EthCC #7 | "The Web3 Identity Meta" - Evin McMullen

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. In the 7th episode, Disco’s Evin McMullen joins to discuss Web3 Identity and her work with VCs (Verifiable Credentials) ------ 📣Rhino. Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🚀ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌴MAKER DAO | DECENTRALIZED LENDING https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO 🔐LEDGER | SECURE STAKING https://bankless.cc/Ledger ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Evin in Paris 5:15 What’s Left to Do? 7:40 The Web3 Data Stack 12:00 The Emergent Human 15:30 Sybil Resistance 18:30 The Future of Identity 20:40 The Build Market ------ Resources: Evin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/provenauthority?s=20&t=GL1yGJyZjY92NyVIeCqfBA ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the ETH CC experience. On this particular episode, we are talking with Evan McMullen of Disco. And Disco is, of course, building off the world of off-chain verifiable credentials. We're all obsessed with soulbound token these days, but verifiable credentials are kind of the same same, but not on-chain. So Evan is a pioneer and huge advocate of what she calls "minimal disclosure," which is actually not something she calls. It's a standard set by, I believe, the Web3 Consortium, which is not something she's named, but it's actually a set of ethical standards set by some internet three-letter agency, a standards agreement committee, that talked about this idea of the least amount of personal identifiable data that is released into the world, the better, because

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  that preserves user sovereignty. So there's been this whole debate about soulbound tokens or verifiable credentials. And Evan is a firm believer of the verifiable credentials movement, and that is what she's building over at Disco, and you can just hear that in her passion. She's just a very eloquent speaker, and I think everyone has a fun time talking to her, whether it's listening to her on a podcast or just hanging out with her in real life. She seems to have everything that's ready to go in her brain. So from a content perspective, it's very, very awesome. As a content producer, I quite appreciate it. So let's go ahead and get into that very wonderful conversation with the fabulous Evan McMullen. We usually do our pre-recorded ads for the episodes like these, but since they are so short, we are speedrunning them, and so hear that cause. And we're going to start with Rocketpool.

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  Rocketpool is Ethereum's decentralized validator network where you deposit ETH and you get our ETH in return, and you can take that our ETH into DeFi. And if you run a node, you let other people deposit their ETH into your node, and you get to charge them 15% for staking rewards as payment for your node operating services. And then you can take that our ETH and use the ACROSS bridge to join over $2.3 billion in the Arbitrum ecosystem. ACROSS, of course, is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge, and one of the safest ways to bridge your hard-earned assets in the world of crypto. And of course, Arbitrum is where you want to be. With over 35,000 contracts and 1 million unique addresses, Arbitrum is leading the way into the age of blockchain. Age of rollups. You know how I know these numbers? Because I watched the Arbitrum's talk at ECC, which you should also go watch, but not before you're done watching this.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

  But when you do watch that video, make sure it's on a privacy-first browser, which is why you should be using Brave. It blocks all the browser ads, it's got a native Web3 wallet, and it puts the user first the Web3 way. You know what else puts the user first? Ledger hardware wallets and the Ledger Live ecosystem. I know Ledger is a great product because I have literally nine of them, and I have 99% of my crypto assets on my Ledger wallets. And the Ledger Live ecosystem is all you really need when it comes to living a bankless life, such as buying with fiat, swapping, and staking. But for the rest of you that are sitting on stablecoins because the market is scary right now, make sure you're using a decentralized bankless stablecoin. May I suggest DAI from Maker DAI, the most tried and tested stablecoin in existence. But with Maker, you don't have to hide your stables on the Ethereum Layer 1.

• 3:01David Hoffman?

  Maker is building DAI portals, so you can mint DAI natively across all the Layer 2s, so you can make sure that your assets don't go down another 90%, but you still get to go do all the DeFi things across the L2-verse. So I hope you use these sponsors on your quest for going bankless. And right now, I bring you my conversation with Evan McMullen. Evan, how's it going?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  GM, David, or BJ, as I guess we're saying here. Bonjour. It is wonderful to be here at ECC.

• 3:26David Hoffman?

  I'm so happy that you're going to be the person that introduces that to the bankless nation, because I have not been sharing that inside joke with all of them.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I regret nothing.

• 3:36David Hoffman?

  So since we're in Paris, instead of saying GM, we've been saying BJ for bonjour, of course.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Good morning in the local language. But of course, as we know, GM is agnostic of culture, time of day. So we love a good universal greeting.

• 3:51David Hoffman?

  Evan, how has this conference so far? We're still on day one, so there's a lot of conference left. But you've risen quickly onto the scene of being the queen of Web3 data. So how's this conference been for you?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  It has been a wonderful adventure, David. There have been a few events leading up to today. And the theme that I'm sensing throughout all of these side events and my experience of the conference so far is that we are ready for account abstraction. People are thinking about identity of the human beings who sit behind wallet addresses. So it's really wonderful to see the ecosystem coming together in service of non-financial utility, especially given this very unique opportunity we have in the build market.

• 4:31David Hoffman?

  You know, I've been thinking about all day reflecting on ECC last year, where Vitalik gave his talk about how we need to focus on non-financial use cases of blockchain. And then that was like, kind of just like an idea for six months. And then Lens Protocol came about, and then we had this resurgence in decentralized identity, and Disco has risen, come onto the scene. And so like, a year later, we're finally doing the thing that Vitalik talked about a year ago. And so, like, there's so much unpacked in the last like year and the lessons that we've learned. But also Vitalik's giving a talk again on Thursday in two days. So I'm thinking, I'm hoping he's like, kind of helps us nudge that even further.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  Because we all seem to be perpetually behind Vitalik by about like six to 12 months. But how much more is there left to do in the world of non-financial use cases of blockchains? How much left is there to build?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Most of it. Most of it. I think, you know, so obviously, we know public blockchains are a really wonderful place for data that has a double spend problem, that requires global public availability in perpetuity, you know, until the heat death of the universe. But for all other kinds of data for which that is not optimal, we need to build a similarly rich ecosystem to what we can enjoy with smart contracts and on-chain interactions. So, love Vitalik's foresight. I take issue with the fact that he canceled Kim Kardashian last ECC, but like, it's fine. But I, yeah, I think it's a really wonderful moment for us to come together, not only as the Ethereum ecosystem, but also to find common ground with other based chains that are reaching the ceiling of fun and utility that you can enjoy with only public data.

• 6:08David Hoffman?

  I was talking to Stani earlier today, and one of the things we were focused on is like, we've got like this blockchain tech stack that everyone is generally familiar with, right? We got the Ethereum layer one, we got all these layer twos, we got ZK rollups, we got optimistic rollups, we got application-specific chains. But also, in completely separate to that, we have this new stack that's coming about, and it's like this data stack, where we have like file storage, we have like ceramic network, which I'm not actually sure how to classify that. So that's the first question to you, is what the hell is ceramic and how do you classify it? But then we also have like Disco, which is like the top-level funnel for all of these things. Can you just like, share your, like, your vision or your vision for like this tech stack that's being built in parallel to all of our blockchain stacks?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  So I would say the way we make this cake is hardware, network, infrastructure, application.

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  Beautiful.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  And so when, in that infrastructure layer, which is like the very substantial center of the cake, that is going to be where our data goes to sleep at night. So teams like Ceramic are building decentralized storage that we at Disco use in a manner encrypted against the user's keys, so they're in ownership and control of that data. But what this allows for is increased censorship resistance, so you don't have a centralized authority lording over a given centralized set of data. It diminishes the risk surfaces that we typically associate with centralized data storage as well, and it offers a unique facet of composability. You can build upon this data, and many apps can engage with it, but it doesn't need to be publicized in the same manner that we do on Chain.

• 7:43David Hoffman?

  So this word "data" is so generalizable because it literally means like everything. And when I was first talking to you about this data stack, I was like, okay, decentralized data, like verifiable data, it was so broad that I had a hard time visualizing it until I just got it repeated and repeated and repeated. So what's an example of data that would be put in Ceramic, for example, that we could iterate on or tinker with or build upon? Is there a use case that we could talk about?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, so many. So one that we're really excited about working on right now, the Disco team is issuing membership credentials to members of DAOs that attest to their membership in good standing. So for those communities that don't want to have an unfettered secondary market for their membership, having qualifying traits, experiences, contributions that represent your membership in a community should come along with a proof of that good standing that you can use in Web 2 contexts to unlock things like tickets, content, merchandise discounts, in a Web 3 context to access permission DeFi pools and interact with smart contracts, as well as in physical spaces. You can use this very same credential that you've used for Web 2 and Web 3 to even enter

• 8:53Speaker 01

  a physical party, as we've tested before with the Disco team. And so having independently verifiable, user-owned

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Data that can be implemented in multiple contexts to unlock a broad variety of experiences, not just a single piece of data for a single experience. That's the the beauty of having interoperability here, right? So if we, you know, this week, we've spent a lot of time filling out forms to go to parties. If you've ever been to a crypto conference, you probably know what that's like. And so we can save ourselves a lot of time and agony if the basic information about us is readily available. So we can essentially autofill these forms. But rather than inviting Google to do that for us by holding a copy of our data, which they're conveniently also selling, monetizing, using without our explicit consent, we can be in control of that interaction.

• 9:43David Hoffman?

  And this is something that is just totally agnostic to the crypto world. It just so happens to use cryptography. And so we kind of think of it as like, you know, inside of crypto, inside of Web three. But there really is no like boundary between what you're talking about in this data stack towards the whole rest of the world. It actually has very little to do with the blockchain, I'd say.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can't, you can sign independently verifiable data, verifiable credentials with keys that you get from a blockchain. But just because your keys come from a public chain doesn't mean you have to use them to interact on the public chain alone. And so we now have two realms of capability for our existing key pairs in Web three, as well as many in Web two. We can push on-chain public transactions. We can sign independently verifiable private data that we pass around via API or off-chain means. And so what this allows us to do is enjoy interoperability across Web two and Web three across chains without needing explicit bridges, without needing to pay gas fees,

• 10:43Speaker 01

  without our concern for security of assets being locked up on one side and information not being able to flow. And so when we think of the Web three that was promised, right? Banking the unbanked, enabling smoother experiences I R L. All of these things require an identity layer. Who is this user behind the wallet? And so something we're talking about a little bit earlier today is like, what is the atomic unit of Web 3? Right now, we think of it largely, or talk about it largely, as wallet addresses. But I'm sure you probably have more than one wallet address, and I'm sure you do too, because that's good opsec. But what that means is, you know, you're the same David who shows up for all of these different wallets. There are different facets of you.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  But as far as the Ethereum protocols concerned, you are a different person every time.

• 11:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And so in order to enable greater, you know, seamlessness in our interactions, and to avoid building a whole bunch of silos on a slower, more expensive database, we need to reorient our design choices around the atomic unit of a human being. Ethereum is a human coordination tool, and if we are not building to optimize for the human experience, what are we optimizing for?

• 11:53David Hoffman?

  Right, right, yeah. There's that meme that, you know, Ryan, I'm pretty sure has a scheduled tweet out every six months, is that your Ethereum wallet is like the passport to the Web 3 metaverse. But, and also, some other people have talked about this use case for NFTs in the same way. We're like, you know, NFTs are like your identity, or then an identity NFT can represent who you are. But that doesn't really make any sense, because I can have as many Ethereum wallets as I want, and I can also have as many NFTs as I want. And so when we talk about like, when you say the atomic unit of like Web 3, you're talking about like a human spirit, like a human soul, and there is no way to get that on-chain. And so it has to be created in like this more like bottom-up type fashion.

• 12:34David Hoffman?

  Can you talk about like the representation of like a human person in a bottom-up type fashion versus how other people think of it as like Ethereum wallets or NFTs?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So Ethereum wallets and NFTs are very concrete, specific, bounded entities. And so they're easy to count. So when we're, you know, telling our venture capital investors about our traction, we can count the number of wallets, count the number of NFTs. NFTs are easy to buy, and so we can obtain them readily, we can choose to self-select into communities, but NFTs offer a very low assurance. Around who their holders are, right? If you can't, and NFT only shows that your public key has somehow attained a relationship with a token ID. And that doesn't, it doesn't mean that you earned it, bought it, you know, made it yourself, or airdropped it, stole it. And so, you know, NFTs offer the same assurances around identity that your watch does, that your shirt does.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  These are objects you have purchased to represent your taste profile, but they are not David the person.

• 13:34David Hoffman?

  Actually, my watch does say is a Hoffman watch.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, clearly, well-selected, as you know, as your pool cats, as your crypto punks, you choose the aesthetics that you like to represent you, but you cannot be contained as a human being inside of that. Now, what a bottom-up approach in terms of identifying a human being looks more like, I think, is, is, you know, how do we think about the data exhaust you create as you move through the world? You're generating all kinds of, you know, moving kinetic energy around, creating all kinds of, of data trails in the apps that you interact with, the spaces you walk into, the metal detectors we walked through earlier today. And so, the unique pattern of data that you emit as you move through the world, that trail is a description of what has made you you.

• 14:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  As opposed to proactively self-selecting items to purchase and demonstrate your taste profile. Instead, a bottom-up approach to identity can look a lot more like capturing the actions you have taken, the contributions you have made, the qualifications that you enjoy.

• 14:41David Hoffman?

  Hmm. I'm sure Kevin O'Wakki will appreciate this metaphor, but you talked about like data exhaust, which is probably like the most unique thing about you. There's no way to recreate your own data exhaust in the time of the day that you listen to this music on Spotify while being in this physical location, engaging with this app at that particular time. Like, that is a civil-resistant bit of data exhaust. And I think in the world of like this decentralized tech stack where we can make that data private and capture it, and then also make that composable with something like Disco, all of a sudden you're like recycling that exhaust into a greater purpose. And all of a sudden, we can just like use this Captured data exhaust and start to plug it into other places. So when we do plug it into the like Web3 apps that we use, like our DeFi protocols that we engage with,

• 15:26David Hoffman?

  or our DAOs that we govern over. How does that experience become richer as a result of being able to leverage all of this data that we would previously just like exhaust into the atmosphere?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  So when we think about DeFi protocols, often we run into challenges because we end up playing with bots. And discerning who is human, who is not, identifying anti-high assurance, anti-civil proofs has long been a challenge. Fortunately, one that we are tackling along with Kevin and the Gitcoin team. So you know, you as a human being do all sorts of activities all day that a bot can't do, right? A bot can't drink wine on the sun here in Paris. A bot cannot eat shredded cheese by the light of the refrigerator at 2:00 a.m. You are doing all kinds of activities throughout your day that a bot can't do. And so why do you have to suffer the indignity of filling out a captcha when you visit a website? Like you've already done all kinds of human activities today. You've proven to the world that you are a human being,

• 16:22Speaker 01

  but you have failed to capture them in a form that can be read by the interface you're interacting with. And so your ability to capture your actions of humanity, the unique stride of your walk, the distribution of your weight in a chair, all of these idiosyncratic expressions of self are more than enough to start to, you know, define the data shape of your person. But because we don't have a meaningful method of capturing those, and we haven't yet agreed on sort of a standard language for how to treat this, we are still in the world of silos. And so, you know, in DAOs, obviously, we are reaching the ceiling of fun and utility that we can have coordinating around group chats with bank accounts.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Moving from one DAO to another is an extremely costly ordeal, right? It's like your first day on the internet when you show up to a new Discord to join a new DAO. There's no independently verifiable way for you to prove that you've been writing the newsletter, that you have been organizing events, that you have been doing AMA sessions or whatever. You may have some contextual proof, social proof, but certainly nothing cryptographically reliable in the same way that we trust the data from our public chains. And so in an instance of a DAO, you can receive independently verifiable proofs off-chain, private, under your control of those non-financial actions, perhaps of your accountability as a member, of your contributions as a leader. And so, once you're able to bring essentially

• 17:48Speaker 01

  that DAO resume from one DAO to another, we lower the switching costs of moving from one organization, joining another, we increase the liquidity of our labor, as it were. And I think this kind of unlock is necessary to enable a DAO-based future of work. Because otherwise, we maintain a system of silos built on slower, more expensive databases. This is also something I'm seeing in the metaverse space as well, where we have a bunch of proprietary so-called metaverses where people can purchase or display NFTs, but without interoperability among them, it's just having a bunch more user profiles that don't talk to each other, where we're filling out the same forms over and over again when we onboard.

• 18:32David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, so that user onboarding and just like filling out forms, I think is something we can obviously relate to that. But I want to use that as, let's like fast forward to 2025. We've built out this decentralized data stack. Disco has issued a bajillion verifiable credentials. Everyone here at ECC number eight, I think, in 2025, has their Disco profile. They've got their VCs in it. And for all the conference scores, and you've already alluded to this, like, you know, you've got to sign up with Eventbrite, or maybe it's Partyful, or maybe it's like whatever. You also have to apply to ECC, and there's like an application process. Let's like roleplay and go forward like a few years. What will the crypto conference experience be like under this new paradigm?

• 19:16David Hoffman?

  When we've fixed all of these broken things?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, one of the initial challenges with ECC was that many people were not able to get tickets because they got bought it. And so being able to have a Sybil-resistant ticketing platform to allow people to attend a conference who have demonstrated sufficient qualifications, I think would be fantastic. Now, that said, you might argue that being able to bought the ticketing site demonstrates your technical aptitude, but whether or not that's going to make for a good community is another question entirely. I think it is also an exciting opportunity to solve the discoverability problem of these spaces. So identifying one's way through the talks throughout the day, finding the right people to collaborate with, identifying other folks who share your team's ideologies, or even

• 20:04Speaker 01

  finding side events, has been a very odd asymmetric totem pole of alpha. So we are all atomic units buzzing through this conference center, and the search process is very laborious. We have to review these, you know, these schedules. We have to seek people out and, you know, certainly based on the number of people like running down the hallway yelling my name, the search process could be a lot more efficient. And so I think the time we spend here can be much better suited to our goals, and we can spend less time searching in earnest and more time finding the experiences that we came here to vibe with.

• 20:42David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. I think we've already been talking about most of your answer, but I'll just lay it out to you anyways. We need to build our way out of this bear market. What do we need to do in this world of decentralized identity to build our way out of this bear market?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  I think that the way we build out of this bear market and the way we decouple the crypto markets from the traditional finance markets is to add another access to the graph. So right now, I think of, you know, blockchains as sort of flat databases that map public identifiers with tokens and interactions, but we need account abstraction in order to achieve, you know, capabilities that the traditional financial markets cannot. And so if we add in the ability to have user-owned, off-chain, contextual, rich data that can be much more expressive and, and much more specific and narrow and plentiful than what we typically enjoy on-chain.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Then we will give ourselves a new set of superpowers that extend beyond financial interaction. And it is that reputation and identity system that will, you know, allow us to bring forth the future that we all grew up watching in sci fi movies.

• 21:51David Hoffman?

  So during this last bull market, there was like a ton of crypto hate that came from like, oh, these NFTs are just for like rich kid toys. Or like, you know, game gaming was like, get these NFTs out of my games. I don't want to like, I'm already being succumbed by like overburdened my microtransactions. But just a bunch of just hate from just like the financial side of crypto in this last bull market. Do you think this this world of like decentralized identity and all of this like verifiable credentials can like win the hearts and minds of people that just are not like turned on by all the money side of crypto?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I think that making things suck less for people in their daily lives is a winner every time. I think that the hyper speculative financial environment of NFTs and of, you know, tokens and DeFi rightly turns a lot of people off. Like, we call them Ponzi nomics for a reason. That doesn't slap with everybody and that's okay. But what that means is that we need to stop building for ourselves. We need to stop having backlogs filled with what we want to make that day and start orienting our product practice around how do we intervene in the problems that real people face and make their experiences better, more frictionless,

• 23:02Speaker 01

  cheaper, easier. You know, we in the web three space have long relied upon emergence as a fetish to give us new ideas. But emergence is no substitute for good UX research, historical context, and appreciation for your users. And so, you know, I know I'm often mentioning the human part of human coordination tools, like now is the moment. We've got the protocols, we've got the infrastructure. We need to design for people, which means that we need to redouble our commitment to user experience, design and research. That means that we need to take on product testing in iteration in a way that we never have before. Because yeeting out another copy pasta AMM is not going to win the hearts and minds of the people

• 23:47Speaker 01

  who are not already in this building.

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  Evan, thank you for joining me at ECC.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure. Thank you, David.

• 23:52David Hoffman?

  Cheers.