The power of porting user data through Sign In With Ethereum

Transcript

[Music] you're good to go okay hey this is a good audience uh for this time in the morning after some heavy partying so uh morning I'm chip Malek I'm an author of a couple of books uh an investigative former investigative journalist for the guardian and now uh the founder of pool for the last couple of years so um I've seen a few people do this which has changed the title of the talk so um I'm still going to talk about porting data and signing in with ethereum but I want to change the framing of that talk to this um what's web3 without the speculation

what's web3 without the speculation so slightly different but we will get into those other topics I want to kick off by asking a very simple question and as the morning session and we've all been partying hard last night yes putting hard no no so boring okay okay all right well I wasn't also putting hard I went to bed at 9 30. UM despite that I'm gonna start by asking something tough um if you couldn't get rich off of it if you couldn't get rich of it what existing products in crypto would significant numbers of people use if you couldn't get rich off of it what existing products in crypto with significant numbers of people you

so let me break that down and then I'm going to ask the audience so I use Uber Google Docs Twitter Gmail Spotify Netflix PayPal calendly slack iTunes I use all of these products without any expectation of becoming a millionaire some I love others I don't I hate iTunes for example but I still use it every day it's really annoying I give most of them money or even transact with third parties through them like with Uber or deliveroo or PayPal but again I don't expect to get rich so what about web 3 what about web3 I've been in the space since 2016. I started off by using coinbase to purchase eth for nine dollars one eth for nine dollars I wish

I bought maybe five um then rapidly moved to 10x margin trading uh with xrp on poloniex uh those are my true djend days I set up metamask account I loved it I worked with uh for two web uh three companies and I once also had to hide Gavin wood in my hotel bathroom that's a true story um so I'm no crypto header right I love uni Swap and metamask uh though I know people got their teeth about metamask I don't know why I love it I love it it's great and I Marvel at Uni Swap and RV's technical uh brilliant and ux accomplishments I use all of them but I use them to trade tokens

and I trade tokens so I can increase my wealth though that often doesn't work out for me so well so again what would I just use for for the utility not ultimately to get rich so you can ask the audience any ideas I've got one I've been told of one thing I've asked this question to about 30 people at this conference beforehand the last couple of months had one I think really solid answer any answers from the audience ens was another maybe answer but I think that's like a little kind of status symbol on top of the other stuff that you do with everything else sorry Makoto and Nick and the rest of the team I have any as I love you guys but yeah I didn't

think that qualified in my view I prefer ipf interesting okay I'm going to come on to that um but but maybe yes okay I had stable okay go on because you like shouted out before go ahead what would be your answer live live here of course of course it's actually being used okay so there's a couple of things here that's good that's better there's more answers that I've had in the last three months from people asking the wrong people it should clearly be here in this audience more often uh stable coins International transfers there are a few things there are a few things but given a kind of one trillion dollar uh market cap currently if I believe uh from right or three

trillion dollars at the peak is that really good enough is that really great is that really good enough right uh tens of billions in funding and yet yet most of it seems to be based on speculation and sometimes that gets pretty embarrassing if you talk to other people in the outside world you all know how web3's reputation has changed in the last few years from up to down um so we need to go back to basics always go back to basics what can crypto offer the world in terms of product utility apart from speculation what does web 3's technology do so well dot web 2 just can't compete aside from speculation what is something

that the ethereum community can give the world that is 10x better than web 2. we really need answers after a lot of thinking this is at least what we the pool team came up with uh one web three is impeccable impeccable at self-custody of assets uh it's ipfs for example but that can be more than just money and more than just jpegs what about turning data into a currency for example it's also good though not brilliant yet at peer-to-peer or disintermediate connections that's your life peer uh I guess in a sense right uh at scale specifically one to one or many to one uh when you've jumped through the hurdles web3 is actually pretty

convenient in that way and finally smart contracts programmable distribution of assets allows for new business models programming values ownership and value distribution in new forms not just the Ico Kickback I don't know if anyone knows Kickbacks one of my favorite projects that's shimokoto from ens that's the two crossovers see that guy's really smart um again great for uh events and and changing that business model around event attendance uh uni swap is itself a very new business model in that sense I think that's also why it's so exciting I've added in feelings emotion sentiments at the bottom associated with all of these three because I think it's important just kind of you know allow

people to communicate these Concepts more widely um maybe not the best but you know self-consciously it's mine uh peer-to-peer connections I hold the power of communications there's no one in the middle of that and finally Wonder uh and explore and new Futures in terms of new business models it could get people excited out there it really does so we've tried for the last six months after heavy pivot to build something that can draw upon all three of these things not perhaps all at once and we're being pretty light if I put my hands up in terms of what we're deploying uh in terms of web3 tech we really want to be laser focused on our members and our customers needs and it's been an interesting Balancing Act uh but

the challenge for us is can we create a product that plays to web three strengths about as I've outlined there and but also can get absolutely widespread traction but whose success isn't in any way predicated on plugging into the speculative aspects and the speculative economy that web 3 has built so successfully I like it all of it um sorry love it I hate it but perhaps this tweet uh sums up a lot of what we're doing and I don't personally know Camus uh but he says I want a web 3 super app I want to control my data money ID Digital Life I want to be a stakeholder in my own economic

digital sovereignty new business models self-custody peer-to-peer if you want or control convenience value um so this is what we've built it's being released in October as a browser plugin and an iOS mobile app and it's called pocket obviously lots of people will come up with their own ideas around those three things and lots of people already have but this is just what we've built what does it do what does it do there's an app that allows people to trade their data for rewards directly with Brands and it gives you insights into all of your data that you'll be able easily able to port and for example

plug into chat gpt's code interpreter consent for trading that data is controlled by a public private key that is also controls and ethereum eoa so what is uh what data does pocket retrieve and handle it joins a user's browsing and banking data with a single ID again that's your eoa address helps you remain pseudonymous and turns that data into interest profiles which can be shared by the pocket member in a few clicks we think pocket will bring together those three elements self-custody peer-to-peer connection and login and new business models pretty well some of those elements like the peer-to-peer

connections won't be there at first because they require scale and network effects others Mo overt crypto elements like the wallet we'll bring in later next year and users will be able to switch that on or keep it off whatever they want to do it'll be their choice so let's go through those three elements and how they apply to pocket start with self custody I like this quote I totally ripped it off from Lane retic's talk on Tuesday everyone can create money the problem is to get it accepted that's uh Hyman Minsky The Economist it's true of money but it's also true of data for example everyone can create data and we actually do all day and

every day the problem if you want to have any external value is getting accepted by others this is actually what Tim berners-lee is working on right now a Data Vault with his solid project but it's facing massive issues with adoption the foundational questions from others tend to be what data what can you do with it how do you integrate it into our needs how do you get consent why would people want to store and trade that data in the first place and at the end of the day it's very deflating it's really deflating for users when you say oh look you can self-custody their data but then there's no utility associated with that custody

it just becomes a fancy and very unnecessary storage unit uh so that's why we've enabled pocket members to trade their personal insights not the raw data directly with Brands if they want to in fact yesterday we just signed a partnership with the times the times of London uh for pocket members to do just this we're putting the value of that data to work by ensuring it's accepted if the private key uh holds and the private key will hold the contents right the signature using a private key will deliver that consent uh members um uh our CTO Conor Deegan to remind me that we don't actually need a public

private key pairs attached to a blockchain he's right of course lots of web 2 apps have encryption but put them putting them on a public blockchain makes the system accountable and enables far more use cases for us so it's sort of a no-brainer we also to answer your ipfs question or Point tried really hard to store and retrieve that data in ipfs Via ceramic and make this in a sense perfect self-custody or even do it on device but in short they've been massive issues with all of those implementations uh mostly around latency and and actually projected costs if you can't work out those two things then it gets really

really hard to deliver these systems properly but in short there have been a massive issues yeah with all of those implementations uh so we now store those profiles ourselves on ndl AWS which is a real shame but it's a start again trying to ensure that we actually deliver utility rather than just saying right let's just keep using web3 Tech until it it you know we end up with zero adoption because this you know app is not usable um so uh even so we think we're giving individuals control verging on genuine self-custody of data that can be traded and traded widely which is why it's 10x better than web 2.

so what about P2P connections and I think this is the uh most interesting part for pocket uh one of my interesting one of my favorite applications in crypto is just connecting my wallet with to UNI swap via Ave or Ave sorry it feels really magic it feels really empowering and it's incredibly convenient I don't know who here also felt that when they first started doing that right just kind of connecting into uni swap connecting into Ave and feeling that connection um okay we're coming up to time but this is our North Star as well which is sign in with pocket uh SSO is one of the most user-friendly ways to ensure that login uh why shouldn't in a sense see we be

the protocol we use to replace uh auth zero uh or zero or oauth and recreate a new feature of SSO stuff is really hard to get adopted but big Commerce Brands and Publishers aren't just going to install SSO outside of the oauth stack so why do it in this case from that perspective it's specifically to get gives users the opportunity to share and connect much more without all the forms you know the required form filling and that for them leads to much higher cart conversion uh much better uh brand connection and uh an account formation for Brands all of which is incredibly important as cookies start to go uh final thing new business models I'm

running out of time I've got a minute left I've got less than a minute left oh God when once you bet in web 3 there's so much you can do and start experimenting with that's what we've Gonna be heading out into so for pocket that could mean seamless micropayments to paper article for example hyper personalized soul-bound discount tokens and token gated access through for example Shopify and also finally a pretty good verification for humans pgv if you want because the banks in this case when people connect their bank accounts they've already been verified as humans by them and of course we've already got data trading so we don't have time for questions I don't think but thank you very much that was a bit

of a a race through all of that thanks a lot [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you