Hashchat -- wallet-to-wallet encrypted messaging

Transcript

hey guys how's everybody doing 8cc5 i think you guys are in the most special room because it was 106 everywhere in france and it rained everywhere in france last night except here so welcome thanks for hanging with me because it's uh it's warm and i apologize for that so i'm steve darzinski with hashchat and the original title of my talk was walt walt messaging and i think you guys know while 12 messaging so really what i want to talk about is better communication for crypto and this has been a real challenge of mine and a real frustration of mine for several years i finally put together a team at east denver to build out chat but i want to go back for a second how many of you were here at cc4 anybody all right

so master awakey which i call him master oak he used to have long hair he used to have long hair that's better okay he says crypto is all about coordination and that's absolutely true it is all about coordination and it's really critical that we coordinate and it's amazing what we can do with all these crypto networks however you need to have great communication and kevin kind of cheats because he's a fantastic communicator so when he's saying crypto is all about coordination we're just sort of absorbing that and it's a wonderful talk and we're all enjoying it um so uh by the way i've tried this megaphone in a programmer's ear it doesn't work so this is an example of what not to do okay so how is crypto communication today how

do you guys get your information about crypto and i really hate talking about this because it's sort of like ptsd if you think about all the different ways that it sucks like with discord i've got you know i can tell you a number of different crypto pump scams that i would love to invite you to seems to be all what i'm working on and then twitter is the post real or is it someone legitimately posting so i've got to filter through all this stuff in order to find the actual actionable items in twitter and then finally you've got telegram i can't tell you how many times i've like seen the wrong server come up on a different thing and it's impossible for me to figure out what the strong signal is in all this all this communication noise and i've been thinking about

crypto communication for a long time and we have these wonderful tools called addresses that are really wonderfully cryptographically provable as i own this address so i've been put together a team to build out hashchat to kind of get all of this stuff together and the real challenge is how can we make these solid decisions that you and you are all making every day based on sort of flimsy communications or at least spending so much time filtering through all the noise so that's what hashchat is building building and crypto can be better um one of the things i like to ask and my background is in a lot of technology development work and commercialization and one when you think about a technology itself and where are the specific differentiators there's a lot of sort of boring things where it's just

lower cost or faster and stuff but then there's the really cool thing of being totally disruptive and that is the world of crypto decentralization right that's just like rocking the world everybody all the regulators are trying to figure out what to do with decentralization how is it you know how is it that we can fix this what are we doing with it um but this that's the enabling block that allows you to do things that aren't possible today so i'll give you one two examples if you think about being a broker how can i be a decentralized broker and that's of course uniswap i can't tell you how excited i was when uniswap was invented i was like anybody can be a broker now they can just post a couple of trading pairs online that's fantastic this is not enabled anywhere except in crypto and then how about

confirming an asset transfer anywhere in the globe with zero trusted intermediary well that's basically any layer one but this was not possible before crypto and that's what excites me all the time i guess if you guys have have come into it and you're all crypto natives it might be sort of second nature to you but i still get excited about these every day like holy cow i can post a trading pair on uniswap this is amazing so now the next example of course is better communication and what can we do with messaging that has not been done before so i state that we can create messages that can be easily verified and certified as authentic as authentic by the recipient with one click i'm going to pause there for a second maybe i'll read it again messages that can be easily and ver be verified and

certified as authentic by the recipient with one click so i've actually been able to do this before crypto but the important thing is available and accessible by all what crypto has given us is wallets available to everybody in private keys available to everybody that gives everybody the individual crypto tools to be able to get messaging right at the end point that matters and it has all of the all the wonderful features that we've been trading trillions of dollars on why can't we use the same tools to just send messages back and forth so that's that's what we set forth to fix it uh at hashchat so this would be an example of a message that you you would get to certify that the messages are there by the way um before crypto if anybody knows about pgp i was able to send an email message with a pgp

add-on on it where i could certify that the message came from the right person and that it wasn't tampered with when i received it however it required me to figure out how to add all that stuff in and get my keys figured out and get the keys from the other person's server onto my machine so that i could decrypt their message you know the the signing of their message this is pre-crypto so it wasn't easy and it basically took a nerd on one side and a nerd on the other side to do the communication but now that we have so many wallets available hashtag can build in all of that complex cryptography into the app and we don't have to worry about the end user being too sophisticated but i'm very appreciative of all the work that the entire crypto community has done like explaining private keys and all this

stuff and getting them into the user's hands so all end to end encrypted yes okay so let's dive into the hashchat app so you connect to hashchat and it reads your wallet and it says okay what are your gnosis safes that you own so down here on the left we've got owen to gnosis safes this is just a slide so it's not live um and then what are the eligible nfts that you have and it just reads them in your in your wallet and you're allowed to join that community the first app that we're doing is the example that's shown here which is i'm a member of the hash chat gnosis safe signers and it automatically sets up a chat room that encrypts all of the messages within with for all the signers so this is like the equivalent of the board of directors for crypto right

everybody in the in that group needs to communicate about what's going on and what's happening within that community and what transactions are we going to do so what i'm showing here is a quick little icon that allows you to click on every single message to verify that it's in cl in fact correct pretty simple it's not easy to implement on the back end but hopefully simple to use on the front end so if i click on that link i get well this is actually an alpha prototype so so it's a json we may or may not use that version so i don't want to put too much into that but that's basically what you're receiving so every message you get you should be able to certify cryptographically that it's correct and that it hasn't been tampered with and that allows us to build a lot of businesses on top of on

top of solid crypto communications so probably the biggest point and if you want to take a picture of this slide please feel free to is this is very obvious to me if i have a message that's going from the crypto wallet to a crypto wallet i can confirm that that's a very strong connection right and that's what i mentioned before the trillions of dollars are being transferred across that so why can't i send a simple little message across that everybody else and this is why i think crypto communication sucks everybody's using these weak connections on the outside to try and communicate so if i say this is my wallet and this is my telegram handle please send me money to my wallet you know then it's like well do i really know that that's correct or

not and and of course you know when i'm making the ass testation it's correct but i have to depend on somebody else so in all of the wonderful trustlessness of crypto there's a huge trust breaking point at this last point that we're trying to fix it at hashcat so i want to talk about our first integration that i've already mentioned in a little demo about having a chat room just for signers on a multi-sig and uh what wasn't shown in the last presentation or the last slide was this little pop-up and we've been working with the nososafe guys thank you guys on figuring out how to get if you think about all the signers and the proposals that they talk about in the in the meeting and what transactions need to take place and then when that

transaction happens there's a notification that pops up into the into the hashchat window so that everybody who's a signer can sort of read what's going on and realize okay this is a signature that needs to be taken and if i click on the details it pops up a little dialog box that allows me to go to the safe and sign the transaction we have talked about actually signing it right here but we want to leave the signing to the gnosis safe side of things and just leave the communication in the in the hashtag world walk before you run right and the second integration is basically if you think about the the equivalent of board of directors of crypto which is this multi-sig signers um wanting to send an official message

to your token holders so if you think about we want to merge with another token company we want to buy you know we want to approve this gigantic transaction and we want to send a message out to all the token holders we're developing an app to integrate into gnosis safe that allows you to do just that so basically this would be an example of you know sort of using i like to use the old world you know the traditional finance board of directors you can sort of replace that with multi-sig right but you want to be able to click and confirm the authenticity of that message to make sure that this is in fact the official message and then you can take action on it this is currently in development and if you guys are around tomorrow and you

find me i might be able to give you a demo my dev is going to demo it to me tonight but i'll find you guys tomorrow we can do it that's where we are in the process so this is an example this is actually an old slide an example of kind of what it would look like as an app inside the safe app world so um a little bit about hashchat this is our team i'm steve durzinski the founder i've got a couple degrees from mit i'm an engineer and an mba so i like to build things that i like to figure out when the customers say your baby is ugly i can say okay fine we'll fix the product that's fine cody is our senior protocol developer and uh he's does a lot of the encryption stuff and and is one of the geniuses

behind it max is our ui guy edison is our front end guy and we have two advisors oren you got some of you may know oren mcmillan from the gnosis world great guy known him for years and corbin who i think he has eight hats but i'm not gonna dox him on on the world of youtube so so historically we started this at east denver um in march and we've won a bunch of awards and various hackathons what's not on here is the mit bitcoin pitch competition which we just won in may that was that was a lot of fun and then in terms of our our i like to mash together the tech stack and the development roadmap so you can read this up to down to read the tech stack and then you can read it left to right to see where we are in the process

we are not on chain so we go web 3 wallets to encryption layer to database layer so that minimizes how much transaction we need to have but it also opens up another opportunity which is to be easily cross-chained so we can go from a from an evm compatible wallet to a solana wallet and we've done that already to send a fully encrypted end-to-end message from an ethereum wallet to a solana wallet and then we want to go beyond that to all wallets that are available um we have on our list we actually won the lf grow hackathon so we've got lens handles so you can send a message from an ev ethereum or even pedal wallet to a lens handle and then we're looking at uh adding solana into the into the mix as well um in the future we're really trying to

balance decentralization and speed i'd love to talk to any of you guys that have been able to to crack this nut it's really tricky to make sure you've got a decentralized database that's also fast you know the world of of of sort of board of directors communications if it takes an extra 10 minutes or 15 minutes that's nothing but if you're standing outside the pub and you want to know how can i get access code to this thing it's you know seconds milliseconds matter in the chat world so and then uh we've got our road map here so you can see basically my favorite line is the second line you know we've got about 18 million wallets between ethereum and evm incredible wallets and then adding solana on top of that you get a lot more i do still have luna up there because there are a number of

wallet holders so um but that's this is our roadmap to kind of get to be able to to communicate among all these wallet holders so including bitcoin i have a lot of friends that still love bitcoin so anyways and that's uh that's kind of the the main point um if you guys are safe signers we are trying to actively get beta signups for safe signers and we'd love to have you guys click on that qr code or come see me and um and sign up for the for the safe signer beta that we're hopefully going to launch shortly this is our website our twitter and that's me on twitter and that's me on telegram and feel free to come and grab me afterwards or ask me questions right now i think are we are we good

just one question we only have time for one question shoot who he is alex and we are very interested in having uh messaging standards yes i've counted already at least 30 projects that are well funded have big teams are doing mayo discord or messaging and on for crypto wallets and my question is are you working with those projects to see how you can be cross-compatible or are you just hoping that your protocol wins over them that is a great question um there's a ton of projects that are doing this and frankly that's the reason why i didn't start doing it for a couple of years because i thought someone's gonna solve

this but they all seem to be trying to copy you know be the twitter or be the you know be the the discord replacement um we are you know hyper focused on kind of this how can we take crypto into a new dimension that can't be done before and people have asked me like are you going to replace discord no discord's always going to have a space for this stuff we're trying to solve a problem that's not solved today and really kind of focus on that wedge point and grow from there we would love to integrate with a lot of other players there's a bunch of other guys on the back end so so there's um i mentioned the decentralized database there's some other players that have a protocol on the back end that we can integrate with there's actually some web 2 things that

we could integrate with the whole idea if you have a messaging app it's the value goes as a square of the nodes right so that's why i have all those wallets in there if the more nodes we can get access to the more value we're going to create so yes we are open to partnering with whomever you want to chat with we're also developing an sdk it's actually very early i probably shouldn't even announce it it's so early but that is in on the roadmap to have an sdk so that people can access the hashchat protocol from an sdk from their own app as well okay i guess we're good thank you guys let's get some ice cream vienna