ZKV presents ... Privacy on Polkadot: Fireside Chat with Anna Rose, Fabian Gompf and Dieter Fishbein

Transcript

[Music] for this particular talk the idea was we want to paint the picture of privacy on polka dot today from kind of a high level from like a look into the ecosystem overall and i think i have two fantastic guests to do this with we have fabi from parity and dieter from web3 foundation do you both want to maybe say a word everyone just met me in the previous session but maybe you want to say a quick word about what you do uh sure yeah i can go first can you get can you hear me well we hear you good yeah that's awesome um

yeah so i'm uh i'm like an early employee at parity so i moved the company for like four to five years i'm kind of uh started in the ethereum days when we primarily build paired ethereum now open ethereum and then uh kind of like have helped build uh like polka dots kind of like from a paper to now like the actual technology and the ecosystem and and all around that uh and yeah i'm still a parody primarily looking after after the adoption efforts well i i run ecosystem development at the web 3 foundation i haven't been around as long as fobby it's very difficult to beat

uh five years in the polka dot ecosystem but but i joined a a couple years ago and did a lot of different uh non-crypto things prior to that although i did do a cryptography graduate degree at one point which which originally got me interested into the space but then kind of went on and did a lot of other stuff before before actually joining so i want to take us back to an event that so i think it was december 2019 before all of the you know lockdown happened i actually helped out a polka dot event it was sub-zero one it was the second sub-zero event and back then there was i think there was only one privacy focused talk and it

was on tes and i remember learning that there was like a little burgeoning t-e-e ecosystem so te is for anyone who doesn't know it's a sort of another privacy technology that relies more on the trusted execution environment of like hardware and it's quite different from zk it's somehow like sometimes people in each camp might not like the others approach but it is a privacy tech and i'm i guess like why the question i have is why back then were teas exciting and what maybe has happened in terms of privacy since then yeah i mean i i can this is my thing back right so uh maybe other

people have have different answers for it but i so if you think back so this is like subs the first sub-zero is like 16-19 i think yeah yeah yeah sub zero one so this was the second one the second one yeah yeah yeah i think it's like end of 2019 or something like that so this is like very this is early days for for substrate right so like anyone who's built on substrate then uh if they're still around like i don't think they're that many lines of code that are still the same right and the underlying tech has changed a lot and and um so you know it's not there isn't why we did have like these first pioneers on it i think it was

primarily people that were attracted by like cool tech not necessarily like business opportunity or you know this is also deep in the in the winter right of crypto so it's definitely like a different different crowd um but i actually think that uh i'd be interested if you have a different perspective on this editor but i think like early grants and showcases around tes that were there so there's like specifically i think the project you're talking about is substrate te is still around i think it's renamed since um but uh that became like a showcase that other people inspired by okay like this is this is how you can use t tech on substrate and then from there there's a couple of projects that spun

out part of the explanation i think the other part of the explanation is also tes bringing something into production with tes around privacy tends to be easier than doing it at the zero knowledge path right so um uh you know it's not too far away that you know thinking that that's also a reason why a lot of people maybe jumped onto that first so it almost sounds like for more zk tech or and and i think that has actually happened since then but like what needed to happen were a few key projects that got some visibility maybe where people could like understand a use case using one of these technologies

and some of the foundational tech is built and then that kind of can encourage more projects to jump in yeah i think so and it's actually it's the power of defaults right like if you if you let's say one of the initial substrate tutorials uh like mentions tes or is like an example of like how you can use te then uh you know a whole class of substrate developers like that's what they're seeing initially right um there's certainly things like that that that went on it's like when you look into this poker ecosystem oh there's a lot of te stuff um so you know maybe go down that route to explore stuff but there wasn't anything in the tech really that

that you know that would have dictated that yeah i want to know i want to look a little bit over the last three months because i mean just recently i had you fabi on the show and we talked a little bit about like this booming ecosystem i want to talk maybe generally about like the number of projects overall to try to understand like how z because i know there's a bunch of new zk focused or privacy projects but i want to sort of understand first this larger picture dieter maybe you want to say a few words on that yeah yeah of course um i think in the last three months i mean what we've seen is the number of projects that's obviously gone up and it really really just keeps going up

um if you look at where we stand now in terms of projects building on polka dot there's over 400 projects building on on on the tech stack in some way i mean this doesn't just count parachain projects but also basically anything within you know what we call the polka dot tech stack which uh includes polka dot includes parrot chains but also includes like all the pieces of infrastructure to really enable application development in a in a decentralized and you know positive and really rewarding way so about 130 140 of these projects are building substrate-based chains which we hope end up being paired chains and i

think probably the majority of them will um so that's like at a high level what what the state of like people building or projects building on polka dot looks like um in the last three months like we don't actually we don't do a very good job of tracking this change but there is like one one good very simple to do we just have to kind of do it but there's one what we do track though are um applications to the substrate builders program which i think give a good proxy for how this has increased in the last three months or so and so there's been a total of and for those of you who don't know the substrate builders program is our basically

it's like a an evergreen accelerator in a way where that that's hosted by parity and really tries to give um a high amount of support from like the technical beauty side and other areas to say the top 30 percent of teams building in the polka dot ecosystem um and we've seen 60 applications to this program in the last three months or so for a total of i think like 250 or 260 applications also since the second sub-zero okay so that's kind of a nice a nice number for how the ecosystem's been growing how like what

is the focus of many of these projects i'm kind of trying to get a picture of like what is the most popular topics that people are applying on like four yeah i i kind of imagine privacy might not be in that top ranking but i want to kind of understand what is there because maybe there's a way for more to be incorporated totally i mean i think to nobody's surprise when you actually break down that number the biggest category is is defy but to me it's actually like not quite as big as you would think at least when you're comparing it to other layer other base layer ecosystems basically so i think like if you look at the

substrate builders program which has like 60 i think roughly 60 pair chain and application teams on it about a third of them are and then there's really not like a massive other category but there's probably like this tale of mid-size and smaller categories as well and i think like the next runner-ups you see our identity uh gaming and nft platforms which has become super super popular in the last little while but then also privacy is probably like third or fourth okay i mean it's also tricky it's also tricky too right because privacy sometimes goes hand in hand with

other areas right uh it's not just privacy as a service but it can be like a defy focused privacy preserving application yeah or even like you can include maybe one small part as private but that you wouldn't even be on the marketing pitch you also have sometimes dkp is used for all sorts of other reasons like compression or file point it turns out like uses tons of snarks but it's not a privacy project necessarily yeah exactly so when i say privacy like it's a bit of a judgment call sometimes where we actually categorize these projects got it do you think um like do you think that there's some challenges when it comes to privacy and polka dot like we just

talked about one thing about how maybe there weren't early example projects other than te projects so that's i mean in a way what we're seeing is like having those front and center maybe would help to push it so that would be like maybe a social or business side but are there any yeah are there any challenges to getting more privacy on the on the actual network even maybe on a technical front uh so i would say i mean there aren't any like inherent technical limitations to privacy on polka dot uh or substrate um you know that would go beyond the technical limitations i i mean the biggest technical

limitation privacy on on pokedot is it's a public blockchain right so like stuff needs to be clarified and things like that um but that's not you know that's not unique to polka dot i'd say if anything substrate gives you know if something is a very high degree of technical freedom generally in blockchain development uh it allow for use cases that are much more difficult to do on on something like ethereum or really any other like more static more homogeneous kind of blockchain system um yeah the biggest limitation to zero knowledge applications specifically um aren't technical they are more they come from the primary

use cases of ck technology which are scaling and privacy right so like if you take the scaling use case scaling isn't a pressure pressing issue in polka dot yet right like it's inherent it's out there uh purges aren't life yet there's not like you know it's not like you could say there's too much going on there's currently really nothing going on so it's not like people jump in and build 2k rollups all the time right because it's not yet a pressing issue uh so that that's one part of the equation and then the other part is if you think about the privacy aspect of it right like unfortunately if you think about like human innovation and progress i think privacy often takes a backseat right so yeah you see that generally in

how we develop web applications it's more about convenience and use cases and so on than about use of privacy at least at the beginning and then it takes a while till people you know understand it and we see the same thing in polka dot like the the first thing if there's nothing isn't privacy that people are jumping on it's let's build stable coins let's go back let's get some user and users in here and then we can think about the privacy of these users like uh after that so it's also part part of it is just maturity of the project which you know slowly these kind of themes are catching up [Music] um i kind of first of all i want to i want to say to everyone who's listening feel free to also add

your own thoughts on anything we're talking about in the chat because i'd also be curious to hear from the builder's perspective what if they see any challenges um one of the thoughts i had here is like generally the palettes like the zk focused palettes like currently as i understand it they're mostly coming from the community so like it is community built tell me if i'm wrong here but like is there is there is there a way that this is being decided on or encouraged no like yeah yeah uh not not from i think like the parity or web 3 side in terms of product right like i mean one thing about what we try to do is we try to make

a very low friction high quality environment for application and pair chain development and we don't really take an opinionated view as to we want team x to do this or i mean and to varying since this is true like there are certain things that obviously we really want on polka dot um but but i think all the development of the privacy sphere like it's not like somebody's kind of there behind the scenes saying we want a lot of these pallets being developed um so i think when you when you look at these pallets they're developed by projects who have a specific product in mind that being said and i think i saw al in the audience so i would love for him to to weigh in on

this um i i do think there's you know within web3 research there is a strong desire for you know having good like privacy primitives on polka dot and on substrate so that really interesting products can be developed that incorporate good privacy features but that's not like a you know that's far from an active product approach from ireland i kind of wonder like how would one push for that like given our role as the xero validator like what what can we kind of do to encourage more of that is is it is it sort of an education question because one one point i want to make is privacy as an afterthought is very common we hear that all the time but

adding privacy on non-private systems is also kind of a like a dumb approach to privacy because you're you have no you've lost your privacy so pulling it back is a lot harder than having it from the start so yeah i'm just kind of wondering like what what could we do also as a community maybe to push for more of this i think it would be really like something that i've never felt quite comfortable with is like where where does the demand exist for privacy like we all say we want privacy there's a lot of like interesting general privacy as a service frameworks um but like where are users actually willing to pay for privacy right now

and where are users actually willing to trade off usability for privacy like these are questions that i really struggle with and like to what degree is that trade-off actually valid right and so it's not easy to answer those questions but i think if the community or if someone in the community can get like a really good idea of how that looks then then there can be products out there that that really do a lot better things and fill a niche cool and we do actually later today have this session which is like privacy and business and defy and like how maybe you can make a business you doing or like including privacy so yeah do do check that out later if people want to join in on that

conversation um i have kind of like a last category a topic that i want to touch on here which is about like the current state of this bull market and funding and there i mean there's there is a lot of opportunities for funding so i'm kind of like what should teams know and what should they yeah what should they know from both of you about like what's out there if if you have an idea you have a project what kind of support is there i think just generally go ahead fabi yeah i just i also wanted to make a very general point i think my very general point is

like if money is not the problem right if money is not not the bottleneck anymore the thing that becomes the bottleneck is talent so whatever you can get do to get talent into the polka dot ecosystem and i mean that in the broadest sense right it could be uh from like researchers to engineers to like product people from like founders to interns like it really doesn't matter like there's enough ideas and opportunity in the popular ecosystem and there's enough funding right so like what's the next thing really is smart people were willing to do it right um i mean you did the zka jobs fair and all right which i think like thinking about like initiatives that really help right i think that's what really helps right is it's getting as more people interested in it and

showing them that path that that exists that's actually um you know relatively low friction currently uh considering to other times past times in the blockchain space when you wanted to start something or get hired someone it's true it sounds like yeah money isn't which is not the bottleneck but there aren't enough people doing it are there are there projects that like i don't know web3 foundation or parody work on to encourage more builders in general that we should know about yeah i i mean i think the grants program is kind of the one of the quintessential programs here that's been around for

for quite a long time i mean over two years now um which basically funds like specific uh open source software development and i know like several of the teams that are presenting today have have hopefully had good experiences around that program i mean that certainly gives like some money to get started but then there's also more holistic programs like the substrate builders program which i alluded to earlier which is basically much more focused on giving like tailored structured support to teams not just funding specific deliverables but taking them from like a piece of tech to a sustainable business business that's solving problems in adding value

um these are two examples i mean the whole ecosystem and business development team is really just focused working on that so there's a lot of a lot of different stuff i wonder like going even to that earlier phase and so we will mention this like we have a plan to do a zk focused hackathon i think it's now time there's enough tools there's enough projects that it's going to be like possible i always i wanted to do it years ago but i wasn't able to but i'm wondering like from the from the actually polka dot community itself like are there ways for people to dive in to even this kind of thing or do you feel like the palettes need to come first does the tech need to like reach a point before people

can actually start building this kind of on their own before they have funding before they have a team before they're like eligible really for the builders program is there any ideas around that i mean you know also this like i think as an individual developer like there's certainly ways to to get into it right like even something like grants you can i mean there's a lot of individual developers that's build small components and get some money for it or same same under treasury or with bounties on on on so um even programs for that i would say right that support that if you think about like let's say building a privacy-focused parrot chain you you will need some funding and a team right like it's very unlikely that

you as a one-man you know will build something that uh that uh if you if you if you build on that level and in the tech stack um i still think like the best way to get into it because it is you know there's a lot of different teams building on it and there isn't necessarily like the ck hub for pokedot where like all the news are on and then all the tech is or whatever it's like either talk to anyone at parity web 3 like like theater or me or talk to um to the teams that are building right like all the lightning talks that come after this talk and all the people who are actually doing it they know the other parties that that that play this game probably still the best source if you

want to get like really up-to-date what's happening talk to people in it because the ck ecosystem in polka dot it's not massive right you can easily just get to know the people um and and and understand what's up do you do you think most builders need to have like firm substrate skills plus zk skills in order to actually do this stuff or are there are there actually opportunities now and maybe it's with like future pair chains where they can use maybe existing cryptographic libraries or even existing open source tech products and start to like play with them on in a polka dot context yeah so with substrate i'd say there's

like a few skilled sets that come together right like one is certainly if you know rust that helps and certainly if you know blockchains that helps right so if uh but even just the expectation of like hey we're just looking for people who know both is obviously not what we're doing right like we're very much uh you know looking at this in terms of like great if you know one of them and we teach you the other one or you know maybe you don't know anything and you just jump into it that that's also cool you layers you can build and become invasive complexity and so on um i think the tricky part of the with the especially zero knowledge stuff is there's a lot of like then specific knowledge that goes into it as well right if you're like an applied photographer who also knows some rust

amazing right but like how many people are out there that that have that so uh i would i would never like rule it out independently from what your skill set is it just depends on what kind of learning curve you're launching yourself into yeah although as al just pointed out in the chat um in an earlier event we actually did with the cosmos community the fact is a lot of i mean the findings over there was that a lot of the cryptographic and z key libraries are actually built in rust and that's why i think there's a great connection point that could be made between these groups and i'm yeah i i'm trying to figure out if there's other things that are blocking more folks from the zk community from actually experimenting in the polka dot ecosystem and that's

where i'm wondering if it's because of the substrate build the fact that you have to kind of learn that infrastructure but maybe maybe that's just like currently and once a certain i don't know a certain development threshold is reached it won't be that complicated to just like get into it i don't know yeah i mean i it's like substrate has a learning curve right i think as everything has and like as i alluded to earlier right like this a big design principle is technical uh technical freedom which comes with usually with complexity right uh so it you that certainly exists but if you think about you know if you think about that comparing to

like you know trying to build zero knowledge stuff on on on ethereum um down the road down the line probably saves you time right because it is something where you can go much deeper under stack and actually build something from the ground up uh you know designed and optimized for uh for your ck uh use case whereas you don't have to hack around uh you know metering and whatnot in ethereum that you know that was never part of the um design of ethereum if you want so and i there's there's a question in here and maybe we've already kind of answered this but i think it's worth revisiting which is where can someone actually find the developers building or wanting to build

in substrate polka dot and let's like narrow that even further like on a privacy in a privacy way like where do people start that process of finding their teammates and finding their uh co builders yeah so i mean there's i think there's many ways but like start it um as i said talk to people like check out documentation tutorials talk to teams that are already building uh check out the grand stuff check out the treasury stuff uh check out the hackathons i think if you're specifically to your question right like uh wanting to find builders or co-founders or whatever hackathons is definitely a good place running a ton of like incubators

accelerators that's a great place to check out um as you said earlier like build this program even if you don't get in right like to like get the feedback of like hey where i'm at with my project uh a few moments here and there of work and then i can get in so even just for that feedback experience i think that's that's worth checking out um yeah and then there is a page i don't think it has a privacy tab but we have like a page on substrate.io which essentially substrate users i think substrate.io something like that um where you see like all the projects building in the substrate ecosystem and uh you can not do some wallets or those default

projects and so on i'm not sure if there's also privacy tab uh if not we should probably add one but you can essentially just find all the links and little descriptions and so on on like what are these people doing right so it's a good good place to start poking around in general just so you know like part of my our our purpose in coming here and doing this event with everyone is also to understand all of those things those places that maybe we didn't find on our first like exploration of the space places where people find their partners the hackathons and try to encourage like in the hackathon maybe a privacy track or we help to put together like we'll try to find like a privacy focused project that can like

sponsor one of those tracks or something like this um cool well i think we're at time but i want to say a big thank you to both of you for giving us this high level view and starting to like give us a sense for what maybe what the space where the space is at today but also you know where it could be and maybe some of the channels we can use to push it in the direction that we'd like to see it thanks so much anna for sure yeah cool