Spritz: Building a Truly Decentralized, Censorship-Resistant and Permissionless Communication App

Transcript

There you go. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Uh my name is Kevin Jones. I am the co-founder of Spritz. I'm also working in the Graphico system. Uh and I've been working in the Ethereum space for about 7 years and very excited to talk to you guys a little bit about a project that I've been working on uh called Spritz. So, this talk is is titled building a decentralized censorship-resistant and permissionless communication app on Ethereum. And uh So, what is Spritz?

Well, Spritz is exactly that. It's the first decentralized truly decentralized video and messaging application built on Ethereum uh with using Ethereum as uh the identity first approach of being able to communicate um in a censorship-resistant way. So, our mission is to restore communications as a fundamental human right by building censorship-resistant decentralized infrastructure that enables anyone or anywhere to communicate privately and directly without centralized servers, surveillance, or gatekeepers.

Um Funny thing is that Spritz was actually born out of an actual problem of censorship. Um it started actually with my wife trying to contact her mother in Russia. My wife is Russian. Um and one of the issues that she had is that pretty much any application that she tried would either completely cut off obviously after um in the in the past couple years and so it was definitely an issue for her to be able to communicate freely. Additionally, uh recently I was in Abu Dhabi for a a conference Solana Breakpoint. Don't judge.

Uh I was there uh and uh we were uh trying to FaceTime with my family and I just could not. And it it come to believe that in uh well, in all the surrounding area of United Arab Emirates, you basically cannot use um video video conferencing services. Then I tried getting on my VPN, and I found out that my VPN was actually blocked as well. Um, so this censorship issue is definitely something that I think if you're not in a place where you experience it or you don't travel, you're not really aware um that it is is a serious problem.

And so again, Spritz was built out of that concept. Um, so the team is me uh and Eugenia. Um, previously I've worked at Engine X. Again, I'm working in the graphic ecosystem. Uh, at Edge and Node, I am um experienced with infrastructure and uh yeah, that's enough about me. So what is the problem? So uh the problem is that there's an estimated uh 29% of the global population, so almost 2.3 billion people that live in countries where essentially VoIP is restricted or censored in some way. It's a lot of people. Um, on top of that, uh a lot of enterprises have uh limited options for communication platforms, especially decentralized communication. Uh there are some things like XMPP and Logos

messaging, which I'll talk about, which actually Spritz is built on, which help with that, but there is not a platform that makes it easy for enterprises to adopt these decentralized solutions. Uh they have to kind of build it from scratch. So what we aim to do, and I'll focus on the individual side, is Spritz shot is this decentralized messaging platform for video and for um uh messaging on built on Ethereum first. Um, conversations are encrypted end-to-end with uh your um uh wallet essentially. And um you're using your wallet as an identity. So um this also helps you integrate things like uh using uh Spritz to do financial transactions inside of the chat as well.

Uh and we'll get to that in a little bit. So the key components how it's built, uh essentially we're using Logos messaging for all of the messaging features. So, you can do uh peer-to-peer messaging, you can create private group chats, you can also do more public group chats on the on Logos. For people that don't know Logos, Logos is a messaging decentralized messaging system that uses this concept of like light nodes and routing. So, Spritz Chat itself, when you load Spritz Chat, it is a light node on the Logos network and so you're instantly connected on your device to and you're routing your transactions in a private way.

Uh we're also using obviously Web3 authentication, so we support sign in with Ethereum and sign in with Solana. And so in this method, you know, you do own your identity, you own the login, and all the code is open source. We also have Xero2 enabled in some context, so you can also link your calendar to Spritz. And the the benefit there is you can essentially use it similar to like Calendly for like setting up meetings. And you can do paid meetings through via Xero2, which is a really cool feature. And we also support video conferencing and audio conferencing through decentralized WebRTC as well. So, when you connect and you want to connect to another user, another Ethereum user,

you we're routing that that traffic again through a decentralized network called Huddle01. So yeah, you a user can come in sign sign in with their wallet, ENS, or SNS, sign in with Ethereum, sign in with Solana. They can also use something like Alien ID or World ID. So, we have that direct integration so you can log in and connect. And this is interesting because it opens up a use case where maybe in the future we can do um some kind of like proof of human so that you know that you're chatting with someone that it hasn't you know, it's not a it's not a bot essentially.

We also support email login for people that don't necessarily know how to use Web3, but they want to talk to their son that is an ethereum maxi, uh they can just log in with email and we'll create a account for them. Uh one of the coolest things I think about Spritz is we also support passkeys. We're using what's called web off n, which is a special package that lets you sign with a passkey uh and create uh an ethereum account just by using your face ID or uh whatever mechanism that your phone supports for uh passkeys. Then uh users can send messages, make calls um join chat channels, do live streamings as well. We support live streaming um which is a really cool feature uh using live peer. So, we have a direct integration with live peer, so you can

stream similar you would do with like Instagram or Facebook live or something like that. You can add friends. Uh we also have this cool little thing called pixel art, which is fun. You can make these little pixel arts and send them in chat. Uh just a fun little thing. And uh we also have a lot of other features for chat that differentiate us because we're using blockchain native kind of concepts, uh we have built-in web 3 wallets, built-in vaults, uh social wallets is you often hear Vitalik talk about social wallets. We bring that to the table. Um we also support AI features that are coming soon. It's currently in beta, but essentially like for ETHDenver, we had a Buffy the Buffericorn AI agent that was sitting inside of a group chat that was hosted on a decentralized network where

people could query and talk to it in a decentralized way, which is super cool. And uh we also support uh again scheduled sessions. So, similar to like Calendly, you can essentially use Spritz as this kind of like all-in-one communication tool. Um the native AI chat feature is again, this is like uh just a screenshot from the ETHDenver community chat. You can see here you can just literally just tag an AI agent inside of the chat. Uh we're going to be opening this up probably eventually uh soon. We're just trying to figure out exactly what the model looks like for supporting the LM inference, but essentially you'll be able to create your own AI agent, uh put it into a chat room, and train it on you know people chatting in your community and like basically gathering

that stuff. One of the integrations we're looking at is maybe using Bonfires if you guys have heard of Bonfires which is basically a product that I've decided world we're eventually hoping to to integrate that so you can basically do some kind of AI agent stuff inside of chat rooms. This is probably the coolest feature I again that I think is is we have Spritz smart wallets which are powered by safe and the cool thing is again you can sign with a passkey so if you sign in with a EOA or a passkey we can create a Spritz wallet for you inside of the chat application and then we have the built-in account abstraction so we sponsor all of the gas on layer twos that we support. Um we also are using the graphs token API

for all of the data that we're using inside of that so we support pretty much all the networks that the graphs token API supports. And then we also have the vaults which again Vitalik often talks about this concept of like being able to have a multi-sig with friends and family we do support that as well so you can come in here you can create a social vault you can literally just tag your friends that are in there so you can tag an ENS name you can tag a Spritz username you can put in an ethereum address and you can build a multi-sig and deploy it all through the UI and again that is also sponsored gas on all layer twos as well.

We also just recently added ENS subnames so now if you have it let's say you bring up app.spritz.chat you create a passkey you claim a username it's going to create an ethereum wallet for you under the hood and then you're just going to need to come in here put in your username and you'll instantly have an ENS name subname so you would have like you know my name.spritz.eth and you can again just claim it through the the normal flow and then you get this kind of like resolver, and you can save that. So, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

I I didn't want to take up too much time. I know we're we're running over, but I'm definitely I'll I'll open to answer any questions about the platform that you might have. Any questions? Thank you. Thank you so much. Want someone back there? Yep. Oh, here's a mic. Yeah, well, I'll have a strong voice. Uh well, just curious about where you came from with the name Spritz, because I I like it. And also obviously the the the the the protocol in general it's it's really nice and it's really useful nowadays. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, the name was uh it's it's it's silly, but it's like Aperol Spritzes. Like it's kind of a fun little summer feeling thing, and like we were literally just like talking like me and my wife, and she's like, "Oh, you like Spritzes are

kind of a fun name." And it's fun to say, you know, it's like a It's hard to find a good name for a product actually, and Spritz just kind of runs rolls off the tongue. It's very memorable. Uh and who doesn't like Aperol Spritzes? You want to go on? Um yeah, and I appreciate the comment. Thank you. I have also I have also a question. Uh-huh. Um hello, it's Wolfgang. Hi, it's Wolfgang. I see that one of your USPs is actually the chat, the video chat. So, you had to still build the whole infrastructure for wallet and all this onboarding stuff on it, because that's the internet of the future, right? Web3.

So, we solved do it did it exactly the same. But, my question to you is, are you also like your chat features and your video features, can it also work as a dapp, so that I could integrate it via API in our wallet? And our users get the features, because we're solving like many people solve the same problem, but they have a different USP on top, and yours is clearly the video voice chat. Yeah, that's a really good question. So, we are we do have an SDK. Uh it's very lightweight right now, and it's directly used for like messaging. Um but we do want to support video and audio soon through it. Um so we'll probably

we are basically going to do a V2 of Spritz. Uh it will be a slight revamp to make it even more like kind of social uh sorry, censorship resistant and pass like the walk away test. Try to be following this whole crops guideline that Ethereum's focused on and one of those things will be yes, a fully kind of decentralized SDK that supports all of the protocol. Um so until that happens, probably in the next 6 months or so, that will be come to a reality. So, very and we'd love to chat with you, so for sure. Awesome. I think maybe one more question if we have if anyone has one.

No? Awesome. Thank you so much for coming, guys. Appreciate you guys.