Episode Summary
In this episode of Web3Magic, I talk with Simon Brown as he shares his experiences and insights from his time at Devconnect-Istanbul and his involvement in the crypto space.
He discusses the value of spending time in hacker houses and the importance of meeting and collaborating with people in the industry.
Fair warning - this is a bit more tech-heavy episode, and you may feel like you need to research some terms and projects to get the complete understanding of what's being discussed.
Simon also highlights the topics of network abstraction, account abstraction, identity, and reputation as areas of interest and growth in the crypto space. He mentions projects such as Verax and EAS that are pioneering the field of on-chain attestations. Simon emphasizes the need for continuous work (and no time for complacency) on decentralization in Ethereum and the ongoing work in measuring and maintaining decentralization. He encourages listeners to explore projects like Ceramic and Intuition, focusing on off-chain attestations.
Takeaways
Spending time in hacker houses and collaborating with others in the industry can be valuable for networking, brainstorming ideas, and sometimes even making ideas a reality!
Network abstraction and account abstraction are important topics to explore in the crypto space.
Identity and reputation are areas of growth and development in the crypto industry.
Projects like Verax and EAS are pioneering the field of on-chain attestations.
Video Episode player
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:12 The Value of Hacker Houses
05:14 Exploring Network Abstraction and Account Abstraction
06:56 The Importance of Identity and Reputation
11:26 Projects in the Identity and Reputation Space
14:30 The Need for Decentralization in Ethereum
18:31 Highlighting the Verax and EAS Projects
20:07 Focus on Attestations and Off-Chain Attestations
21:16 Conclusion
Transcript
BFG: 1:11
Hello, hello everyone, welcome to the next episode of Web3Magic. I'm here today with Simon Brown. I met Simon in Istanbul. Hi, simon, hey and he. I would say Simon caught my eye because you know he was. He was not doing a typical conference visit like running through lectures or anything he basically spent most of the time talking to people. I liked, as he put it, that he spends. He likes to spend time around hacker houses, and so I thought it would be fun to have Simon on on the show and let him talk about. You know his impressions from Istanbul, from people and projects he met, which are most likely not projects which were on stage, which you can check anywhere you want, but you know those other guys which you wouldn't probably see or meet unless you spend the time in co-working and around hacker houses like Simon did. So I'm happy, happy to have you here. Simon. Can you tell us? Just a brief start, as always, like how did you get to crypto?
Simon : 2:25
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on, and it's great to find out about your podcast, so I'm looking forward to kind of subscribing and listening to more shows. So how did I first get into crypto? I think it was about four, about four years ago, five years ago, wow, yeah. So I was working in Fidelity Investments at the time, actually as a UI engineer building out their complex UIs for their trading applications, and it was around 2017. And I discovered Ethereum and just got totally pilled. I just got completely obsessed. It was the whole notion of like being able to launch a business which is like a few keystrokes on a computer keyboard and, you know, you could launch something that could accept money, I could send money, it could, you know, could organize things, and the fact that you could do it without a lawyer, without a bank loan, without contracts, and just the fact that there was like basically no barrier to entry, you know, it just really captured my imagination. So I started teaching like workshops and stuff on, just like free workshops for people to come to to learn how to build decentralized applications, and they started proving quite popular, because at the time, 2017 was a bit of a bull run and there was a lot of curiosity around Ethereum. Anyway, that led to a job in their R&D research center in their blockchain incubator team, which was a fantastic experience and I was really grateful to get that experience. So that was like three years and I was doing bits of research, but mostly I was a full stack developer building out prototypes, and over that three years I got more and more into the research, wanted to do it more. So I joined Consensus about almost two years ago and now I just kind of focus on research and advising various different teams and trying to kind of get projects off the ground and stuff like that.
BFG: 4:27
I see, I see some very cool and like a long journey and now I now I get why you like Hacker houses, because you're basically yeah by heart I do.
Simon : 4:40
It's funny, you know it's kind of ironic that you've asked me to kind of come and talk about DevConnect. I went to one talk in DevConnect. That was like the whole conference. I managed to make it to one talk and not you know it's I think I missed out on a lot of really good talks and a lot of really interesting information. But I find a great deal of value of actually meeting people and just kind of brainstorming and just jamming and riffing on ideas. It was the same in the ECC back in July. I spent like $400 or something to get a ticket. I didn't even make it in the door, it's like, didn't even make it into the conference. But yeah, I was just hanging around in Hacker houses, hanging around it like meeting individual people and kind of brainstorming and doing whiteboarding and stuff and it's. It's great to see that. I remember, like at ECC, I was at Jesse's Hacker house. We were in like this Just behind like in the yard, behind some building in France, and we were just like discussing ideas. There was like 20 people there and we were talking about one idea for something called Verax. At the time we didn't have a name. That came months later but it was an idea for non-chain attestation registry and like that again, there's about 20 people just drawing the idea around and like six months later I think it was six months we're deployed on chain as a quarter of a million attestations. There's like five different teams maintaining it. So it's great to see that you know from inception all the way to the project. That's where I really, that's what I really enjoy, I see, I see.
BFG: 6:19
So natural flow of question is OK. So what are the ideas which caught your imagination in Istanbul? Because we can talk about them, probably in six months, being a project.
Simon : 6:33
Yeah, I mean, if you ask every person, they probably have a different answer for you. I think the space is so big now but there's so much happening. It's impossible for one person to know everything that's happening. It's just totally impossible. Some of the things are really and that I'm really enthusiastic about for next year are one is network abstraction and how we're going to handle that. How do what's the intersection between wallets and different like networks? When I say networks, I mean ecosystems, like you know, start net ecosystem, the optimism super chain, you know all of these various different kind of ecosystems and like how did the layer threes communicate with each other? How does it look like from the user's perspective? Is it really interesting question? So I'm looking forward to seeing how that evolves and how, like, account abstraction continues to evolve. What is it going to look like once we have like real adoption and what are the dynamics of a unified mempool for ERC 4337? And how does that relate on layer two and layer three? As I said, the network abstraction that's a really interesting area. The thing that I'm most interested in is probably identity and reputation, which has sort of been baking my noodle for the past like six months. I think next year is going to be the year for identity and reputation and what that means, and what's built on top of those, those primitives that have been built this year.
BFG: 8:08
I see, yeah, well, you know, actually I had the same feeling from you know. Devconnect when I came back from Istanbul. So when I went there I actually hoped I will hear a lot about identity and and also like communication and some security things which I think are like longstanding problems. But I think I heard a lot more about identity than I expected. It seemed that it's an area which is moving forward and which is fast and, you know, captured minds of many people, I know you wrote a really long article on that so I'll definitely link to it. Is there anything which stands out around the identity Like have you met anybody who has, like a unique look at it, who is planning to build on the project you mentioned? Anything which stands out from that space?
Simon : 9:07
Yeah, there's a few things that do stand out from that space. First of all, I agree with you that there was like a lot more enthusiasm and interest and curiosity about identity reputation than I had anticipated. I went to DevConnect and I was really pleasantly surprised by the amount of energy in like focused on that area at the moment, but in terms of really interesting projects that stand out from me, there's like code, like technology, which is technology that's derived from TLS Notary. So TLS Notary is a technology that must be. I don't know. It's been around for years and right now it's been built out by the Privacy and Scaling Exploration Group in the Ethereum Foundation. So that's the group that Barry Whitehead leads. I think there's about 80 people in that group. It's like the biggest group in the EF and they do incredible work. So they are kind of spearheading the research and development into TLS Notary. And there's a whole bunch of projects that have different flavors of that idea. And the idea is simple you basically co-sign a HTTPS session and that allows you to drive data that's certified from that session that you can bring anywhere else. So, to put it simply, if you log onto your web browser, you know you see that little padlock at the top of the screen and that means that you've got an encrypted connection between you and the server In order to do that. There's like a kind of a handshake and your browser and the computer. They come to an agreement and what you know cipher they're going to use and then they generate keys and they swap keys and they do all this kind of stuff. So there's a way to if you install a browser extension, that part of the key can be created by your browser and the other part can be created by this other browser extension. And what that allows you to do is, effectively, you can prove what's on the web browser. You can say, basically, this web browser had this piece of text in it and it was signed by a certificate that was issued to whoever Googlecom or Facebookcom or Amazoncom and then you can create a zero knowledge proof from that. And that means when you bring that zero knowledge proof to a smart contract, for example, a smart contract can say Amazon said this and it's completely verifiable because it's cryptographic all the way back to the certificate authority issue to Amazoncom. And so there's like a half a dozen different teams looking at that and pioneering it. There's Reclaim protocol, there's Pado Labs, there's Kink, there's who am I missing? Zk, pass D-auth are doing a flavor of it for authentication. I think they're slightly different, but they're all kind of doing something similar. The use cases and the design space is sort of unlimited. You can take any data from any API connection or web browsing session, anything, and then you can bring it on chain and then you can interact with whatever logic and whatever smart contract exists on chain. So the most immediate use cases are civil resistance, but beyond that it can be. Basically it's about taking ownership of your data All of the data that's locked in silos and Facebook, google, apple, whatever that you have to kind of get permission for other people to access. Now you can just take it and bring whatever you want. So that's what I'm most excited about, and those six projects I mentioned are pioneering that area and doing amazing things.
BFG: 12:55
Right, I think I remember at least part of those names are also working with on Verax, right On VAT stations.
Simon : 13:05
Yeah, a lot of them are actually. Actually, some of them are building Verax. So Clique and Paddle Labs are both building out Verax. They're like the core contributors to the project and they already have tens of thousands of AT stations on chain. So, for example, clique are doing cool things where they're allowing gamers to prove how many hours they've played on different types of games on Steam, which gets them access to promotions and stuff on chain. Paddle Labs allow you to prove, for example, you've passed a certain verification level on a centralized exchange. So, for example, you can say the owner of this wallet address has passed verification level three, which is full KYC on Binance. So now any smart contract can say the owner of this address has passed KYC and now are legally compliant to give them underclutter-alized lending or whatever it is, and that's a big deal. And we saw all the noise about kind of point-based doing something similar with EAS Paddle. We're doing it with basically every single exchange. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to seeing what they're doing next.
BFG: 14:24
Wow, that's impressive. Okay, so it was actually a lot deeper dive into reputation things than I expected, yeah it's quite a wrap, unfortunately. I assume that's basically most of what's on your mind for the next year, right? How are the identity projects going to progress?
Simon : 14:56
Yeah. I always have. I always end up being distracted by different interesting problems. I'm an easy person to nerds snipe, so I mean, identity and reputation is definitely a rabbit hole. I'm still falling down. I think that, like keeping an eye on the decentralization in Ethereum, is really important as well. I think that's something we always have to be vigilant about. The worst thing we can do is be complacent. So one of the projects that I want to get more involved in next year is collaborating with different people who are interested in measuring the effective level of decentralization across Ethereum. So I did some research on that this year and published a paper on it, but I think there's more work to be done. So that's a very, very interesting area, because Ethereum changes every year. This year we've got a lot more people using Layer 2s. I think that's going to increase next year but Layer 2s themselves are going to change in their character and their nature depending on how decentralized they become. Many of them are starting plans to decentralize a sequencer, decentralize a prover, move to share sequencers. And then we have SWAV is coming online. We've seen DA layers like Celestia, so so this time next year, Ethereum will be very different to the way it is today, which is the same every year. So that's an area that I have an interest in as well, kind of more of a hobby horse, but something I'll definitely be doing more work and clever as well next year.
BFG: 16:40
I see that's great. I hope you can send me a link to the paper you published on the Ethereum decentralization. I'd love to share it, yeah, if it's okay. And so I joined the I think it was Saturday. There was a censorship what the fuck? I think censorship, wtf. And there was a lot of talk about, you know, the resistance, which is not that ideal as it used to be, because the decentralization of different levels of Ethereum is not 100% ideal also. So it was a little bit surprising for me because, you know, it wasn't nerding on the decentralization that much. It was more thinking about like security and governance in general.
Simon : 17:33
It's like how much money.
BFG: 17:35
you have to have to basically buy 51% and then slay the vote. So that was totally new to me and I have almost finished article about this.
Simon : 17:49
I look forward to reading it. I mean, that was the one that was the one for you.
BFG: 17:54
It's going to be very high level.
Simon : 17:57
That was the one event I really wanted to go to. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay on the Saturday night for personal reasons how to fly out and I want to watch all the videos from that day. I think you know Tina from FlashBots especially. She's fantastic at getting people together and actually discussing like really important things, and so hats off to her for organizing that event. Yeah, yeah, that it is a topic that I'm glad. The event was great, it was very interesting.
BFG: 18:28
Yeah, I definitely recommend watching it. I think you know the talks were really cool Not too long, but you know a lot of them and so it was. Yeah, they were definitely. I'm sure you will find topics which go light you up. It was, you know, eye opening for me for the most part, but for you it's probably going to be a deeper dive, a notch maybe, for some some topics. So is there because I think we are coming to the time when you need to run Is there any specific topic which you would like to highlight, any special project you would like to shout out, either from Istanbul or you know anything from this year, because we are almost at Christmas, it's like, you know, almost end of the year.
Simon : 19:24
So, hmm, let me think about that for a second. Looking back over the year, yeah, I think like the biggest project that was going to shout out it's going to be for Verax and EAS as well. I think at the start of this year. I mean, I knew about the whole idea of on chain attestations and I had been following the attestation station and not to mism. But EAS have really evangelized the whole idea hugely and I now I think it's like a topic that people are generally interested in and a lot of that goes goes down to kind of like their efforts and kind of evangelizing in. So hats off to them. Yeah, definitely credit where credit's due. They've done great work. Verax as well Very interesting, and it's great to see it evolve as more teams join the project. So those are the that's the kind of area and the use cases that we built on top of it that are most interesting for next year. I think we're going to see some really exciting stuff.
BFG: 20:31
Okay, very cool. Yeah, I, you know, have to read more of their activity. Definitely. It looks like it did a lot of work in a relatively short time, and definitely true about attestations. I keep hearing about it from left to right Basically anyone I talked to before the whole. After the podcast, we somehow end up one way or the other around the station and just as I'm talking about it.
Simon : 21:03
if people are interested in attestations, you know EAS have a lot of information on it- there's a lot of development, but it's kind of going to be interesting as well to see it evolve. But there's also, like other, kind of focused on off chain attestations. So if people are interested, check out ceramic and check out intuition who are building as well as right they're going to be. There's going to be a lot more attention on them next year as well. So if you're interested in that area, I would definitely recommend checking out those projects.
BFG: 21:38
Awesome, awesome. There was a guest I think it was David from Joe Grace who actually mentioned intuition, and I think I met someone from intuition on the first day and have connect, because there was an event which ceramic organized and it was Monday rep connect or something. So it was definitely interesting. I will keep my eye on them. Thank you very much for your time and we had to squeeze it into your schedule, but thanks a lot. It was pleasure meeting you and I hope to see you soon again.
Simon : 22:16
Absolutely yeah, keep in touch and thanks for having me on the show. It's been a pleasure.
BFG: 22:23
Thank you.
Links To My Guest
Here are some of the links to the things that Simon mentioned during our chat. It's more than comprehensive, so I recommend you take it slow and enjoy!
This is the TL;DR for the research paper Simon published about measuring decentralization in Ethereum:
Simon's recent article about reputation value chain:
A previous post, which was the first Simon's attempt at trying to grapple with the complexity of the decentralized identity space:
Here are the teams that were mentioned doing cool things with creating attestations using ZKPs (Zero-Knowledge-Proofs):
- https://www.reclaimprotocol.org/
- https://zkpass.org/home
Here are some of the other off-chain attestation protocols worth checking out:
Here are the on-chain attestation registries (that I know of)
- https://ver.ax/ ( still in development )
Simon's Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/orbmis
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