ZK12: Future of ZK Applications with Anna & Friends

Transcript

[Music] cool how are you all feeling now that you have reached almost the end of ZK Summit 12 have you learned a lot yes some I need some reactions have you learned something yes okay good um did you have fun did you did you use the card the NFC card who used it who used it hands up oh yeah okay um very good I'm glad that you guys gave it a shot so what we're doing now is we're kind of wrapping up the main stage with a panel um kind of like

every time I do a summit this panel comes together as the day progresses uh what we wanted to talk about oh nice thanks guys uh what we wanted to talk about today if you were there for my intro talk I was talking about the map of ZK and I had this area on the map of ZK which I had just called miscellaneous tools basically it's categories that have not yet been defined and what we wanted to do with this panel was just kind of like explore brainstorms what some of those categories might look like um I think we're going to start really with the panelists and we're going to have a conversation about what might be coming but I do also want to open up the

floor to you to think about what those categories might look like like or maybe you're working on a project which you think could Define a future category and so we want to hear from you in this talk too all right let's kick off with some intros uh I introduced myself at the beginning of the day but my name is Anna I'm the host of a show called zero knowledge podcast I'm the co-creator of a project an educational Hub called ZK hack and I'm a co-founder of a company called zkv uh ZK podcast is also the producer of this event and and we are now on our 12th edition I kind of can't believe that we've done a dozen anyway that's me what about you sweet um I'm

aush I have mostly been thinking about ZK email for the last year and a half but I've spent maybe a little bit over two years thinking about General ZK applications um so things like anonymous group signatures or uh data Providence um and things like that so yeah I'm excited to jam more on weird new applications nice uh I'm Andrew uh I work on cursive and we build cryptographic apps for human connection and I've mostly been exploring how we can turn cryptographic tools into social Primitives they're all very succinct I'm a bit shy I'm never so succinct when I introduce myself but I'm Ashling I'm the

head of privacy at tatso uh we are building MPC tooling for uh ZK at the moment but hopefully soon general purpose um my background is in cryptography I care a lot about privacy I love web3 I love crypto I want everyone to use it so I now think about all the ways in which we can make it so that people actually do use it nice um I want to start Us in sort of discussing what what I what I think of is some of the new categories so you mentioned you know ZK email sort of the ZK TLS maybe what cursive is working on I want to sort of Define what has started to emerge kind of those categories that I think we are seeing

teams line up in and then from there I want to talk about maybe some New Primitives New Concepts I mean even the co- snarks like what that actually opens up it's quite interesting but let's take let's go back like I mean when when would you say the ZK TLS category happened was this in the last year I mean The Deco Paper was like yes more than five years ago so fair enough practically we first saw like maybe TS proxy style implementations like a year ago and then okay finally the the notary St impation started getting a lot more traction I think this year let's define for the audience and like who may not be as familiar like what is that category what

kind of teams what are they doing ZK TLS yeah I think there's generally two main approaches these days there's the TLs notary approach uh which I think think was originally an external project and then PSC picked it up and revived it it was like super old um so that's like notary based approach uses MPC um and the other approach is TLX proxy um I actually don't know who originated that um not not sure but I think now that's become a more popular approach it's like s simpler to set up and there's probably there there's quite a few teams working on this like off the top of my head like

um Pluto reclaim opacity like ton of teams exploring this space so that's really good get a bunch of Builders here what when when you talk about TLS notary or TLS proxy what is it like what can you actually do with these things like you're proving something about what about any like uh HTP like TLS response so you send a request to a server and then either this request is initiated through an NPC session where your session keys are shared with a notary or it's routed through a proxy which ass signs the direction of the traffic um and that allows you to actually like uh prove things about the

API response or the TLs response um and you can also use ZK to basically like hide certain things from this proxy or like use selective disclosure to prove certain things and like as I've understood it's I mean you're you're kind of tapping into like the web all of a sudden you're making proofs about something that's out there on like on the web websites um ZK email I it's funny because like I've sort of put it under the ZK TLS category but I'm curious what how you place it and also maybe let's explain what cka email is yeah sure I'm happy to to dive in a little bit so I guess yeah I don't know if I would agree with categorization ZK TLs but there

there definitely is a lot of overlap in the sense that you can kind of and maybe I even disagree with ZK TLS as a name but um you can you can think of it as like yeah like all the data in your email you already have signatures on them and you can now make proofs of them um and it's kind of separate from the TLs work because TLS you have no signatures it's all symmetric and so you're kind of fundamentally trusting okay there's some party in the middle that's going to be centrally permissioned it can't be a decentralized uh a decentralized thing or else that person could collude and then drain whatever it is you're trying to prove um and so the way I think about zil ideas is like it's kind of just the first example of oh this is one really interesting piece of signed data that we

can make really interesting ZK proofs about but it's just like just one of like a category of many many of these like pieces of signed data like passports are also signing you see projects like open passport or rare mode doing really cool things with Selective disclosure on signed passports and then you have uh ID cards are starting to get more and more signed around the world and then you have um even like sometimes web frontends are signed with like sign exchange um and so there's there's lots of signatures if you kind of go hunting for signatures and then you can make ZK po of these things and then people like to use the word like vampire attack in web 3 but I think of it more as like adding features to it like we're like helping the web 2 services like add little features their little products

and all they have to do is add a signature nice I actually I want to come back a little bit later on in this conversation about sign data and like what that could look like um but now I want to hear a bit about Co snark um we did an episode Pretty recently where we went very much into detail about it but maybe you could just quickly explain what those are and some of the use cases that those open up sure I think I mean they kind of add to a lot of the stuff that you're talking about and it's so cool I mean I'm thinking also a lot about the ZK use cases at the moment and it's so super nice to see that there are actual things that people are using now that I can say ah look here I can actually point at things but Co snarks

generally are collaborative snarks where where you generate a snark in an MPC circuit so you have a distributed setting where you want to do some private computation and you want to generate appr proof um yeah in a in a private way so one example I think that was at the workshop earlier was suppose we want to determine who has a higher salary or who is richer we can engage in this NPC protocol um but suppose now Anna we reveal the result to you but you're not quite sure if you trust us maybe you want us also to provide or the circuit at least to provide a proof that yes indeed the computation was done correctly but because we're in this NPC setting you need to do this proof in an NPC way so this is essentially a

coark um and maybe like with ZK email and ZK TLS and all of this stuff with the ZK passport this works quite well now if you want to just generate a snark in in a small circuit this kind of stuff it works pretty efficiently but if you start now talking about these types of cards and you have smaller devices with low memory and you don't have lots of RAM and you don't have lots of power and you don't have like uh yeah like memory space computation power uh it becomes much more difficult to actually compute something especially in a ZK like to compute ZK proofs in an NPC way so maybe you want to do some Outsourcing maybe you there are all these proof markets now showing up um maybe you want someone

else to generate your proofs but you don't want to send your witness in the clear because you're talking now about private data it's your passport it's your emails it's whatever um so yeah this is where coars fit into the sort of things that are emerging now as the kind of more human things where it's like okay we want to share some data but I'm okay sharing it with you guys but maybe not like publicly for everybody cool I also want to come back to that and what kind of use cases could come off that but uh let's talk about cursive in the MAF ZK that I presented you're you're currently in miscellaneous tools because I don't know exactly how to define what you guys do so can you

share some of the experiments and sort of areas that you're experimenting with yeah definitely so uh we're still figuring it out so that that explains a lot um I think the uh one way we look at this is thinking about problems with existing social apps and problems users have and how we can solve those problems with cryptography so these were the three points that Vivic mentioned earlier during his presentation the first one is unbreakable consent and this relates to the issue that a lot of existing social apps are push-based so advertisers or platforms or big algorithms will impose what they want you to see and that's just kind of what

you get um you don't really have much Choice there and cryptography allows you to do the opposite in a lot of these MPC setups you have to consent you have to opt in in order to actually have computation run on your data um the second idea here is digital phermones and this relates to the issue that a lot of existing social apps are closed platforms so your data stays within a platform and you can only use it within that space and digital fairmon is this concept that your data can be open it can be anywhere it can just exist and as I'm walking by aush like our digital fairmon can somehow interact and it can do so in like a safe and privacy

preserving way it's a great metaphor it's kind of creepy when you explain it but it's also kind I you understand it sort of like usually if if you try to do this sort of like two people walking by each other it's because you both have some app it's owned by a third party it's doing tracking on both of you and then matches you here you're sort of imagining it being from something that you have yourself that's not owned by a third party I'm guessing like something where it's like something on your device that it might be provided by a third party like the ability to create this thing but then it's just living on your device and it's like being triggered if you walk by someone else yeah I think I

like that that that like response initial response is exactly why cryptography is so important that's why like if this idea were to work or make sense I think having safety and privacy would be a critical component of it because otherwise it would feel like super weird if someone was just like spying on you the whole time and you walk around and they like match you with this specific person that's like really targeted that would feel like kind of creepy in some way well that actually exists right now with like adte where it's like you walk by a certain store and then I remember this is from years ago there's like adte platforms where they would like if you they knew your Spotify data and somehow like mapped where you were and then it was like you'd walk by a store and you just get

the advertisement for that store while you walked by it in your Spotify feed and I don't know if this this is a company that was like pitching me so I don't know if that actually worked or that if they ever got it into the hands of people but they're trying to and it's very adte it's very web 2 it's very not privacy friendly it's scary related to that idea of like you whisper something into your phone or you're like just having casual conversations like oh like thinking about buying a cat and then the next day you get a bunch of cat ads and it's like oh how did this get here I don't know yeah yeah so that was digital phermones the final one is this idea of narrowcasting so narrowcasting opposite of broadcasting this addresses the issue

that a lot of social apps are public Billboards where you just post a bunch of information it's generally accessible think Twitter uh Instagram is somewhat public half public um Tinder everyone sees your profile and this idea of narrowcasting is being able to specifically Target who can see your data and who can interact with you so you want to be able to say hey like I want to find out who's going to this concert but I only want to ask people who are maybe like two degrees away from me or people who share the same music interests as I do and would be interested in going to this concert as well so you get more targeted queries and the idea is that leads to safer and more intimate connection is there a connection between the coark idea and

narrowcasting is that like a use case cuz you sort of you mentioned something around like yeah having at least it sounded like it was a smaller group getting access yeah well it's something that we're thinking about a lot because it's a problem that we kind of can't really solve right now with MPC we can't really do this well I shouldn't say can't it's like we don't immediately see how this can be done in an efficient way with MPC right now or like in a very privacy friendly way because there I mean this is a bit this transitive trust problem so you're saying that okay I trust you and you trust him and like there are a few people that are a few degrees away

from me and then you have the social graph and if you want to sort of Traverse this graph in a privacy friendly way you need to touch every node and then it becomes like um super expensive to try and actually do anything if you want to say okay um I want to know what concert or like what music taste we have in common or whatever you need to just check the whole graph and so if your graph is big then it's yeah it's hard so it's definitely something that we're thinking about a lot um it's my favorite Topic at the moment so I really like that you brought it up um but yeah I think like for me this is one of those things that should be on this board next year like um it's definitely one of those topics I think will it be called narrow casting

or what if someone has a better name please let us know is that the word is that the term that you were using when you were thinking about I mean so I was thinking about it in the context of more in the trust context so like how can I know how can I tell you that I trust him so you can have some relationship with him as well and like if you trust me how can you inherit some trust from him knowing that I trust him this kind of stuff so it's a little bit different and this is the the transitive trust problem so it's a little bit different to it's yeah it's a bit different to to narrowcasting but narrowcasting is yeah I I didn't

want to the name is not bad I didn't want to challenge the name but the phon also makes me think of like some sort of digital smell it's kind of it's it's quite descriptive it's also I don't know what else that's it's actually quite good yeah it's great like if you think about it what what it means but yeah at first it's sort of like digital smell everyone in the '90s wanted like smell a vision they were thinking about how do we digitize smell and how can we like there you go I mean I think this is a nice way to do it congrats on your smell Vision nice I want to go back to what you were talking about iush with the signed data so you talked about like ZK email being off like it's something you

can get signed data from and that's sort of why you started there what other kinds of signed data are there you mentioned passports but maybe share some others that that you're thinking about yeah there's so many I know Andrew also has a list of these up um I mean we've seen I know like credit card transactions sometimes have signatures on them I've seen um what else have we seen we've seen so the NFC chip in your passport has it but also um when you download like um a digital version of your for instance your state ID if you're in the states and that'll often also have a digital signature on it um when you sign documents like on docu sign they'll often send you back like a signed copy which is actually Al often like

digitally signed with the cryptographic signature um I know in India the um a team or one of the team like adjacent to the other team basically all of your documents like your Elementary School certificate and your high school diploma and all these things are all digitally signed and put into like the the Indian government has asked all these organizations to sign it and that's the only way can get added to your kind of central registry of all your documents and so now you have like a billion people with like crazy amounts of documents and data which is very interesting um do you when you're thinking about the signed data though are you also thinking about ways that like data could be signed in the future like what you've described is sort of like where you can now get signed data

but like yeah absolutely I mean I think the ideal case is that for instance like I I spent some time at like the ETF conference like the standardization conference all these internet standards and I was like hey we should go sign stuff and people didn't really seem to buy most of the use case when you say oh you can get Providence you can stop fake news and they like really light up and so I think if you can pitch like even traditional uh web folks on hey look like you can you can get more Providence on data you can stop fake news and therefore you should add signatures to TLS you should add signatures to everything photos exactly whatever it is exactly then allow you to verify it in the future and there's a lot of like really weird ways that people are doing this kind of like authenticity like I

saw a paper the other day where so so like one of problems with signing like photos or audio is that you can often like put something like there's some connection between the thing getting the input and the thing doing the signing but i' I there was this paper where it was like oh you can use a like variation inherent in like an fpga to to detect the correlation between something like temperature which affects should affect in a correlated way and you measure this fpj so that you can say oh yeah is this correlated in the correct way therefore yes I'm actually live measuring the temperature and you can get this really weird like interactive ZK proof out of like a like Hardware defect which is like crazy to me um so I think we're gonna see a lot of like crazy weird new like attested sensors where something on this

side is doing a hash something here is doing like fbj noise detection and like get these really weird new attested sensors but I'm yeah I'm very curious to see where that feeli goes that's cool um you one of the points you mentioned was unbreakable consent but we didn't actually go into what that is so let's dive into that one yeah I think it's just the idea that this consent of using your data is actually enforced at the technology level so when you uh let's say run multiparty FHA on your data or run some MPC like you actually have to participate in this computation to be able to have the computation execute correctly um so I think there's there's

roughly two different scenarios here when we talk about like FH MPC security um this terminology I believe comes from enrio from psse but it's delegated versus Direct Security so delegated security means I want to Outsource some computation so I send it to a bunch of different parties and they run this computation for me and then I get the result back uh Direct Security is what we mean when we talk about unbreakable consent it means you are actively securing the computation because you are participating in it and so if you don't consent to this computation if you don't like what's going on you just don't participate and nothing will actually happen like is this currently though very conceptual or is this like do you have

you seen something like this in practice I think this is how we Implement NPC stuff in practice right now our NPC schemes like these uh PSI implementations are based on this idea where you actually have to like say yes to this to decrypt I think this is yeah like suppose I mean even with these uh cards suppose we're in a four party NPC protocol and we're all the notes and we're all kind Computing on our encrypted data between us suppose you at some point become uncomfortable with the convers uh computation and you don't want the result to be revealed or somehow I don't know whatever you can pull the plug and and before like the result is computed then the network breaks and essentially you don't get the

results so if unless everybody stays in till the end and I mean yeah this is a bit different to the delegated case that's cool so if feel like we've started to tease out like a few of the future ideas I do want to sort of get the audience slightly primed I don't know if you're ready to jump in but I'd love to like start thinking about these use cases or the things that we're talking about I'm kind of hoping to hear from members of the audience if you've been thinking about these things or if maybe you've been thinking about something else that comes off this um Tanya do you have the mic just to be

ready and so just put up your hand even if we're like we're in the middle of talking if you have something you wanted to add or if you're thinking about anything around this um do you have any like especially maybe you in the miscellaneous category do you have any like other than these three do you see any applications emerging maybe people like things coming out of psse like kind of other other application categories yeah I mean I think for me the big topic is around trust and like it covers I mean for me this is a whole new industry that is kind of bobbling a bit now and like it comes

up in pretty much every single conversation that we have like that I've had today and like even just a few examples um one is let's say you want to set up an NPC Network how do you trust the nodes that are in the network um how do you trust the data that goes into how do I trust the result of this uh computation from the two of us how do I know and so like one conversation like also with the signatures okay I can sign some data but how do I know that the data put in there was is was fine so there's all this kind of stuff about trust and like a nice conversation with Yen earlier was a bit like how do we know we've won actually

is it when your granny is on boarded to web 3 or is it when the government trusts that your ZK passport is valid yeah yeah and like how then does does your granny trust the government or does she trust the cryptographers and like you know how does all of this play out and I think like it's really hard like we're all kind of trying to figure this out now how how who do we it's not who do we trust it's yeah it's not trustless and so somehow this needs to emerge and somehow and then even with the code like what about you know how do we trust the code for sure do we need now more like um yeah like yeah like there's just so much about trust like from the technical

aspects like both like okay um proving and formally verifying code to forming these like mini governments or institutions that sort of say like this is a good protocol this is a protocol whatever um so yeah there's like on the technical side there's a lot about trust on The Human Side there's a lot about trust on the like fun side there's a lot about trust like so for me that is the kind of key topic that covers and touches everything both in web 2 and web3 it's like for me that's the topic that ZK like starts the little spark and then it's just going to explode I think W yeah I think one one concept related to trust I think uh this is from our node

but I might be wrong talking about trust infrastructure I think the quote is something like crypto allowed us to build stadiums uh programmable cryptography allows us to build bars or some something like that um but it's this idea of like uh not just having trusted spaces that are like building Global trust or Global consensus but programmable cryptography really enabling uh more local areas of trust so there's this team called Tonk that's building this concept called speak easys um and I think the idea is like you have to provide some ZK proof that you meet a certain criteria to join this private gated space and within that space you can uh you know talk freely to other members of your community but the purpose is it's more of like a small

cozy space rather than a large scale venue I just want to I want to highlight what you were saying there too because the word trust I mean we use I I trust this I don't trust this but I think the concept of thinking about trust now is in contrast to the promotion of that trust list mentality which I think actually dominated the conversation in in our space for many years like as long as I've been in it I think I was introduced this like trustless sounds like untrustworthy when you first hear it and then you have to learn that trustless means you don't need to trust anymore because everything is built by engineers and it works perfectly and you can just trust the cryptography and the ma and

the engineering and and don't worry but then yeah in that conversation with Arno he kind of brought back and I I think it's been talked about a lot in certain circles is that idea of like still there's going to be someone who makes that code and there's going to be someone who maintains it and like there are other places there there's like you may still need institutions or something human that creates trust for those trustless systems to be trustworthy anyway yeah I know we have a we have uh someone from the audience yeah okay amazing what I said uh uh don't trust verify it was always

uh but um I think with on on that I think um you know not from a non Tech um perspective I always uh uh find this uh system fascinating because it helps us to remove human error and create better ways to relate to each other but going back to what was it MP C feromon what was it right digital exactly digital pherone catchy name um I was recently looking at an app right and they are kind of web 2 SL trying to move more in web 3 and they had those kind of um uh ads exactly that um you have to look at and I checked a little bit what was the

issue or the perspective that um certain de rails had about this app and one of the um thing that pop up was I shared a lot of data with them and I don't think I got what I uh was expecting back and and so I think it's a really important use case because a lot of times we have you know problems in our space with user engagement but imagine a a web 2 app you know trying to cross over into web 3 and being able to utilized um uh MPC or you know DK to allowed at least that LE year of privacy or consent um it could definitely be a great uh use case and it

will be lovely to see more of that nice thank you yeah I think something interesting there is this question of uh most existing social apps are based on ads and require ads to run um and inherently this idea or the way ads have been implemented is based on this like Marketplace model um it is based on this auction and so so this question of like can we create pole-based ad systems does that even make sense as a business model uh is there any setup there that these like new projects that are based on consent based on user ownership like what are the business models there for ads or do do ads just not work at all in

that model just going back to is there another question yeah let's go I was going to go under a different line of questions so if you um want okay yeah so I've been thinking about um web proofs a lot in ZK TLS and it seems like the um the main focus of those projects is is building like an identity product first and to me that seems like it's one of the features of a wider product that eventually will come in sort of like an internet of trust or an internet of truth whatever you want to call it I think I understand the end Vision I think I understand the identity products I'm struggling with the middle and what comes next um any hypotheses can you say that say you the ID Products and the yeah like like it seems like a lot of like the ZK TLS or like the like those

types of projects are focused on identity looking products right now um and eventually I understand that like yes of course you need an identity product in order to engage with like an internet of true statements or something like that but I'm struggling with like the next thing um to get to like that eventual internet well I think I mean uh I think like a lot of the ZK VM stuff that going on at the moment is maybe a first step towards that because at least there you're doing computation that's verifi like verifiable it's maybe not fully private it's like this sort of going towards scalable verifiable computation not

necessarily private so maybe not so good for like all the all the use cases but like I guess that's the first kind of step towards it it's one of them at least I think but yeah like that's a hard question like how do okay we we're here we dream of being here how do we get there it's like that's that's why we're here that's the job and maybe one note on the like broadening of possibility from like things that we've already intuited is combining ZK with other cryptographic Technologies like starting with ZK and MPC or ZK and fhe we've also seen like oh you can now fhe things verifiably and then I think also some of the stuff that c explain like oh now what if you combine that with a witness

encryption like oh you get some really interesting stuff and even though we don't have full witness encryption we have partial witness encryption actually that gives you like enough um that you can outo really interesting things and I think it's kind of like okay we've now had like almost like eight years since like Gro 16 since like practical ZK proofs to be like okay like what can we do with these things but we've had only like less than six months since practical like witness encryption could be combined with like ideas from ZK etc for us to think about what can we even do with this technology and so I think as we see more of the cryptographic infrastructure getting built out then it'll allow us to be like hm okay we can verify this kind of like weird Cog graphic computation what does that let us do and it's kind of a different

mental model necessarily than the kind of narratives we've seen play out repeatedly in ZK or web 3 or whatever these existing spaces have been I think just to follow up I think this is like exactly the nice way to think because if you think about TLS itself like Security on the internet for communication there were all the building blocks like people were building like okay public key encryption and signature schemes and deploying them and making them efficient and like all sorts of stuff like handshakes and like you know reducing latency and all sorts of things and reducing communication and like you know it was always this kind of like ah here this bit tweaking this bit H you know and like um cryptographers would complain that maybe this is peace

meal engineering whatever but at some point in off tweaks here and there lead to the whole thing just kind of working kind of not overnight but like just working and the same with Bitcoin like uh all the pieces there was ecash and there were like Merkle trees and there was like all sorts of stuff and eventually someday they're just kind of put these pieces that these weird pieces that you plug in together somehow just form the right configuration and it works bitcoin's there TLS is there and then yeah maybe this is the um Way Forward I want to like what you mentioned there this like ID to web proofs it just made me start thinking

about the ID Products that we have and programmable privacy and something that like something that web 2 stuff gives you I'm G to I'm going to do here's my slight case for what web 2 is good at is that you sign up for something you live on that thing for a little while and then at some point you kind of get bored of it and you move on and as an identity so usually we are in our space claiming the problem with leaving your identities fragmented but I think there's like a freedom in leaving a platform behind like I think of my like Myspace account and I'm like I'm okay with that not being attached to my

current person do you know what I mean like in a weird sense the siloed effects of web 2 allow you to leave identities behind which can be good I think to grow and change in what we're building like do we have the ability to leave your identity behind like I mean I guess I guess so but it's this is something where it's like if you own it and it's attached to you we can carry it with us everywhere like can we still opt out well I I think sorry random yeah I think that's a good point but I would say like in this data ownership model we can do something even cooler which is that we can have multiple simultaneous data profiles at

once so you can own all your your data and at any given point in time you can choose who you want to be so you can set certain profiles of like oh I'm at ZK Summit I want to be this person like let me show this data let me surface this data when I interact with people uh let's say like I have this like digital fairmon set up my digital fairmon are tied to my ZK conference profile right but then I go home I go back to my friends and I want to go like hang out uh with people maybe I put on a different profile and because I'm in control of my data I get to choose who I want to be in any given moment and to me that's like a really exciting primitive that's cool I think the keyw there is choose like you have the choice with the

web two platforms like you don't have the choice you don't have the choice to leave and take your data with you you okay maybe you can create second account but like you don't really have so much choice and in web three like you have the choice to first of all change but you can also choose to kill them I mean you can burn them burn an address or like burn whatever I mean it's hard to to kill something completely but yeah choice is the key word and maybe one small rephrasing of the identity is like I feel like historically identities have been oh I'm going to collect all of these little badges that show who I am but I'm not sure that necessarily encapsulates like how we want to think about identity moving forward it can be like a weirder thing like oh like I'm

going to add aspects to profiles or or I'm going to pull this piece of data from here for this one action I'm going to do so that one action can be more relevant it's not like a badge I keep on my profile forever but it's like oh this one thing I attached to this one Anonymous speech so that that can become more relevant or in context or whatever and I don't necessarily think identity has to be this like longterm thing it can be something shortterm that you apply it can be like oh I just did this thing yesterday and therefore I'm going to tell you this thing about today and then I'm never going to think about it again I think it's when ID becomes attached to immutable ledgers though is where you start to think can you choose like isn't it somewhere and I guess if

it's private it kind of is not visible but it is Al also there forever then again I mean no my MySpace account might actually be gone I mean is MySpace still around well maybe one pitch is that you if you have an immutable Ledger this is just one of like many cryptographic tools you can use to build your applications and maybe The Ledger doesn't need to be the place where all these attestations live publicly for anybody to see maybe you just put commitments there and then if you want to delete it you just delete your the pre-image of the commitment and now nobody can reconstruct it or you use the ledgers as a place for everybody to share the verifying keys or to come to consensus on the public keys or whatever it is and like that's what these chains end up being used for and not for

actually the way people currently conceive of oh let's like throw identity into this little like token and have everybody keep it like that may not be the way that we actually use them that's cool any other thoughts from the audience curious if you guys are thinking about anything like this are you working on anything that you think is sort of in a new category or if you want to talk about anything we've talked about uh do you think that giving people choice like at some point people don't want to choose right they just want to go through a flow that like simplifies the user experience uh do you think this will be like how do you go about that how do you

think about something like that that's interesting just to rephrase are you sort of almost like are we is is there was sort of like too much power given too much control given like sometimes you just want an experience to guide you and you just want to do most most people will not like I I that's correct um and I think the like ideal situation here is you have multiple choices but each of those choices is quite opinionated and so you can choose your path but your path is still like determined on a certain personality or certain opinion or certain perspective worldview whatever you want to call it um but you

can still switch if you don't like that although that still has a lot of agency I think some maybe what you're talking about is like situations where you want less agency I feel like we're in a room full of people who want agency but but maybe but maybe you're right maybe there's I think these are a special group of people but there are reasons why there's like Bitcoin ETFs or like why certain Banks you know store your Bitcoin because people don't want to manage their keys or they don't want to manage their Investments and that's fine like I totally agree that sometimes these services are needed for helping people so that they don't have the choice I mean but it's nice to have the option like if you want to hold your keys you should be able to and I think this is

the thing that the people in this room are sort of working towards another way that I might look at this is that this layer where you have Choice doesn't have to be the application layer it can be the infrastructure layer below it and now the instead of currently the world of applications you build you have to build in a world which you have no choice oh you can build one which you have choice or you can say my users don't really seem to be like that I don't want to do that and you can now build on top of the infrastructure and have one in which there's no choice for the users and that's totally fine but at the base layer like there should be an option to have that and I think the world can look very different if users have that option at least simmering in

the background even if it's not directly exposed to them in the way that they interact with the applications but then going to that application idea like if you think about how applications tend to get built and how also they tend to get fun funded one of the questions will always be like what is the moat so like they're building to hold you there that's what they're they're trying to do it's part of their business model it's part of like what makes them competitive so I wonder if like yeah it's almost like as a crowd like there that there'll still be a gravitation towards applications that make a lot of it easy and then there's power in that and there's some sort of moat and you can always go around it but the same way

you could always run your own like what is it you can run your own website off your own server sitting in your house or something I think you can do that I I've never done that but you know what I mean like I think you can do those things but they become so unpopular and like everyone else is over here now and there's more power in being in that closed Garden I just wonder how we really break out of that like it is crazy that Twitter and like those platforms still like they still capture us like all of us I gave you hashtag to tweet like we're not away from it yet we don't like it I mean most we're not like into it but we can't seem to jump to anything else but I think this is like again this The Stadium versus the bar is

like now if it's easier if it's easier to build something like you know if it's easier to build a bar than it is to build a stadium then people are going to build bars and you know if you can tear it down quickly people will do it and I think because of the sort of Open Source nature and whatever replicability or composability of programmable crypto generally this makes this sort of yeah the bar building easier and so and I think like it should be I mean a lesson for all of us to build the tools that allow people to build the bars and not like I mean always in cryptography when

people talk I mean yeah like again another conversation earlier was like how like even if you have a PhD in cryptography you can't verify that all of this code is correct like I mean so at some point yeah you need to make sure it's open and composable and the people can build I would also say that uh if these things are easy to build they can also become like the default path can then be technological to resolve these and not legislative like we notice you know oh now there's all these cookie Banner rules and the solution to the cookie Banner rules can either be add a bunch of banners to your page or it can be use NPC for analytics so that you don't actually see the analytics or the individual user data and now even though you have cookie Banner legislation it's

solved the problem by pushing us towards a more cryptographic technological friendly solution and we could do the really hard path of okay let's like really get super screwed by all of these things and then build legislation to stop it and then come back to the technological solutions that allow us to keep the flows we want or we could skip all that legislation little Loop and then just say okay what what is the actual technological endgame can we build this now can we at least build the tools that allow us to build that later I want to go back to your what you were saying about the bars um because actually as you were saying that's something I realized is like I think there needs to be something so like the social aspect the fact that what is a bar it's like it's a group of friends

that meet often but there's a size to it it's not like yes you could have like the threepers bar the dive bar or the I don't know dungeons Dragons game or something like it could be the smallest group but I think you think of those it's Community it's about like where are people and that kind of going back to that idea of like if everyone goes to the big app even if it's a d app even if it's on a decentralized thing it's all owned by something somehow or or or could be captured like I think what you have to build are these Alternatives but they have to be they cannot just be like solo Solo webcaster solo blogger like if you look in history you know yes you had power you could you

had agency but if you were sort of stuck on your own in a desert like eventually most people just sort of drift off but if you could keep some sort of community like if you could keep people still stuck together around something or in something or at a bar then it might work any I think that uh relates to one of the like most important questions here which is how to like how to fund these types of projects right that's the elephant in the room it's like how do you provide a sustainable funding model for apps that provide a ton of value to maybe a smaller group of users traditionally funding is designed for apps that just Target everyone um and

we've seen how that turns out and I think like it we like a lot of teams have still yet to figure out if you want to build the bars if you don't want to build the stadiums um but for the people who go to the bars like that is really important to them and that matters a lot to them how can you still build a sustainable entity around that I think there was a question over here or a comment this one on um just a general question like how do you see ZK interfacing with AI now I'm investing in AI infrastructure and I've done a lot of investing in ZK in the past I'm interested in your thoughts it gets thrown around a lot around things like proving computation on graphs um proving

provence of data and ZK is like thrown around a lot in that space But you guys are the experts I want to hear where do you see the real applications today ZKA AI yeah yeah I think the kind of canonical examples you see are usually around like proving that a model I you did correctly or proving that you trained on some private data correctly or proving that you ran inference on somebody's private input correctly um but I think there's like also another side to these which is not actually about the like training or inference of the model but is about the like verification of the outputs which is like oh like how do I verify whether this thing this image that I'm seeing online came from an AI generated model

or not and then oh now like the thing that cryptography does best which is like Providence and adding unforgeability like one of the things that AI cannot generate like you cannot generate a fake digital signature you can generate almost anything else you can generate pretty convincing looking text but you can't get 26 bits of entropy out of a 4005 billion model or whatever and so this becomes then one of the defenses that we have against oh like can we verify whether this text came from an AI or a human can we verify what this image came from an AI or a human and you can bake a lot of this cryptographic techniques into the models and then help ensure or into the model outputs and help ensure that okay like a camera is going to sign this thing came from the camera and therefore I know

that it could not possibly have been generated by the AI and so you can I think a lot of the the thinking around AI also can be around like not just oh how do we like get privacy around the training or the inference but oh how can we like get clarity around the Providence yeah there's been I mean I think it was in early 2023 there was like a group like a zkl group that was founded and a lot of ideas were thrown around and I think there was a moment of a lot of excitement around it and it sort of chilled out but I've been left with this and but I I don't know if I can Define it that well but it is that like things like ZK and MPC they they almost add this like human protection thing like against some of

the AI stuff maybe for a while I don't know if it's forever because AI is pretty smart maybe they'll figure out a way around it but like in the in the uh short term it seemed like just coming out of those conversations that ZK could be a guard rail maybe cryptography certain kinds of cryptography could be guard rails to what this thing could do just to help the human brain decipher like in the case of Providence or to help look inside what's happening when it's very opaque system yeah at a at a fundamental level like if you think about AI as an extremely enabling technology it allows you to do all these especially generative AI being able to like just

create things on a whim cryptography in the spirit of adding hardness directly is a remedy for that hopefully hopefully all right I think we're getting the nod we're getting the signal that I think that the event is meant to wrap up really soon um thank you guys for this panel uh talking about some future ZK applications I have a bunch of notes things that I want to explore um thank you all for joining for ZK Summit 12 and for coming for speaking for being part of this thank you all thank you yeah a dozen um maybe just a quick

note there I think we don't have it up on the screen but there is this Afterparty happening tonight there's a ton of side events happening tomorrow please do sign up for them um I think the teams are like they're kind of calculating how much how many spots they have based on who signed up I know some there's also sort of an assumption that people are just going to show up but it's better if you do sign up actually cool okay thanks everybody see you soon