Privacy on Ethereum

Transcript

[music] Welcome to Dev Connect special in-person podcast with Ethereum cat herders. I am Puja Ranjan and super excited to meet so many developers right here in Argentina. But for people who could not make it to Argentina, don't worry, we have got you covered. In this special podcast episode, we [music] are going to talk to developers who are building one-of-a-kind solution to many problems. Those are already existing and they are helping us with their solutions. Earlier this year, we had recorded an episode on privacy pool with Nathaniel Fry on [music] Oxbow project. For people who

aren't familiar with Oxbow, it's a privacy project that is going to help many users learn and may be able to use freely crypto in the space. To get more details of that, we would highly recommend to go check out episode 24 on ECH Institute YouTube. But to continue this conversation here today in Dev Connect, I am joined by Mike [music] McCob, the product lead at Oxbow. Welcome Mike. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> Thank you, Mike, for taking our time and joining us here. I know today is the first day and people are so busy to check out so many things, but you try to take out time and be with us. So I'm so thankful to you.

>> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. >> By the way, I learned that you have been part of European Decentralization Institute and continuing the work of digital sovereignty over there. So we would love to learn more about it, but maybe we can kick off with your brief introduction and uh the project that you are currently engaged in Ethereum ecosystem. >> Yeah, that sounds good. So hey everyone, I'm Mike McCabe. I'm currently the product lead at Oxbow. At Oxbow, we build privacy solutions such as privacy pools as well as compliance tooling. The goal of Oxbow is to make privacy the default on Ethereum, especially for things like payments. Besides that, I'm also part of the European

Decentralization Institute. uh we are a think tank where we bring together policy makers, institutions, startups to essentially collaborate and help uh Europe gain some speed in the tech race. >> That is very interesting. That means you are not only just building one product but also enabling many other infrastructure builder around the ecosystem to come up with new projects. So from your perspective, what it is like building new infrastructure for this brilliant ecosystem that we have here today? Yeah, I mean Ethereum is always evolving and we have to evolve very rapidly because there's a lot of competition. I've been very impressed with what we've achieved so far, but I think things can definitely get better.

I think privacy in particular is one topic where we still have a lot of a long way to go. Privacy is of course uh very important, especially if we actually want to move the economy on chain. This is something I've been working hard towards for a long time now. And yeah, I think we're making good progress, especially the Kohaku wallet demo that was uh done yesterday at the Cippher Punk Congress. I think that's going to mark a major milestone and um yeah, I'm excited to see that space specifically continue and um Ethereum in general.

>> That's brilliant. And you mentioned about the wallet expo that was there. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts and perspective around the proposals those are coming up in Ethereum space to make these wallets more enabled and maybe more usable. Do you have any particular EIPs or ERC's in mind that you might want to talk a little bit more about? >> Yeah, I could think of one. This was actually a recent EIP proposal. It's uh 7503 if I'm not mistaken. This actually uh enables the burning of Ethereum >> and also the reminting of it. So essentially what it does is users can send Ethereum to a specific burn address and then later on remint that Ethereum to a fresh address. And so that would

essentially enable privacy on the base layer of Ethereum. And I think it really kind of highlights how important privacy is in the space currently, how people are thinking about it. And yeah, it's exciting to see it being brought up in these kind of EIP proposals. And um yeah, I'm excited to see the outcome of it. >> That's right. Like uh it sounds very interesting burning and then trying to remint and giving a full privacy to users transaction. That's cool. We should look forward to that proposal. Maybe in upcoming uh days we can have conversation of the author and try to bring more insight of that proposal to our community. Well, getting back to the project zero oxbow, I understand this is called as a response of defy sector in

privacy and regulatory balance. What does it mean? And could you maybe talk a little bit about maybe the challenges and opportunities around building these privacy projects? >> Yes, definitely. I mean, privacy is a tricky topic. We've tried it before and the outcomes have been very mixed. Um I mean obviously specifically referring to Tornado Cache which is still the biggest privacy protocol on Ethereum today. It's been a major success in terms of use case and adoption. However, obviously the developers of it have faced the consequences and that is just something that has I think shocked the entire ecosystem and really highlights how important it is to actually make sure your privacy protocol does comply to to

certain regulations and um does adhere to to certain rules and has certain measures in place that that can enforce this compliance. And so what we do at Oxbow is we build the privacy tooling but at the same time we also build the uh compliance tools that allow us to do this in a way that regulators can also agree with. >> So it's kind of a balanced approach like people are getting what they want as well as regulators are also getting the confidence that everything is in moving in the right direction. That's so cool about this particular project. Well, as ECH Institute, we are also organizing EIP summit and we did talk about one of the proposals, one of the EIP that you

are excited about. I'm trying to understand here like are there any kind of a specific support that you would want to as a team provide to these kind of proposals or if there are any particular experiences uh that you would like to share in order to make our present EIP process better. Any thoughts on that would be welcome. >> It's a good question. I mean obviously we are very much into privacy technology as are the proposers of EIP7503. We are definitely more than keen to review what they have published and provide feedback on it. I think that privacy in the base layer of Ethereum is is a fascinating concept and something that has been discussed for a while. I'm honestly very just eager to see the

process on it and see if it is going to actually be implemented. Yeah. if they would like any support I think we're we're happy to offer it. >> That is good to know. You know when we are getting a proposal and we are getting a backup of any team who are already in the ecosystem and then they support this proposal. It makes our life easier like people who are involved in EAP process. It makes their life easier to support that proposal and move it forward because we know that there is going to be a use case of it. People are going to implement it. So I'm very happy to learn more about it. Well, as a kind of a closing reflection, if we can talk a little bit more about the project and what kind of support that you would expect from this broader ecosystem. I

know the things have changed. You did mention about tornado cash scenarios have changed. What do you think how we as a community can help privacy projects grow more? >> Yeah, I think there's actually already a lot of support being offered. I think especially uh as mentioned before the Kohaku wallet could really be a gamecher. The Ethereum Foundation has worked hard on this for a long time and it's super exciting to see it come to life. It's also great to see that they are featuring multiple privacy protocols in there and that everyone gets their chance to to present themselves. I think it really highlights the power of the ecosystem coming together and showing that we're here to move the entire

industry forward and that we can actually build tools that that do that in a composable way. So I think that we'll see a lot of advances in privacy over the next year. I think that privacy might actually become the default in in wallets and the way we do make payments on chain. I think is very necessary as well because you might not want your entire transaction balance to be public forever. So it's great. It's great. The ecosystem is moving in the right direction and it's just an amazing experience to be a part of it.

>> Yeah, privacy by default. This is a dream. One day we would have it true. Thank you Mike for joining us here today. I know it was a short notice but you did show up. I would love to congratulate you and the entire team of Foxgo working in the privacy domain and providing us a safe and secure space to make use of uh cryptocurrency. Thank you once again. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's been uh great being here.