generally have more institutional cons to social based um you know uh enter quest coming in and utilizing blockchain institutions coming in uh is now very popular to um N tokens effectively N tokens on traditional stock exchanges by forming reverse lesson. Uh so the overall revenue universe for liquidity on lchains today is massive compared to what it was in 2015 and certainly I imagine far beyond the the the expectations of those original pioneers people like having uh but I would argue that we've lost something in our in our journey. Um and uh I think this might particularly resonate after the de the act of it. Um

because this is all because I feel like blockchain has two core promises. It promises to be a more efficient form of money but it also promises to be a more efficient of social organization of um allowing individuals to coordinate together to collaboratively um work on shared projects and shared ideas. this isn't what the D was originally trying to do and that social organization like that's part of what like the act is um is a spiritually successful but I would argue it's also the the party the the the blockchain proposition that has um most fails to materialize and my hypothesis is that that the the very explicit and permanent

failure of doubts to really become meaningful entities is causing a slow and spiriously death of what And it's changing the culture of blockchain in a way which is very damaging for the industry because if blockchain only is a more efficient form of money that's valuable. It's lucrative but it does not inspire generations upon generations of innovators and builders of startups who come into and dedicate their lives to creating radical change. Um technology is downstream driven culture and without this social utilization for us blockchain's culture in my opinion space and internet and whilst blockchain will

always be a useful technology it won't be transformation and so my question and my thoughts are how do we how do we um move into the future as in I don't think it's good to be react and say oh the original values better well they they kind of weren't because they weren't scaled um and also Some of it was a spirit of what I um but I think there needs to be some synthesis of what used to be and what 2 is and I'm a very broken rep. I think that the missing release of privacy the original tenants of web augmented fails because of a lack of privacy. They scale because of a lack of privacy. The current use

cases of web 3 are are restricted to be what they are because of a lack of privacy. Without privacy, you can't have a decentralization centralized >> because if you think about voting shame with a token, how do you assume who has that token? Either you use um and oligarchy effectively multi or you use butoracy whoever buys in those token persons. These are the terrible things happen. What you need is the ability to identify who the stakeholders of your organization really are, which requires things like private votes without anything. ended up requires understanding having having oracles providing information from web two from the real world into web 3 trusted so

that smart contracts and the people using them can uh have an understanding of again rest of what's happening outside of the outside of the smart contract hub and this again requires privacy and I'm talking about things like email I think the future is uh going to be uh going to um be had to think it is the fact that you have institutions pan enterpris coming to blockchain using its technology to hack value that um and I think this can be a very good thing but uh if compliance kits are required with the real world in my opinion they need to be be compatible with decentralization you need to be able to prove what you're doing if you like not to pass us but to be smart

contra um to centralize that again requires privacy uh that enables real world assets that are pastoral and defense as well. Imagine having something else by having actual financial credit or you know bonus whatever like um within that framework that would be very useful and small of a tree. Um so anyway I'm running out of time now. So in my opinion seem like that's what we've been trying to build with aspect.

Um and by privacy I mean fully permissionless decentralized privacy. Anyone per contract on ASIC anyone deploy smart contract to Aztec. Anyone can send transaction to ASC. Um but you still have ability the ability to uh have private states. You can have encrypted state trees in Aztec where nobody knows who you are. Nobody knows what spot contract you're transacting with. Nobody knows the data that you want. Um and in my opinion this is um what's missing from blockchain is what leads to uh really experience technology make it big and cause experience like uh anyway I'm out of time now so that's that's me uh I'm from Aztec we are hopefully launching I next year fingers crossed thank you for listening

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