What to Build on Ethereum That's Not DeFi - Tereza Bizkova

Transcript

Hello, hello. Yeah, okay, awesome. Hi everyone. I am Teresa. I work for different organizations including funding the commons and crypto altruist and today I want to talk to you about what you can build on Ethereum that's not DeFi. I would love for this to be a little interactive um because this is something that um Let's get a second. I love Phil Collins. Yeah, let me Okay, let's let's get started. Maybe like a little warm-up. I would love to know when you're uh explaining Ethereum

to someone, um what do you say? Does anyone have a good example, a good page? Anyone? Any any use case that you share with someone? Is it the world computer? Is it I don't know. Do you go to DeFi immediately? Is it a transaction you can send privately? Anyone has anything? >> No, but just just feel free to shout it. >> I I just explain uh Ethereum as a cool database where everyone has a way to write and everyone has a way to read >> Mhm.

>> and uh there are some basic rules and guards. Um and what it allows is a lot of interesting use cases potentially where you can have a global ID in this global database like an NFT. It can be something representing something to someone. Um which you cannot do with databases running in AWS or anything like that because it's very scoped to um some specific provider or something. >> Cool. So, read-write own, a lot of coordination. Anyone else wants to share quickly? For sure. I mean, the

um I would say the programmable money is really the the first thing we all always go to. I got into the space like 5 years ago when I learned about uh fundraising with NFTs. Actually, like one of my platforms I know the founders are are here. It was called Doing Good. It was a really great use case at a time. I think now one of the the ways I explain it is usually things like um transactions for like humanitarian aid that can be delivered like much faster, much cheaper, things like that, right? But, if you were to ask me or if I were to ask you, what is the change that you want to see in the world with Ethereum?

It would probably maybe look more like something like this, right? There's There's more than than DeFi and um there's a really great article I wrote like a few months ago from uh Chris Dixon from A16Z Crypto, who was saying that DeFi really is the proving ground, the natural proving ground for Web3. But, um I think we've built a lot of it already and uh there's a lot to explore and I think we see a little bit of a gap between uh what is being built or what exists now and what is something that we would love to see. So, um what I would love to do um maybe before that actually. Um I've been seeing a lot of uh

discussions online as someone that like chronically lives on Twitter around things like um the tension between values now that institutions are entering. Uh some people are, you know, maybe not loving the direction. Some people are calling back for for the values to come in and then it a lot in the official Ethereum narrative as well. One example is like a recent video I saw from ECC where somebody was going around with a camera and they were asking people, mostly from the Ethereum Foundation, uh what is uh Ethereum for you in one word? And the most common answer was freedom.

Um another example is obviously like Vitalik publishing about it a lot, saying that this year is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness. Um and another great example is the the mandate itself that came out in March. Uh I did like a little scan and I saw that uh the word self-sovereignty self-sovereignty specifically is mentioned 70 times, freedom is mentioned 30 times, and privacy is mentioned 27 times. So, it does show us a little compass in what um at least the Ethereum Foundation and and its adjacent um ecosystem wants to see built. So, I think it's really really interesting because um okay, one more uh example. Actually, I do like a lot of phrasing of uh sanctuary technologies.

So, um that's something that uh I want to be also using as a framing for this talk. But, uh the question that I want to be answering with you today is what really exists on Ethereum that allows us uh to practice those values that we want to be seeing and also solve uh real-world non-financial problems, right? Because again, DeFi is is built to an extent. We are still solving a lot of things around it, but I think all of us can agree that to an extent this is a layer that's already usable by most people in the world. So, what are some of the other things that we can build and we are excited about and we want to see.

So, since we're in the Czech Republic and I am originally Czech, I was thinking that we could actually take like a point of reference uh of something to compare it against, right? Because if we're going to be talking about what can be built on Ethereum that's not DeFi, we probably can come up with a million of ideas. So, the one that I would like to use as our frame of reference um is Samizdat. Um how many people here know what is or was samizdat. Okay, we have a few checked and Eastern Europeans, I bet. Loving to see that.

So, samizdat was basically a self-publishing mechanism mostly used in the Eastern Bloc during the Communist era from 1948 to 1949. And as you can imagine, the purpose of samizdat was to share and publish ideas that were not allowed to be shared by the Communist regime. So, this was really interesting because whether it was poetry, prohibited books, Western music, anything that you wanted to share, you would do it through samizdat. Uh the word itself, samizdat, means self-publish in Russian. And it's actually a word play on the word Gosizdat, which was a publishing house, an established publishing house in the

USSR. So, turning that into samizdat means like we could self-publish. It was born in the 1950s and spread here in Czechoslovakia. Yeah, I would say mostly in 1960s and 1970s. 1970s specifically here were quite a tough era because of following the US invasion USSR invasion in 1968. So, 70s were like a heavy normalization era, how we call it, where the regime was doing more than regularly intense crackdowns on any kind of subversive activity.

And then it makes sense to for something like this to be born where people could kind of share ideas that they were passionate about. Again, some of it was poetry, so nothing necessarily like subversive. Some of it was more political. Um the story I want to share and, you know, there there have been a lot of people involved in this, even our first democratic president, Václav Havel, which some of you probably know. But the story that I think is like even more interesting in this context is the story of the guy in the beard with the glasses called Jiří Gruntorád. Jiří Gruntorád was one of the samizdat representatives in Czechoslovakia and it's interesting because he got into it as a bricklayer. He just like went to repair a wall in a house and he saw that these people living in the house were

doing samizdat, were having some of these like prohibited books. So, he got really excited about it. He started um working on samizdat. So, the way you would go about it is that you would have a typewriter, you would rewrite anything or write produce as an author or copy anything you want to copy with carbon paper. So, uh you know, depending on the on the width of the paper, you could probably produce like five to five to 15 copies at the same time. And then you would go and think about, "Okay, who are the friends that I trust enough to share this with?" Right? Then you would probably do that. Your friends would then do the same and you can already see that it has like an interesting network effect. Um it has no center. It's really difficult to kind of stop once that it starts spreading. So,

you can see that it has a lot of similar um values or characteristics that we see uh in blockchain, right? Um and what is interesting about Jiří Gruntorád specifically is that um when the regime kind of found out about him, they arrested him for like 3 months at first. And when he got out of prison, uh he actually signed the Charter 77, which is one of the most important documents in Czech Czech Democratic Resistance. So, like he got out of the prison and he just like went straight into it. And then he was imprisoned again and put in one of the toughest uh prisons uh in North Bohemia at the time for 4 years.

And when he got released after 4 years, he just went back to samizdat. So, you really see the resilience, but the interesting thing is that while he was locked in for the 4 years, his typewriter uh his typist, the woman that was uh helping him with the work just kept going, right? So, you can really see that the walk away test, as we talk about, really really got through uh with him. Um just a fun fact, uh after 1989, after the Velvet Revolution, uh, Jiri Gruntorad started a library that's just like a 5-minute walk from here, which is the biggest samizdat library in the world, uh, recognized by, uh, UNESCO in 2013. So, if you want to check it out, it's for free. Uh, really worth going if you're into into this stuff. But, my question now that we can dive into

together is how we can perhaps like, um, structure this to think about this more broadly, right? Again, we can talk about anything that can be built on Ethereum, but uh from this particular example, we can learn something about freedom infrastructure, and I think it has five layers, uh, based on how I looked at it. So, we have financial autonomy, free communication and publishing, verifiable identity without authority, private coordination, and lasting infrastructure. So, my question to to everyone here is, do you think that today we can build something like this with Ethereum, realistically?

And that's kind of what I want to be, um, now figuring out with you for a bit. And if not, what are the gaps? If, uh, if we believe that those are gaps in terms of primitives, in terms of integrations, in terms of UX, um, I think it's really worth looking at. So, um, the first layer, let's talk about the money that can't be controlled. So, in the case of samizdat, there was really, um, things like, you know, being able to receive money for your work. For example, if you were a author and you could not publish here, you could probably through samizdat get your work, uh, abroad, and then have it published, and then receive payments for it somehow, right? So, that would be like a interesting use case. So, I think we already have stuff that

exists in this term. Like, is anyone building, uh, anything related to DeFi, anything related to like privacy DeFi, or has been using anything like that? Anyone wants to to share? Go for it. >> Awesome. Yeah, so I agree with 55. We have a lot of stuff.

uh working on this already, so that's really awesome. One interesting project that I also want to mention in terms of if you are building really uh really this freedom infrastructure is a project called Canary that I learned about in uh Buenos Aires uh which is basically a dead man's switch. So, if you think about people like um political uh activists or journalists uh having a dead man's switch for DeFi could be really interesting. Um what I can also uh share a little bit is that at Fun Republic we are currently working on like an interesting pilot that does require like fully private infrastructure and we had some issues uh bringing it together when it comes to you know, like onboarding uh people that have never used crypto, then being able for them to uh transact or receive

donations, for example, privately and then also off-ramp. So, I think like having a full like payment flow, for example, about donations not only to receive them as an organization, but also to be able to give donations privately. I think it's really interesting in some countries where you want to support a cause but don't necessarily want to uh want for everyone to to know about it. So, um that's that's the money part. I think let's let's move on to the next one that might be uh even more interesting, which is the the publishing that can't be taken down. And I'm sure that here somebody might have some examples, like if you were to um publish something and you want it to be uh decentralized in a way. Are there any tools you would use?

Okay swarm. Anyone else has anything else? No one says IPFS? That's that's uh disappointing. I am big fan of IPFS. I'm just going to move it to the slide then. Um so IPFS obviously like with Wikipedia for example in Turkey it was a really really great use case that when uh Turkish shut down Wikipedia in 2017, um people moved to all the content to IPFS and that was a shut down that lasted 3 years, but thanks to stuff like IPFS it was still accessible. There was also stuff putting on uh IPFS put it put it on IPFS IPFS uh during the Catalonia referendum uh because obviously it was like declared illegal by by the Spanish government and people were able to at

least still access information about the referendum there. Um we also have ENS when it comes to at least like um the identity layer that we can tie to to um censorship resistant content. There's also Farcaster which is interesting when it comes to um social like owning your social graph, so that can be a part of that too. Um one of my favorite uh tools in the space has been Numbers Protocol which has built the ERC-721 standard which is basically uh a way for you to uh embed uh proof into taking when you take a picture of something. It basically generates a proof of the information in that moment on chain. So like stuff like who is the photographer,

where was it taken, at what time, and and mint it uh to to be uh basically like a proof of that. So that has been used for example um I think in 2023 in Ukraine where they used it to uh basically document war crimes uh in a specific area. So they uh Uh, they it with IPFS and Numbers Protocol and were able then to take it to the International Criminal Court, which was I think the first time that something, um, like this was done. Then, uh, some people would probably say Paragraph as well, which has like a blend model. I think if you want to, you can choose it in the user settings that you want it to be, uh, decentralized, basically, and minted on, I think, uh, on Optimism.

Um, it also has Ethereum for for identity there. So, there's, uh, a little bit of that, too. Um, yeah, and Blue Sky, uh, is not Ethereum, but is using the AT protocol, which also enables interesting things. So, maybe that's something more like to to be, uh, inspired about. Um, I think it would be great if we saw, uh, you know, more more stuff like that that would allow us to have like a full composable publishing infrastructure. I don't know if anyone's like working on anything like that, but it would be would be great to have it with ENS integrated in it. Also, ZK press credentials, obviously, um, that you can prove, uh, your your identity there.

And then, source protection tools, uh, as well. Let's move on to the next layer, which is the the ident- identity one. I would love to hear if anyone has any examples or thinking that, again, we're building this freedom infrastructure together. Where do we go for identity? And uh maybe think in the context of some is that it's not really that we just need the identity, but we also need reputation, right? Because you want to not just know that someone is someone, but also that you can trust them if you're handing them the documents or if you're being handed documents. So, anyone has any ideas or any anything we could build it with?

ENS ENS for sure should be a part of it. Anyone else has anything that we could probably go to. It's interesting because, um, a lot of the identity solutions, um, allow you to prove something about yourself, whether that's self on on Solo, whether that's, I guess world as well, even though that's pretty pretty um controversial. Um I think uh EAS is is really great as well as a stack. I would love to see more more things built on it. I think uh having that attestation layer that allows us to to show who did something um and attest to that as well as as evaluators could be could be really interesting for this use case.

Obviously, ZK passport, we saw Zupass. Uh I think for 2024 uh Devcon being used. I'm not sure if anyone has uh seen it used since. Um an ecosystem that's being really ambitious about this right now is also Human Act, which is building on Aztec. Um so they're trying to do the the kind of the whole identity privacy stack, which is interesting. They acquired uh the Gitcoin passport a few years ago and are building up on that as well. Um again, worth all worth all the different different uh focus. And then there's the global legal entity identifier foundation, which is an interesting use case for organizations.

Uh I'm not exactly sure how private it is, but it is interesting to see that there are already like institutions working on uh institutional identity, not just individual um identity. And uh in terms of what we can build again, that could be the aggregation layer of bringing everything together. You will see that that's a point I'm kind of repeating um throughout this because it feels like we do sometimes have the little pieces, but we don't really have something like um Uniswap for identity or coordination. So it feels like bringing these together would be something really interesting. Again, um one of the examples when we're explaining Ethereum, I bet, uh or at least for me it was that like, "Okay, like the Uber driver can own their identity, you know, if if something

happens." But um seeing that built, I think we're still a little little step away from that. And having that composable like across across different platforms, uh that would be really really cool. Okay, moving on to coordination without exposure. So, the interesting something that connection here is that the Charter 77 document that I mentioned was really really important for mobilization and resistance here. Um had 243 signatories without the STB, which is STB was the Czech um KGB basically, the secret police found out. So, you can tell that by the time that they were able to like limit this, it was already too late. And it was

mostly through uh private coordination. So, this is the layer where really not just the communication comes in, but things like um private voting or um bringing like capital together in a in a way that like allows you then to to decide on it. Uh So, there's there's little little different different parts of that. Um infrastructure that already exists, I think interesting there is thing is the minimal anti-collusion infrastructure, which allows you to um basically vote in something without uh having your identity or your like vote uh disclosed, which was uh like one of the use cases was the Gitcoin privacy round uh in their TG24, where there were 93 projects and almost

8,000 votes as Indonesians, because that's that's how the platform basically works. But then um you could not see the result or any any kind of votes until the the final tally. So, there was uh an interesting uh experiment there. Uh Follow Versus really good for that as well, if Brad's schedule is there. We have Aztec now uh launching or like having launched their alpha in in April and uh having their updates for V5 uh coming up soon. Um a really interesting ecosystem as well is Logos, even though it's not Ethereum compatible, but doing really really great work uh in this area, especially because they they're building basically specifically for for this movement of activists and and freedom.

So, we're we're a big fan of them as well. Um when it comes to the governance tools that I've used like I think most of you might have heard or used snapshot, which is really great when it comes to the UX, but again, not really useful in the sense that if you do end up voting, uh your your uh votes end up being public. So, there are some issues with that as well. One thing that I want to mention here is that about DeFi, um I mentioned the humanitarian aid uh use case that I really like, but realistically, um DeFi itself is not enough because when it gets to the privacy part, it often collapses. So, the World Food Program actually uses a permissioned version of Ethereum because uh if it

were permissionless, it could put the identity of the recipients of the aid uh at risk. Obviously, if you're uh I I spent a lot of time in Colombia, so uh I can imagine if in Colombia if you found out that your neighbor is receiving aid into his wallet or something, they would likely become a target or it could generally uh cause a lot of a lot of potential risks like that. So, that's that. Um but there are use cases uh or like different pilots around the two. Actually, specifically in Colombia, I saw that Mercy Corps was running one, but with the Alio blockchain. So, I think we're missing out a lot of opportunities as the Ethereum ecosystem by not focusing on this more because even when I was doing my research uh for

this, there's a lot of stuff going on with Stellar and Hedera and um other other ecosystems. So, I think uh yeah, it's really really important for us to look at that. And the last layer that we have is lasting infrastructure, so that really is stuff like the the World Food test or um just making sure that what we are building is built to last and there is continuation even if, you know, the the leadership team changes or if somebody has to step out or um that people can always pick it up and and continue. So, one layer of that actually let me ask before if anyone just quickly has anything related to building infrastructure that last, whether that's funding or creating like

organizational memory, any any tools that come to mind? Oh, that's protocol. Okay, for sure. Yeah. Can create structure. Anyone else? Anything for funding for example? Like how do you fund community? With different mechanisms. Anyone? Interesting. Yeah.

Octant for sure. I actually am listed as for So, there's a tool we have Gitcoin that now being slower and focusing collaborations with different ecosystems, but we've seen tools like specifically the data developed used in other ecosystems as well, which is mostly the quadratic funding formula that now other projects are taking on including Gitcoin. Gitcoin is currently running a 500 ETH Ethereum security quadratic funding round until May 14th. Which is interesting because that's a way I think that's like a few more days for us as ecosystem participants to to go and directly support Ethereum security. So, I think that's that's a

really interesting thing and again I can see that working in the freedom infrastructure stack really nicely. If it's if it's the the voting and everything is private obviously. Then Octant is really great and I see more projects kind of going into the endowment model where you're using the yield from staking to then fund things that matter to your ecosystem. The same or very similar model is being developed by Lido impact staking. And specifically when it comes to projects, maybe smaller projects that are implementing it. At the funding the Commons Residency, one of our residents built something called Muka, which was quadratic funding for it was the I think it was a Slovenian

city where he was wanted to run it to basically allow people to to vote and fund what what matters to them in that specific community. Um, the Earth organization is also doing it for land regeneration, which is really interesting. So, um, there is different pieces of that. Um, I think some of you might also know Drips. Drips is an infrastructure that allows you basically to drip down when it comes to your open source software dependencies. So, that is a really interesting model. They are actually collaborating with UNICEF on funding different applications in the UNICEF ecosystem when it comes to things like protecting families and and education. So, that is interesting. Also Artisan Fund.

Um, again, a lot of these are missing the the privacy layer on them, but they are interesting premises that we can work work with. Artisan basically helps fund creators. So, they do also different matching round. Matching round epochs they call it where you can go in and support creators and creators can kind of own on their work in better ways. So, for some is that funding that could theoretically work as well if the if the privacy layer were were incorporated. So, this is kind of where we're getting. Think it would be interesting to see some of these mechanisms also pointed at different targets. I know again we are still in the kind of setting the the foundation stage in the ecosystem. You could draw the

parallel to internet like early internet days as well. Like I wouldn't expect for us to be deploying really really complicated use cases and seeing everything we want already, but it's interesting to kind of point towards that. So, whether that's um, freedom of speech or journalism. Um, yeah, loving to see, for example, Earth or land generation being already funded with on-chain mechanisms. I think that's really, really awesome. So, hoping to to see more of that. And, um, just a little summary of like why now.

I think that now we do see that there are some primitives we can already use to build this stack up. So, um, things that were not possible 5 years ago are. I think I'm really excited personally about like Aztec specifically in this sense and what can be done, uh, with that infrastructure. Um, the second thing is that we can also see in this that the compounding doesn't happen automatically. We do need to have the different layers. I think we we have stuff like EAS, um, there's a lot of potential to be building that with, uh, identity and privacy. And then, um, a little like challenge is also like uh, accelerate towards what because everyone's talking about acceleration.

AI is moving really fast. Um, it feels like the window to embed the the values that we want to see in the world is getting smaller. Um, I saw that, uh, the European Union is rolling out their, uh, digital identity, uh, by December this year. There's countries that are already doing pilots on this. So, um, institutions are are ahead of this and if you want to see the the identity solutions, for example, that we care about, um, the time to to build them, uh, is now. So, um, my conclusion is that, um, you know, there's different different, uh, parts of the stacks. Uh, there is DeFi which is important, there is, uh, identity, there is governance, there is, uh,

capital coordination and allocation. I think that, uh, whatever we build, it's good to be reminded of the of the value that we want to see or the values that we want to see it associated with. I think now we have a probably a much more powerful technology stack that the people in the '70s had. Whether that makes it easier or more difficult because um onboarding someone to to some of these uh would be much more difficult than getting them a typewriter, right? So, that's also something to think about is the is the user user experience because even if you were to come to me and say, "Hey, but like this is not true. Like you can do all these things."

then I guess my question back to you would be like, "Okay, but is it easy to do that, right?" So, this is something else to to think about I think for us as an ecosystem that um yeah, I mean I think the question that I've been hearing about a lot like last year's where like, "Okay, would my grandma be able to use it, right?" But now the question that I want to ask you like with everything that's going to happen, do you still want to use it? Like is there a way that you would that something could happen that you would be even happier to use it, right? So, let's uh keep building but let's not forget also like why we're building because I think if we do that, we can build really interesting stuff and uh help people um that need it. So, yeah.

Thank you. >> DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY QUESTIONS? >> THANK YOU FOR A great talk. I'm a um huge sucker for uh dissidents and samizdat and parallel polis and all of these things as you know. Uh I have one clarification. Logos is not being built explicitly for activists. It's one of the things that we think where privacy really really matters and so that's why we are talking about it a lot but it's not like it's being built for activists.

It's being built for anyone because as you said and showed in your talk, the freedom requires privacy. We cannot talk about freedom if we are being surveilled because we are not free from the surveillance and we are not free from our thoughts about being surveilled. Uh so, that's just one comment. It feels like everything there is about privacy and so that also goes to privacy on Ethereum is complicated. So, I think the question to everyone is like, how do we make it simpler? And one last comment was that I think that like what you said like do we think that we have much more technology that enables much more, but they had it much simpler because it was based on

one-to-one trust basically, but we are basing it on trust to infrastructure developers, providers of services and stuff like that. So, um minimizing the trust should still be the key because that's how I got into Ethereum and I understood Ethereum as minimization of trust, but we are re- we're changing a lot that requires more and more trust in centralized solutions around the consensus. And so, that's that's a key outcome for me from the talk. >> Yeah, for sure. Like the last thing that you mentioned is kind of the scale problem, right? Because for example, Juan here from Refi Colombia is one of the people that run

like a little UBI program there for all single mothers. And I think there's like 20 mothers in the program, but like it requires so much hand-holding. Like if you were to scale it, you know, to let's say 2,000 instead and incorporate maybe some collaborative finance element where they could like trade better or you know, do like community lending, that would be like a whole different thing, right? So, yeah, like the one-on-one is always going to be easy, but the the scale is the problem as well. >> Um hello. Sorry, in the back. Uh yeah, just something to add that I know that was not really included here because it was mainly focusing on the Ethereum ecosystem.

Um but to really look at the communities that are using like mesh networks or like mobile phones burners to send each other money. Uh this kind of like infrastructure that's more focused on like hardware and I'm specifically excited to see how that will integrate with the Italian ecosystem to use those those tools that are already available and used. And maybe it's not a typewriter, but it's other kind of hardware that may be cumbersome, but very practical. >> Totally, I saw that some people are hacking stuff like this in the hackathon in the in the hardware track kind of, so that is really exciting.

Any other questions? >> Any other questions? No? Okay. Then let's give her another round of applause, please.