187 - The Ethereum Attestation Service

On today’s episode we welcome Bryce Patrick and Steve Dakh from the Ethereum Attestation Service. EAS is a new public good, open, permissionless, and token free. Is this the key unlock for decentralized identity through crypto? ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-eas/ ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ 📣 AAVE V3 is Here! http://app.aave.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ https://%E2%81%A0https//k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2%C2%A0%20%C2%A0%E2%81%A0 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/uniswap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:27 What is an Attestation? 11:51 Attestations as a Primitive 14:35 What Are The Good For? 19:15 Defining Identity 22:39 Primitive Before the App 25:55 What is EAS? 30:31 Attestation Form Factors 36:51 Use Cases 40:19 EAS Growth Goals 42:17 Why Do We Need Attestations? 46:10 Why Build This on Ethereum? 52:46 Who is Using EAS and For What? 1:00:04 Web2 vs Web3 Attestations 1:05:17 Decentralized Reputation 1:08:05 The App Layer on Top of EAS 1:15:08 Privacy 1:19:48 Comparing To Sign In With Ethereum 1:21:22 How is it Funded? 1:25:08 Soulbound Tokens 1:30:00 Closing and Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES EAS https://twitter.com/eas_eth https://attest.sh/ Steve Dakh https://twitter.com/stevedakh ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now and audio content, it's probably all legitimate, most likely not AI-generated. In the next few years, you can kind of see how that can start to flip. One of the things that we think about is like, right now, if you just, if you take some historical content, hash it, timestamp it on-chain using an attestation, you can now prove, you know, a thousand years from now, that this content existed before we had the AI capable to make a perfect replication of that. So right now, we can actually use attestation to almost save history, and I think we should.

• 0:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The Ethereum attestation service, a new public good, a standard that's open, permissionless, and free. There's no token on this one. We talked today about why this might be the key unlock for decentralized identity and non-financial use cases in crypto. As we've said so often on Bankless, first, we take back our money, then we take back our identity. This might be a key to that solution. A few things to take away from this episode. Number one, why decentralized identity isn't a mystery, it's actually just a bunch of

• 1:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  attestations. That word, attestations, that's going to be the focus of today's episode. Number two, we talk about why Web 2 and social networks like Twitter are actually just attestation silos. Number three, we talk about why financial use cases are going to absolutely explode over the next 10 years as soon as we unlock the power of attestations. Number four, we end with thoughts on WorldCoin, on privacy, on soulbound tokens, and a host of other items related to decentralized identity. David, why was this episode significant to you?

• 1:50David Hoffman?

  The arc of crypto is just iteration and unlock after iteration and unlock. And I think this identity primitive of the attestation is a big unlock. I think a lot of projects, there's been a lot of teams and organizations out there that have gone straight for the identity golden goose. And they've, they're skipping a step. They're skipping a, a layer. And that is what I think is the Ethereum attestation layer, the attestation service that we are going to talk about here on the episode. I think without the building block of attestations, crypto will become much more, is much more muted than it otherwise would be. And in order to get to a much more expressive version of the crypto economic future,

• 2:33David Hoffman?

  we need these attestations to unlock new doors, new opportunities, because they bring in basically everything that's not money and finance into the fold of crypto and allows us to build on top of those layers. And so getting to that point where we have identity and not just identity, but everything that is related to attestations, you're about to learn all about that in the show. In order to get there, we need to first build out these building blocks that the Ethereum Attestation Service team is working on building today.

• 3:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have nothing to disclose for this episode, but of course you can always check out Bankless disclosures at bankless.com/disclosures. Guys, we're getting it right to the episode, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange for 2023, Kraken. Go check them out.

• 3:19David Hoffman?

  Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data and lightning fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want on your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today.

• 3:56David Hoffman?

  Are you planning to launch a token? Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Toku will help you navigate across the lifecycle of your token, from easy-to-use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing postcliff taxable events with payroll. For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge, complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll, and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments.

• 4:39David Hoffman?

  Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space: Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to toku.com/bankless or click the link in the description below. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network. A brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle.

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  Mantle already has subcommunities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle.

• 5:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to Bryce Patrick and Steve Dack. They are builders leading the effort behind the Ethereum attestation service. This is, we're going to refer to this by EAS in this episode. And EAS is a free, open-source primitive that's deep in the Ethereum tech stack and has aspirations to unlock an entire world of use cases using one simple primitive: that of the digital attestation. Bryce, Steve, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you, Ryan and David. It's a pleasure to be on the show. We've been a longtime listener. So to have the opportunity to come up is, it's great. We're excited to chat, help educate more about attestations. And yeah, looking forward to the call.

• 6:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think that this is going to be an educational episode for everybody, including David and myself, because part of the reason we're having this, this conversation is, of course, the Bankless Nation knows that identity is very important to David and myself. We often say, first we solve money and then we solve identity. That's kind of like where crypto is destined to go. We also heard on the back of Ethereum Waterloo from more than a few folks that you have to talk to the EAS team. They're doing incredible things in the space. This is a major unlock for on-chain attestation identity. And so David and I like took a look. We understood a few things. This looks like a, you know, open source primitive. It's tokenless. It's free. It's a public good. Like this is music to our ears on Bankless. So we're hoping by the end of this episode,

• 7:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  we know enough about EAS to be dangerous and we sort of get the, get the shape of where identity might be going, at least from a public goods perspective. Does that sound like an okay agenda?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, great.

• 7:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, we'll start here. Can you tell us, it's in the name, Ethereum Attestation Service. What is an attestation and what on earth does that have to do with the identity?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  All right. So, so basically, simply speaking, an attestation is simply an entity making a signed statement about something. In the, in the case of EAS, you're able to make an attestation about literally anything. And, you know, that might not be, you know, the, the reason why that's important might not be immediately obvious. But that's why we have this story that we like to tell. So essentially, we've been really super interested in solving decentralized identity and reputation. And we know that it's like a super hard problem to solve.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Identity, identity is relative. Your reputation is relative and it's contextual. So for example, my reputation to Bryce is different than my reputation to David. You know, and, and it's a very complex kind of abstract concept that, you know, no one has really solved. Because, you know, I think people have been trying to solve it. Uh, the wrong way, almost building one layer too high and not building upon a primitive to be able to describe uh such complex uh things. So we started to think about uh identity. And we're looking at all the platforms that existed out there, you know, today.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  And we saw that most of the platforms that are doing identity, they they're almost all like uh glorified KYC companies. They build these like uh siloed platforms that you essentially as a company or developer have to adopt. And then you're kind of locked into that platform. So say, for example, there's, you know, Polygon ID or or Bright ID or or any of these platforms that allow you to do do some sort of KYC. Uh, they essentially are attesting about you passing your KYC, but that attestation can only be used within that platform. And so if some other uh platform wants to KYC you and you want and you're like some maybe a smart contract that wants to valid,

• 9:41Speaker 00

  allow users only who are KYC to use it, you'd have to implement every single identity platform. And that just makes no sense for for decentralization. It's non-interoperable. And also, none of it actually solves identity. Identity and reputation is very uh complex. I might, you know, like Bryce's, you know, selection of music, but I might not like his food tastes, but I might still trust him anyway. So we were thinking like, what actually, you know, what actually is identity? And we started to think really deep about this and we started to think, well, you know, at some point, at some point, we had no identity and then we did. And so we were thinking, well, you know, at what point was that? And so like, I remember coming to this realization, like,

• 10:27Speaker 00

  when I was born, my mom named me Steve, right? You could say that she attested to my name, right? And so I went to school and the teachers attested to my grades, right? And the kids in the class could have attested to whether they like me or not. Uh, the, the government attested to my passport and my driver's license. Uh, university can attest to your, uh, diploma. And your employer could attest to your employment or whether you're a good employer or not. And so we kind of quickly realized that actually you could represent identity and reputation as an aggregate of attestations about someone. And so if you really want to be able to solve this problem,

• 11:12Speaker 00

  what you really need to start with is a base layer where any entity could just attest about anything at all. And so that was, go ahead, Bryce.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and, uh, it's not that all the identity protocols are moving in the wrong direction. It's just that because there hasn't been this primitive base layer, everyone's building their own solution towards it and they're just one aspect of an identity. And so we realized if you actually want to be able to solve reputation, digital identity, we need to have a common language and a framework that everyone can communicate off of. So we've been reaching out to a lot of the identity protocols, um, and beyond with different use cases, um, to, to really help try to bring everyone together.

• 11:52David Hoffman?

  When you guys say that attestations are primitive, really gets me excited. Um, especially when you define the primitive so easily as a, just a statement that someone attests to something else. And when it's, when a statement like this is so simple, you, you can get this instinct that the, the expression of this primitive can be massive. And I think the, when trying to, why these conversations around identity and these primitives can be so difficult is that, um, a lot of the listeners, especially crypto newbies, new, newcomers into this crypto world, aren't used to thinking in these grand terms and trying to get people to understand this new form factor for identity is trying to also get them to understand these

• 12:37David Hoffman?

  new monies that were created.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  You almost have to like unlearn the paradigm of the dollar in order to understand, you know, Bitcoin and Ether. And then in the same Model, you have to unlearn the fact that your government issues you your identity to really learn that actually your identity is an aggregate of all of your social relationships that are like piecemealed together throughout time. So maybe we can actually just go back to this primitive with that shared kind of context. And maybe Bryce, you can start and Steve will go back to you. Like, how does your identity form? And how is it a primitive, like EAS, actually, the basement level foundation that is actually needed to make one's true identity?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, if we check ourselves out of like blockchain altogether, and we just think about how we interact with each other offline and in the real world, there's a lot of interactions that we have together. Imagine just like getting a loan for something. You might go to Ryan and say, hey, Ryan, I need to borrow $5,000. Well, a simple IOU might be justified from Ryan to give you a loan because he trusts you. And all the interactions that you guys have had and the trust that you've built. But if you, David, wanted to go get a loan from a bank, you might have to go to that bank and provide all these documentation, you know, all this documentation and all these different proof points to actually show that you're a credible person. And that's because you don't have that same rapport and there's other regulations that they're following. But

• 14:03Speaker 03

  the idea is that all these entities are just making attestations about each other. And the value of the attestation from you giving an IOU to Ryan is saying, you know, he's trusting that you're actually going to follow through on that. And so if we, if we think about how attestations can work, it's really just like any interaction where you're trying to build trust and to make sure that the person on the receiving end like has some sort of authenticity that you are kind of who you say you are and like you have some reputation behind it, you can unlock so much just, just from that. But we haven't had a way to do that online and on chain.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  Is this just an identity conversation? Is this a, is this a conversation specifically attestations? What do they do? They give us our identities? Or is there something grander here?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  So so attestations can be used for a lot more than identity. Uh, we talk about identity first because we like to explain how like you can take such a really complex idea and describe it with something so simple. But a- attestations, because they're simply essentially signed statements of entities saying things about things, can be for anything, it could be used for supply chain, it can be used for voting, it can be used for certification, all sorts of things that aren't directly tied to identity, it could be used for ticketing, there's, uh, you know, if you start, and and what's interesting is in real life, in in the real world, we're testing all the time, you know, we say things about other people, we sign documents, but there's never been

• 15:28Speaker 00

  like a digital way to do this in a structured, uh, uh, standardizable way before. And so that's what the the the magic of like, you know, with E A S being able to create a schema describing what you're testing about, what you might want to attest about, and then being able to attest with that schema. I think that's really the revolution that, yeah, E A S has like kind of brought.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, if we think of like a a notary service, if you were to sign like a mortgage document or some sort of important document, typically you have to get it notarized in front of someone. That notary is essentially attesting that you were the person that signed that document, but we don't have a way to actually have, uh, you know, a way to attest in a in a more structured way on blockchains. We do have digital signatures, which gives a lot of authenticity to who's signing, and we also have the verified timestamp, but we haven't been able to actually structure that in a way that is composable and more, um, in interoperable for people.

• 16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I I'm trying to like put put this together, make this make sense in my own mind, so a a few things maybe have been talked about. The the first, I I just want to make concrete is this idea of an attestation. It's somebody saying, um, a thing about someone else or making some claim, right, on chain. What this mechanically looks like is on chain, um, with a, say, a MetaMask type of, um, you know, prompt, I'm signing something with my with my private key, right? So I own. RSA dot ETH, that's my ENS and it corresponds to an actual Ethereum address. And I can sign things on chain. I can like digitally verify and I have to, you know,

• 17:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  let's say I'm using my ledger for this hardware device. I have to, you know, or MetaMask, I have to click through and actually attest that something is true. Is that what you mean by an attestation?

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that all we're talking about here?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yep. Yes, yes, but but it's structured in a particular way.

• 17:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  You know, with using the EAS standard, but yes, every attestation is signed with a with a wallet, with a private key.

• 17:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  And so that so you have the authenticity, knowing that this attestation came from the entity that's claiming.

• 17:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so it's coming from the entity that that owns those private keys that has like physical access to those private keys.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Or a smart contract. It can even be a smart contract that attests.

• 17:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Perhaps the smart contract receives some sort of inputs that it validates. And then once it gets these proper inputs, it attests to the entity that they've passed some sort of thing.

• 17:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  And Ryan, so like with social media today, when you're posting something, you're essentially just attesting to the post, right? And then if if David likes your post, he's attesting that he likes your statement. But we haven't had like a core building block to be able to do that. And I think one thing that we realized is like on chain is really good for a lot of things. But we also wanted to make sure that EAS was accessible off chain. So EAS is also an off chain protocol for making digital signatures as well.

• 18:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. I want to get into EAS, but yeah, that's that's an interesting point. I guess all a tweet is is an attestation that my account, the the person who holds my username and password and, you know, is two factor authenticated into my Twitter account is saying this thing, right? And that establishes my my online Twitter reputation, basically, and is the basis for my social graph. But I want to go back to something because. For for somebody who's thinking like at the primitive layer, just signing something with a private key and saying, yep, I approve this message, basically. You're saying that that's essentially what identity is? I think that's the the part that is a little bit mind blowing at first.

• 19:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the part that's kind of like back to back to the basics of this is like, you know, what is money? Well, it's, you know, a social scoreboard, I guess. And, you know, like, we all agree something's money, therefore it becomes money, right? That's what you have to unlock to actually understand money. And to David's point, it's something similar involved in understanding identity. So all you're saying all my identity is is attestations that my peers like that. The the social context through which I'm in like make about me. So like the nation state will attest that, you know, America, hopefully they attest this that I'm an American citizen and I have a social security number and they will attest that, right? I mean, whatever, the government database somewhere. And I'm also a Canadian citizen, so the government of Canada will like attest that I'm Canadian.

• 19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, you know, if like, if I'm a member of a church or something, then my church might attest that I'm a member here. If I'm a member of, you know, some other community, or if I'm a friend of someone, then they might attest that I'm their friend. Like, that's, is that really all that identity is? It's just like people attesting certain claims? And there's nothing more than that?

• 20:15Speaker 00

  So it's not, it's not the claim so much that is your identity. It's how the entity looking at those claims values those attestations. So, for example, if I show you an attestation from Vitalik claiming that he believes that I'm a good person or something, and you know, it was signed from him. You might find value in that, but maybe, you know, some Solana guy might not.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe, maybe someone who doesn't care about Vitalik might not value that. And so like, it's, it's very relative. Like, if I was to want to take out a loan, I would probably show the entity who I want to take a loan from attestations that are relevant. That prove that I'm actually, I actually paid back my loans and that I'm a real person. And that I, you know, I have enough attestations where I don't want my record to be smeared. You know, and then that might be enough for that entity. But for some other entity, they might require something else. And that's what makes it super decentralized. Because like, instead of just having one entity saying like, oh, this person's a human. Trust, trust us always, right? There could be other entities that say you're human. You know, there could be friends that say that you're human.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  And, and depending on who you are and who's attesting, you might value those attestations or not. And so that's, that's why I like, this is the only way that I can imagine solving the decentralized identity problem. You, you can't presuppose, you know, what identity really is. It can be, it can be made up of a lot of things. Maybe I have an attestation that I was part of the Mickey Mouse Club or something, you know, or something like, maybe that's valuable to somebody somewhere, but you know, to most people probably wouldn't care. So.

• 21:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there, there's been a number of attempts at identity ever. Honestly, even ever since the Bitcoin talk forums, like the early people coming into this industry realized the relationship between private keys and identity. You know, if you sign a message and you are known to be the bearer of these private keys, then everyone can trust that you are the issuer of that message. Like even the, or you know, the primitive days of crypto, when we were in crypto stone ages, we still figured this out. And then ever since then, where there have been like a smattering of attempts of like peop- people in the application layer trying to go after identity, right? Like WorldCoin, for example, comes to mind, which is recent, recently going through the crypto meta. But even before that, right? Circles, so was another attempt. BrightID, you guys listed them.

• 22:37David Hoffman?

  And these are all like identity apps? And like that, that one comic, that one XKCD comic comes to mind where like, uh, there's 14 standards for identity. We need to make another identity play that aggregates all of them. And then the next panel is like, new problem. Now there's 15 different identity standards. I think what you guys are saying is, is that all of those attempts at identity, you can't go straight for identity at the app layer. You need to build the base building block, the primitive down below. And then maybe the applications can blossom. Can you, can you guys talk a little bit more about why you need the primitive before you have the app?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and as I mentioned before, like all these identity solutions, they're all moving in the right direction. And people will value, like even with WorldCoin, right? People have, there's two schools of camp. One is like very, like, some people don't care to have their eyeballs scanned, and then the other people do. None of those people are wrong. It really just depends on the applications of like, do they care about WorldCoin's attestation? That that person's a verified human? And would they consider that as a part of their identity? But if all these fragmented solutions like WorldCoin, BrightID, you know, etc. Are, don't have a common layer where they can communicate? You can't have an aggregate view of who someone might be and to give like builders and users the choice of how they define like who's trustworthy or not.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And so while I think like all these are moving in the right direction, they also tend to either tokenize or like try to extract value at the protocol layer. Um, which if you think about like trust and like identity, it's kind of like oil and water. You can't really mix like finance and like trust and identity at the same layer because someone's going to come in with a bigger budget and try to direct the narrative of like what is identity? And it's usually for, it might be their gain, right? But if, if we truly have a credibly neutral base layer where any entity can make these types of statements from that, WorldCoin and all these other um, protocols can actually become more composable and actually help them.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  One of the things I want to add is, uh, in response to your question is that with these companies, if you don't have a base primitive, you end up having to presuppose a lot about what identity is. And I think this was like one of the biggest fails of like Uport. They built in all of these presuppositions about what identity is, trying to use like DID standards. But there's so much more than just what's in that standard. You can attest about, you know, there's so many different types of interaction intentions entities can have. And you can't just pre-program them all into a smart contract or an application. I think that's where these platforms have failed because if you have to sign on to something like a Uport, then you have to just assume like Uport has everything that you'll ever need.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  And if it doesn't, then you have to use another platform and then you just create more fragmentation. Whereas like EAS, Uport could.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Use presuppose whatever they want to build a schema around that and attest with it. And that's the cool thing about EAS, like all these platforms that have their own standards can still build their own standards and use their own standards using EAS. But they're still on the same, uh, the same layer, like you, any, any smart contract can say, I want, I care about attestations from this entity or this entity or this entity when it comes to these types of attestations. And that's what, that's, that's what makes it so much more interoperable, interoperable and actually useful for decentralized identity and reputation.

• 26:01David Hoffman?

  Okay. So what actually is it? So EAS, uh, it's not, it's not just another identity play. It's something is which we've been using this primitive word, but, but what actually is the thing? Like what actually is EAS? Is it an ERC standard? Like what, what actually is the thing?

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so the EAS, the, it has two basic, uh, parts to it. There's two smart contracts. One of them is called the Schema Registry, and it allows anyone to register any type of attestation that might want to be made. So for example, there, there would be a schema for voting, a schema for testing to whether you trust someone, a schema for testing whether you like someone, a schema for testing to whether a smart contract has been audited, et cetera. And then there's

• 26:46David Hoffman?

  These are, these are types of attestations, attestation form factors?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's the form fact, essentially it's a form factor registry for attestations. And then you have the attestation ledger, smart contract, which just has a ledger of attestations, each referencing a particular schema. So like, you know, you, you have, you, you want to make an attestation, you have to first reference a particular schema. Cause like, what is this attestation about? And what is this data structure? And so the schema describes like exactly what pieces of data are in there. So maybe if I wanted to create like a Like an off-chain ID card, maybe I'd have like a name field, I'd have a birthdate field and whatever relevant fields and then you can attest with it. And anyone can create whatever kind they want and every schema gets its own unique identifier.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  What's great about that is when you're testing about a particular schema, anyone can know like, oh, this is this schema. This is an attestation from this schema. It gives its own category and anyone can essentially attest with the same schema as long as it's not protected. So schemas can actually also optionally have a smart contract associated with them. And essentially anytime an attestation happens of that schema, it'll run through the smart contract and the smart contract can can prevent attestations from happening. So say, for example, you wanted to have like an allow list. You can block people who are not in the list. You can make a payment happen, happen. So say, imagine you created like an oracle schema.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Anytime someone attests to a particular truth and they're inside of this some particular allow list, they get paid out automatically. So you can do, you can do interesting things like this. And just with, with these two base primitives, that, that's, that's, that's the whole on-chain component. So with these smart, because of these smart contracts, any smart contract, any EVM-based smart contract with EAS deployed can easily verify any attestation and validate it. And then also because we, we understand that actually most likely over 90% of attestations that people will make will probably be off-chain. This is like private attestations, things between, between friends.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  There's so many private things that we, we don't want to put on-chain. And so what we created is this off-chain attestation protocol, which uses EIP, EIP 712 to be able to sign in using your, using your wallet. You're signing off-chain signatures that still follow the whole EAS format and standard. What's cool about these off-chain attestations is they're completely portable. You can pass them from peer to peer. You can keep them private. Inside our, inside our UI, you can actually, it generates a QR code for every attestation and the QR code has the entire attestation and the signature encoded inside of it.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  What's cool about that is you can easily pass this. Anybody can just scan your attestation and it goes from your phone directly to their phone without ever living on a server. Or optionally, you can put an off-chain attestation on a server and then anyone can verify it. But what's cool here is it's completely gasless. It doesn't cost any money to make. And anybody can verify them and then even additionally timestamp or revoke them on-chain even after the fact.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  And and one one key thing with with attestations is that they don't always have a recipient or someone on the other end. Like you don't always have to say something about someone else. You could be self attesting more or less. So imagine Bankless, you know, bankless dot E, if they wanted to attest to the authenticity of this episode, you could generate a hash of the episode and attest that you that Bankless actually produced this hash. But you're just, it doesn't have to be about another subject. The power is that this known entity is signing some sort of structured piece of data at this time.

• 30:33David Hoffman?

  So this was great, and I think a lot of people will start to have their imaginations start to go now and start to see this like world open up. And just to maybe double down on some points that that y'all made specifically about the the form factor of attestations, maybe to put this into the trad world or the the world that we currently have. Like different attestations come in different form factors that that we already know of, right? Like Steve and your story, for example, your birth record has is an attestation of your date of birth. Might actually be the originating document that attests is attests to your your name too, right?

• 31:09David Hoffman?

  Maybe a diff like a your university diploma, a diploma is another form factor for another attestation, right? Maybe your credit score is an attestation, another type of form factor for some financial financial related primitive. And so the attestations, the the EAS that has all these different form factors for attestations are trying to mimic this world of the there's a varying different needs of attestations and various different form factors. And all of these things are are various standards that people are proposing saying, hey, all the other form factors that that have that already exist aren't servicing the needs of my kind of attestation. So I'm going to promote, I'm going to advocate for this new type of form factor and I'm.

• 31:54David Hoffman?

  I'm going to submit it and merge it to the EAS system and all of a sudden that form factor gets gets uploaded and maybe there's a network effect that grows around that. And then and then also you guys said that you will you can also put a smart contract logic into one of these things and I'm sure that just opens up a brand new world of of of, you know, territory that we could start to play in just because now we're starting to do some some crypto native stuff as well. And then the other thing I wanted to just bring attention to is like the off chain component, especially like only so many attestations actually need to become transactions. Like actually, we're not really talking about blockchain or cryptocurrency very much at all here.

• 32:31David Hoffman?

  We're mostly just talking about private keys and private key signatures. And so whether or not they actually make it on to their the data of an adaptation actually makes it on chain, actually is not really the focal point of a conversation like this, right? It actually is like, hey, all we really need are these private keys and these form factors for consumption. That's kind of how I would summarize the the last little bit of conversation. Bryce, is there anything you want to add to that?

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think on the the web three side, like the crypto native side, the the reason why we want to put something on chain is so a smart contract can interact with it. Right? And maybe greater transparency for especially in decentralized communities where you might want like the governance of the community more transparent, like how funds are being distributed in this very decentralized world. Putting things more on chain makes more sense, but there are a ton of like normal offline use cases that you just need to prove the authenticity of a signature. So it really just depends on like the goals of of the use case, but they both they both have value.

• 33:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to be clear. So you you said there was kind of two smart contract registries, like one for the schemas and one for the for the individual the attestations themselves. So the schemas that that David was describing, that's completely permissionless, right? So like, anybody could propose whatever schema they want. And if they can organize enough people to sort of participate in that schema, then bam, they've got it. They've got kind of a standard. So let's say all of the academic institutions across the US got together and they were like, hey, we want to do on chain attestations of our diploma.

• 34:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Then they could propose something, even if there are already a few standards in place, they could propose some sort of schema. And they could, if they got the consensus together, they could adopt some sort of standard on top of EAS to attest to whether an individual, I guess ETH address, you know, owned by someone has a degree from their institution. Is that sort of how this works?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're spot on because I think one of the challenges for a lot of like previous attempts at like creating some sort of like diploma, like schema and stuff. People assume way too much in like the fields that are required in the schema. And you actually just need to allow the community to come together to develop the right schema over time. And we've seen that even like in the EV worlds for like your electric cars, right? There's like a lot of research around like the best charging port for all electric cars. And then Tesla comes out and says, no, actually, we're going to build our own standard. We're not going to like adopt an existing one. You actually need to follow where the users are and like what they care about most. And then let standards kind of be built over time.

• 35:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is so interesting because I almost feel like I'm learning about HTTP for the first time. But like, you know, like HTML for the first time, right? Because it feels like it's so flexible and can do so many things at once. I don't even know where to start or like what to do with it first because it feels like it's like, not, you know, Turing could be, but it's almost like, kind of like Ethereum itself, which is like It's boundless. Yeah, it's boundless. Now we have smart contracts. You know, we have programmable systems where you can kind of like a programmable property rights system. And everyone's like, all right, what do we do with that? 99% of people are like, yeah, I don't get it. You know what I mean? Like, it feels like it's that, it's this type of conversation that we're having.

• 35:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like attestations can do basically anything. I mean, they are the primitive building blocks to reputation, to identity, to like the way everything is organized across society. And attestations do everything. All right, that's the

• 36:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm like, okay, so, so what do we do first? Like, it could do so many things at once. Are, are you guys worried at all that we're kind of like boiling the ocean with this approach? I totally see the merits of what you're saying is, hey, all of these other on-chain identity solutions are starting almost at kind of the application layer and they're just like making way too many assumptions. We have to go down to the primitive and start with a standard for the primitive, kind of like HTTP or something like this, right?

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And now we have the hyperlink and we've just created this new primitive. Um, all right, but what about the websites? Like, what do we build first? I mean, are you worried at all that we're boiling the ocean here? What's, what's your take on this?

• 36:53Speaker 00

  I don't think we're boiling the ocean. I, I think this is just, this is just the case with this technology that like now there's a new technology that, that allows for things that couldn't exist before. And so there are infinite possibilities. The cool thing though is it doesn't necessarily require like a massive network effect, right? In order for it to work. Essentially, if you can find one use case for EAS, it's still useful. If one entity decides, you know what, we're going to start this venue is going to start a testing to tickets that entities have tickets to this event and they just start using EAS for that, that's it. You know, you only, you only need that, that entity and their, and their customers. Uh, you know, you don't, you know, if you're starting like a, a new social network, perhaps, you know, that you might run into issues like that.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  But for so many use cases, like you don't necessarily need a ton of people signed on. So what we found, we've been running hackathons the last few months and like this recent one that we did, 25% of the teams built on EAS. And, you know, what was interesting to see is like just the wide variety of like apps people were building. Some of them were in medical, some of them were like in cross-chain, like Paymaster systems, some of them were like attesting to open source software. It was just, it was just so many things and it was cool to see that like there's really, there really is like infinite use cases for this and people are able to just fit it into their application in some way because otherwise they're, they're going to have to build some smart contract and a test within their own little platform and then it's not really useful anymore. Whereas like

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Like having them all in kind of one standardized place gives value to these attestations. It makes it much more valuable. If if WorldCoin started test just being in a tester, instead of saying like, you know, we are the solution for identity for the world. If they're just like, oh, we're just one of the attestors. Scan your eyeballs with us and roll a test. Some people might be like, all right, that's cool. And that and that and that'll be, you know, valuable for them. But then some other entity can also take part and say, you know, well, we also want to attest that that that people are human and it creates these like real interoperable systems.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  It's it is it is a concern for for a lot of people. Like if you can do so much with something, you almost feel like you can't start with anything. And I think that what we've really tried to lean into is just like where the ecosystem narratives have been. And so EAS is not an identity protocol, even though identity things can be built on it. But we've really tried to help and like bring the identity ecosystem closer together, because that's just where the narrative is. And it makes sense. But as Steve was describing, we had builders across like so many different categories that are organically just seeing like how easy it is to create a scheme about whatever they want and then sign that data. And it it, yeah, it's just exciting to see. But I think ecosystems will follow narratives when there is something that's so generalized.

• 39:39David Hoffman?

  I think there's something pretty refreshing about having a team on here that doesn't have a token, that doesn't have venture funding, or doesn't have it doesn't have any of the incentives that some of the other like startups that might have that that play in this space. Whereas and every single startup is trying to scale and grow and grow and, you know, scale to the fastest possible. Whereas like what what you guys are just saying is like, hey, we're going to build out this standard, this primitive, and whatever use cases come on top of it. Great, that's fantastic. We've built out some utility for this little corner of the internet. That's that's that's lovely. But then also, at the same time, we're saying like, well, you know, attestations, they they could be everything. The whole world could be built on attestations.

• 40:22David Hoffman?

  And so, you know, what what is, if you guys can speak for EAS, since you know, you guys are EAS, does EAS want to take over the world? Do we want to take all of the world's attestations and make them on top of Ethereum signed private keys? Or like, what are your guys' growth aspirations here?

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Like, I think we definitely, we, you know, we don't wanna, we don't wanna own anything, right? Like, we're just creating this base layer infrastructure for anybody to use, but it would be cool, I think, and it would be great for the world if we were all testing using the same technology, because it would just make all these attestations so much more valuable. If identity platforms and KYC platforms and, you know, institutions and doctors' offices all start using EAS, it would create, I think, like, just like a new revolution and bringing like web two to web three, because it hasn't really been possible before. You know, we, in the, in the real world, we sign, we sign documents and we, we say, we attest all the time,

• 41:24Speaker 00

  but there's never been a way to just attest about anything in a digital format that's, you know, standard, standardized.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  And, and I think the world is, we're, we're looking for a more trustful online experience. So whether it's on-chain or online, I mean, if you go onto any platform today, it's filled with mistrust, misinformation, fraud, scams, right? Like, every click is a risk, every download is a risk. And like, if we can actually use digital signatures and start to build this reputation network using attestations, we can actually start to help people stay more safe online and to actually be able to do things in a more, you know, decentralized way. But without these types of like trust mechanisms, it's going to be increasingly difficult with how much fraud and misinformation is going to be launched with AI,

• 42:10Speaker 03

  that I, I think like we need to start attesting now to everything, just so we have a better chance at, you know, building trust.

• 42:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Bryce, you started to paint that picture. Let's, let's keep going with that. Why, why do we need attestations in this digital age? Like, when we daydream about the future world that, you know, EAS could bring, why do we need it in the internet to like progress forward as our next steps as a species?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  I'll talk, I'll let Steve talk about relative trust networks. And I think what we're noticing is like with this rise in AI-generated content, it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove like the authenticity of what we're consuming online and interacting with. And if we can actually use digital signatures, let's say, I'll use the Bankless example. If Bankless was attested to this podcast, right? A proof of that, like the audio file of this podcast and it's signed by Bankless. People have a verified stamp of it, but what you can't prove is like, how do you know that, you know, Steve and I were actually real people on this podcast, right? You would want verification that, because in the future I could be totally AI-generated.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  You'd want to know that Bryce and Steve actually attested to the proof of that, that podcast and verify that these people were actually real. And I think just from digital signatures, digital signatures alone and verified timestamps, we're going to be able to, to build some of that.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  One of, one of the examples I like to give about this whole like AI situation that's coming and, and how EAS can be useful is just like, think about right now, like probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now and audio content, it's probably all legitimate, like most likely not AI-generated. But in the next few years, you can kind of see how that can start to flip, right? And, you know, because we have the ability to hash any kind of content and sign, and sign it and put it on, on chain, like just, actually before I go there, like just imagine in just the next few generations, people can just start to, then maybe even the next generation, people can start to deny, deny the Holocaust and say like, you know what?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  The Holocaust never happened. Look at these videos that we actually have, look at Hitler, he's like a great guy in this video. He's helping these grandmas walk across the street, like, you know, you know, whatever. And there'll be no way to tell whether or not this is actually indeed historical footage or not. So one of the things that we think about is like, right now, if you just, if you take some historical content, hash it. Timestamp it on chain using an attestation or whatever method. You can now prove, you know, a thousand years from now that this content existed before we had the AI capable to make a perfect replication of that. So right now, we can actually use attestations to almost save history, and I think we should.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  I think it's like a really important thing, you know, because AI for sure is going to make things really hard. Like, imagine the next couple of years where you get a FaceTime call and it's like your family member who is talking just like them, but it's a it's a bot and you have no way to know whether or not it's really them. So, you know, digital signatures are, you know, are going to become increasingly important as as time goes on and technologies that allow you to like prevent being like defrauded and, you know, keep content authentic.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And and that reality is here. We were talking to a team that we won't disclose, but they were saying that they jumped onto a Zoom call and the CEO of this known project was actually, uh, the the Zoom like CEO was like a fake fraudster. And in like the web two worlds, we've all like received like the CEO emails and employees saying, hey, I need a gift card, like, go get me one. But now imagine like jumping onto a Zoom call and not knowing that the authenticity of that meeting request, or even that, you know, the person who's signing into the meeting was actually the the real person.

• 46:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what um, what role does Ethereum really play in all of this? Is is Ethereum sort of, or like blockchain in general, just kind of, um, I guess seeding this infrastructure for digital signatures? Because you're like, to your point, I don't necessarily need to do the attestation on chain. I don't necessarily need to update a smart contract, do I? But, um, like I like I can sign an off-chain message using my, you know, Ethereum like private keys. So is like, how related is this attestation to what Ethereum's doing? And like, why did you choose? Why did you choose to to build this on top of Ethereum?

• 46:44Speaker 00

  So so um, EAS is is is completely EVM based. Uh, one of the one of the the important things that does does need to be on chain. It technically doesn't have to be, but the fact that there's a schema registry on chain, that anytime you see an attestation, whether it's off-chain or on-chain, you're able to instantly know what it's about by like instantly checking the schema registry. I think that's super important. Ultimately, off-chain attestations, they don't get they don't get stored. So like, they don't need technically like to to be aether Ethereum based. But because it's an it's signing with your theory, it's it's only cable. It only works when you sign with your Ethereum wallet.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  It's using E I P seven one two for for signing those those off chain attestations can actually be verified by smart contracts on chain at a later time. Um, and so we chose Ethereum because, you know, we believe it's the, you know, the number one uh blockchain infrastructure, you know, base layer. And we were also launching on other E V M's that are, you know, Ethereum layer twos. And, you know, perhaps maybe some other E V M based chains that are not, you know, directly uh layer twos of Ethereum. Uh, but we chose Ethereum because there's most of the apps seem to be built like an E V M based, you know, systems. And that's where all the developers are.

• 48:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I I guess I'm also asking, so um, I think the the world is looking outside, looking in kind of mainstreams. Sort of like, yeah, crypto, where's your use case? You know, you keep saying you're you're good for the world and we keep being like, yeah, but you know, store, store value, right? And they're like, but we have the dollar and we have a bank and we're like D five, but we have a banking system, all of these things, right? And uh, of course, we sort of see the future. We we sort of see why the world uh needs these things. But what what they see is kind of like, you know, Ponzi games and get rich quick schemes and all of these things. I I I'm wondering if we've um, as a byproduct of this whole property rights system that we've created, where we've got private keys and that are that are secured in more people's hands.

• 48:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  If we've actually like created a boot loader for a identity system, an attestation system. Like, Bankless is so often um thinking about Ethereum as sort of a uh global permissionless property rights system, but we mostly think of it in terms of um, you know, like a a property settlement system or almost like a decentralized banking system without the banks, right? Hence, bankless. But I but I I kind of wonder if we've also bootstrapped and bootloaded a global decentralized attestation?

• 49:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Operating system computer and like that seems to me like that is actually undeniably good for the world, even if you're not into kind of the money games, you care nothing about finance. To have a decentralized, unstoppable, permissionless way of attesting. As long as you're kind of online, there's something incredibly valuable there and almost it might be more public goods oriented than actually this whole like money use case that we've spent the first three years of the podcast talking about. I don't know, reflect on that for me. Is this how you see the world?

• 50:01Speaker 03

  I'd love for Steve to also give his opinion just because when we like Ethereum or just in general, in the past 10 years, we've really focused on decentralizing assets. But there's like this, in the real world, there's so many other things like information and like non-financial use cases that we just haven't been able to decentralize yet. And I feel like it's because a lot of times we do try to extract value like immediately out of the system. We revert back to like financial use cases. When like Ethereum was built, so you could actually create like land registries and like all these very like decentralized, you know, aspects of life. But here we are 10 years later and we're only, you know, decentralizing money. And I think it is because we've been missing this attestation layer.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of the things now is that like, you know, because so many people now have these private keys, you know, private key, private keys in possession and people have used NFTs. Now's a really good time for entities to be able to just start to get into like identity, you know, I actually got, so I was in the space for a really long time. And I remember actually, you know, when Ethereum was coming out, everybody was super, the narrative was around, how do we decentralize more than just money? How do we decentralize everything? And, you know, nine years later and, you know, like it's basically the, this like we've decentralized a little bit more, but we haven't solved every problem.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  And it's because, you know, while Ethereum brought, you know, the ability for anybody to launch a smart contract. Like, how does that work when you want to be able to attest to someone's diploma? Like, do you make a smart contract specifically to attesting the diplomas? Because that's kind of what's what's been going on. People like, oh, you know, I want to do KYC. So they build a smart contract around KYC. They build a smart contract around attesting to whether someone's a human or not, you know? But they haven't built a smart contract for just arbitrary attesting about literally anything. And, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's why I think now, like with EAS, you can actually solve these, these really hard problems. And anyone can. It's not just limited to developers, you know? Before it was like, oh, you know, you want to build something in the space

• 52:13Speaker 00

  and you want to build some credentialing thing? Oh, you have to be a developer to build a smart contract specific to this? Now you can literally be an institution and just say, oh, I'm going to use this no-code schema builder, build this schema and then attest with it. You know, it's just nothing like that has ever existed before.

• 52:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I would imagine the big signal that this is actually being adopted are non-crypto institutions are testing to non-crypto people about stuff. I would, I would imagine that that would be a huge sign of success. Maybe we've gotten there, I don't know. I'm, I'll ask you guys that later in the, in the show. But for right now, what, what projects might listeners be familiar with that are using EAS? And what are they trying to do with it?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so one of the, when we're building a standard, as you were describing for it, like, how do we just end up not being like another standard that tried to become a standard? You know, that's, that was a real fear in the early, like, beginnings, because we were building EAS and then Optimism was building their attestation station, which was a different primitive related to attestations. And we, we reached out to them. Long story short, we did code reviews and things like that. We, they, they came to the conclusion that, hey, wow, this infrastructure is extremely, you know, versatile and powerful. They deprecated the attestation station and adopted EAS as the core infrastructure for attesting about anything.

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  So you guys want a thumb war with Optimism?

• 53:37Speaker 03

  A code thumb war, for sure. But they adopted us as two, so we have, we're integrated into the native code base as two special addresses. So anytime a new chain gets deployed on the OP stack, they automatically inherit the EAS contracts. And that was a really big win for us because optimism is like really trying to push the attestation narrative. And they're really leaning into like identity related things. And we wanted to make sure that if we didn't get them to use EAS, then we would be building two different standards again. And it's the, the amount of like identity protocols that we've reached out to have received us, you know, very welcoming because we don't have a token, we don't

• 54:21Speaker 03

  have all these things and they can instantly start building with it. So optimism is probably the biggest well-known one, for sure.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  This really just goes back to the power of credible neutrality and public goods wins you hearts and minds. It sounds like what you guys in optimism were trying to build was the same thing, but maybe they were kind of trying, they were trying to roll their own identity and you guys had already been thinking about this. And, and so it sounds like the EAS, the EAS smart contracts are a part of every OP stack chain that gets deployed. Is that true?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  What, what, what kind of attestations are people doing in optimism right now? Like, what are they attesting to?

• 54:59Speaker 03

  The use cases are a lot of like, there, there are like people experimenting around like governance related things, like attesting to roles in a DAO as an example. There's people attesting to, like, there's a project that's attesting to like optimism domains and like different aspects of like a domain registry.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Quadratic voting. We got, we have this dev folio for all their hackathons now. They use EAS for at the end of the hackathon, all the teams get to vote using EAS quadratically. And then anybody can tally up the votes and verify, you know, who gets paid out. There's also Gitcoin, so Gitcoin passport stamps. We reached out to them, we were talking, you know, hey, these stamps are essentially just attestations, right? And they've, they've been very welcoming to us as well. And so Gitcoin passport stamps are migrating to be attestations as, as a primitive. Because what that does is it also unlocks them to be more composable with other identity solutions.

• 55:56David Hoffman?

  So when Gitcoin stamps becomes EAS compliant with the standard, I don't know if that's the right word or not, what, what does this do? Does this just help with like discoverability? I don't know if there's like a search engine for EAS attestations out there, but what does actually coming into the fold and being compliant with the ERC standard get you? Maybe you can use the Gitcoin example, like what were they not able to get? What network effects were they not able to tap into? And then, and once they complied with the standard, what were they able, able to get?

• 56:29Speaker 00

  So, so just like other platforms, like Gitcoin passport is like its own siloed, you know, little like ecosystem. So if you want to implement Gitcoin passports, you have to understand their docs. You have to implement their SDK and like it was, it's not super interoperable. So say you want to make a smart contract that, that cares about a Bitcoin passport, you have to make sure to implement specifically Gitcoin passport related code. And then maybe you want to verify that they have a Gitcoin passport and a world coin ID or something else, and now you can't because you have to implement too many pieces of technology. Whereas now it's just an attestation of a particular schema. And then, you know, so you can just say, I, we care about Gitcoin's attestations from this schema.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  So if it comes from Gitcoin's address and it's from the schema, you know, we, we trust this type of attestation. Or if it comes from this schema and this other address, we trust it too. You could never do that before when everybody's using completely different, uh, different protocols.

• 57:28David Hoffman?

  Are you a MetaMask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are. The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. MetaMask portfolio is the ultimate one stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains. And multiple addresses all at once. You can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens and NFTs in one convenient place just by connecting your wallet. MetaMask portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio, though. Inside the portfolio, you can do all the incredible money verbs that make DeFi so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your DeFi moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in Web3 your way, MetaMask portfolio is the answer.

• 58:11David Hoffman?

  I already know that you have MetaMask wallet, so go check out your MetaMask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io/portfolio. You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bakeless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS. The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet. Buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees. And you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs.

• 58:53David Hoffman?

  And you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards and price charts. Or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet. Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One with flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social dApps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput.

• 59:37David Hoffman?

  Whether you are a developer, enterprise or a user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap and friction free.

• 1:00:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I remember the most, probably the most interesting attestation I've done recently, maybe in the past couple of weeks, and I guess this would be an attestation, is actually, you know, it's an OP stack chain, I guess, the application's on top of friend.tech, you know, the thing that everyone's saying these days, right? And so, in order to like, start your friend.tech profile, you have to attest from Twitter that this is actually your account. I think that counts as an attestation, right? So basically, when I create my friend.tech profile, I also log in using Twitter, and I essentially attest from that, you know, this ETH address on base in friend.tech is corresponding to my Twitter account. And so I make an attestation there.

• 1:00:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  That does count as an attestation. That's the kind of thing that you guys are talking about, right? And it just seems to me that there's a ton of web 2 types of profiles, social reputation, different things that you might be able to attest to just through an API. And it's not perfect, of course, right? It can be bodable, but, you know, I have my Twitter password right now, and two-factor authentication, it's like, it is pretty verifiably my account over on the other side. Is that a good example of an attestation? And what are you seeing in the world of like, web 2 attestations?

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  It's an attestation, but technically because Twitter can just go into your account and make you attest to whatever you want. It's not...

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Or buy your X... yeah, or buy your X...

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Or like, lock you out, block you, you know, it's not permissionless, and it's certainly not, you know, like, using any kind of private key infrastructure. So like, you know, ultimately, like, someone is in control of your keys. Not your keys, not your attestation.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  It's also, it doesn't participate in the interoperability if you actually did use like, a base layer, where if friend.tech attested to this person passing some sort of verification, other people could start to build like, their own parts of a social graph, knowing that they were verified in this way. Similar to how like, social graphs today are building like, very unique use cases around, it could be blogging, it could be, you know, a social app, whatever it is. You still need a way for people to be more interoperable. And if you just use an API from one specific partner, you're going to struggle with like making sure that all your APIs are always up to date and making sure that they're not changing the code and things like that.

• 1:02:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So how would you prefer like a friend dot? Like, what's a better design for friend dot tech to kind of attest to my? Like that I own this, this, this Twitter account? Like, what would be a better way of doing that?

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  It's literally, it's literally the only way though, right? Like you, you, you do, you would have to make some sort of post from Twitter that references your, your address because you need the two-way attestation. Cause I can just say, I, I, I own, you know, David's Twitter account. But if there's no way to, to like reverse it and say like from that account that you own this address, there's no, you know, there's no way to prove it two ways. And so it's really the only way you can right now.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Here's, here's a way though, because, or a potential alternative. I think if the requirement for you to sign up with friend dot tech was for you to have a verified Twitter account, right? Well, that's what Gitcoin Passport's doing. They're providing the OAuth to allow that a Gitcoin Passport stamp for your Twitter account is if that's an attestation. Friend dot tech could have just looked at Gitcoin Passport and integrated that into their, you know, onboarding process to say like, if you have a Gitcoin Passport stamp you pass, if you don't have one, then you need to go get one from anywhere. We just like, here are providers that we would accept in this way versus them creating their own internal verification.

• 1:03:50David Hoffman?

  I think maybe that starts to illustrate the role that many attestations might play in the world of the attestation landscape. As soon as you have more and more and more data about, you know, different attestations, all of a sudden it paints the picture of identity, not just for you, but for everyone. Steve, going back to your story, like you were born and then you were given a name and then you were given your next attestation and then your next attestation and then your next attestation. And then all of a sudden, here you are, your name's Steve and you, you have an identity. I think like if we're going to build this on-chain society with trustless identity, it's just going to come from attestations on top of attestations on top of attestations, providing applications and smart contracts

• 1:04:33David Hoffman?

  and anyone with the data that they need in order to actually receive attestations so that they can know who you are and what you're up to.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Imagine in the future, you can look at any address that you're like going to do business with or, or operate with. And you can instantly see all the attestations related to them and you can see like, well, how, how, how is this entity relative to me? So like, for example, has Bryce attested them? Has Bryce's friend attested them? Has someone that I've attested, like down my attestation, you know, downstream, my downstream attestations?

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  Attestation degrees of separation?

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Degrees of, degrees of attestation separation, like how far away?

• 1:05:12David Hoffman?

  Attestation separation?

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the D A S, of course, the degrees of attestation. Um, so, uh, you'll be able to build like a really true, true decentralized reputation. Like right now, if, if, if a friend of mine asks me like, uh, in, in West Palm Beach where I live and they say like, hey, like, uh, do you know any plumbers? You know, maybe I know a plumber and I'll tell them and then they'll trust, trust me. Or maybe I know I have a friend, maybe Bryce knows of, of a plumber. And then I'm like, well, you know, they're like, and, and, and it kind of works like that, right? But i- in the real world, we can only really do that a few degrees out. Like, once we get past three degrees, we don't really know what's going on. But digitally, you can still gain, you can still kind of find some like, uh, value in entities that you don't even know.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  So like, there might be like five people who have attested somehow even like multiple degrees away to some entity. And all, and on average, it's a positive attestation. Therefore, I should have some sort of positive value. I should see some sort of positive value in that, in that entity. And then if I choose to, to work with them and then maybe they screw me over, I can then see exactly who, who, why, why? Why, why did this person get rated so high? And I can tweak my, uh, my attestation weights to different entities. And now I have a new view that I might be more in line with reality.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  I- imagine in the, in the near term future where like the web of trust gets more, uh, you know, in visual? And you put on like your Apple, you know, Vision Pro and they're just navigating your, your different web of trust. But the, the difference is like in the real world today, we get assigned a trust score, right? Like your credit score as an example. And what if you could actually control like how you define what is trustworthy to you? And as Steve was describing, like turning those attestation weights, you could figure out like, oh, I don't really, as long as they have these types of attestations or they can like prove these attestations to me before I interact with them, then I'm going to give a, a greater trust score to them.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Imagine this, like, imagine you start like this brand new, like, decentralized trust network, and everybody you look at in the network, it starts with a zero, everybody's just a zero. And then you say, you know, like, well, let me, like, initiate my weights, like, I'm gonna give my mom, like, a high rating, I give my brother a good rating, uh, you know, I'll give the, the influencers that I listen to, I'll give them somewhat of a trusted rating because I trust them. And then now, every time you interact, interact with some sort of DAP, maybe Metamask starts to show you, well, this is, this is this person's rating based on all the people that you've attested. Uh, you know, David Hoffman thinks that this is a gr- a great app, you know, like, and then, you know, like, opens up, there's an attestation from an, opens up an audit on the smart contract too, so you get like a, a nice little checkmark.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  And like, users can start to like, build, like, you know, start to gain trust in these things and know exactly why do I trust this? Well, you can see these attestation from these entities. And, and then even negative attestation, so you can kind of make up your mind based on who's testing.

• 1:08:09David Hoffman?

  I think that starts to really illustrate the need for an application layer on top of EAS. As soon as the number of attestation is out there, starts to get pretty unwieldy, all of a sudden, we're going to need, like, attestation service providers to help re-coalesce all of the 10,000 different attestation that's, that are made every single day. And so, like, we, like we talked about earlier, there's all these different identity plays that are out there. Like, everyone's trying to go and, we are the identity app. What do we do? We provide identity to Web3. And I think we've now, go ahead and kind of nailed that, that business model in the coffin, where you can't, you can never go straight for identity. You have to allow it to emerge, it should be emergent.

• 1:08:54David Hoffman?

  But we, what we are going to need, once this, once this, um, once there are enough attestation out there, we are going to need the application layer to help us actually provide a lens for viewing all of these attestation. And so, rather than just there being one identity application, there's probably going to be a many handful of them, and they're each going to provide their individual lens for viewing this attestation landscape. I don't know if that inspires any, any thoughts? Steve, you're nodding your head?

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. That's it's it's a huge thing and we're working with a few different teams that that's that's their thing. They they've typically like looked at on-chain data for like all sorts of DeFi platforms and aggregated and come up with all sorts of scoring. But now if everybody starts to testing about all sorts of things, you can start to define like all sorts of scoring connections and metrics in all sorts of different categories, right? Like so like, what is his DeFi score? What is his friend, you know, like social score? What is his, you know, like, you know, there there can be infinite categories. And so, yeah, like providers that that that like aggregate all this data and and make sense of it are going to be really important.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  But then also open source tools that users can themselves run and also aggregate the attestations and derive scores too. I think that'll be interesting too. And so you you can have all these other entities that like attest to like what this entity's score is. So, you know, in in the example that I gave you before of like, you know, being able to get a relative trust from somebody, maybe that person isn't within your network, so you have other trusted entities, like maybe like the Equifaxes of the world that now instead of like just doing credit scoring, they start to aggregate attestation data and build, you know, different views about entities, you know, from from the from that data.

• 1:10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's it's interesting how, you know, on kind of the the web, the internet, which is a web of trust, I guess. A lot of the attestations that we're doing kind of happen in the background as we're like consuming content. So, you know, I consume someone's content, I might decide to follow them, so I get more of their content, right? Well, that is an attestation that, you know, this particular content creator has me as a follower. And then, you know, more people who follow them, you know, obviously, they're kind of their their social rank moves up. They have more followers, that sort of thing. Or like, if I am writing a blog post and I choose to to link to a specific article, right? The way Google indexes these things is you kind of link links really matter, right? A page rank system.

• 1:11:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so by in by effectively linking back to Wikipedia page, I am attesting that Wikipedia is a great source for this particular topic, right? I I wonder if we get to the stage in in crypto and Web 3 where the attestations are kind of like happening in the background. So we're not actually always signing things and clicking addresses. And yes, I know this person, but it's just as a function of navigating our way around like an optimism chain or like doing this, interacting with this protocol. I'm like in effect attesting to it in some way.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  If you take a look like, so we've actually built some really cool things on top of EAS. One of the things that we created as an example is called speaketh dot ETH or sorry, speaketh.org. And essentially it's, it's a, it's like a decentralized social network similar to like a Twitter, where every, every post is an attestation, every like is an attestation, every follow is an attestation, every reply is an attestation, every name, you know, change is an attestation.

• 1:12:20David Hoffman?

  Is that just what Twitter is?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  That's

• 1:12:22David Hoffman?

  Whenever, whenever I tweet something, I just attest to the fact that I

• 1:12:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's an attestation network. Yes. Everything's

• 1:12:26David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, it's just attestation.

• 1:12:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's attestation all the way down.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  And even, even the community note feature, right? Like now in, in Twitter, you can have like these arbiters of truth that say whether something's like trustworthy or not, like the piece of content, so people can, you know, attest their voice that this content is credible. Well, in the decentralized world, even Wikipedia, as, as you're bringing up, Ryan, like, it's a great way to post like some sort of information, but you, you look to the wisdom of the crowd to make sure that like the history is actually the history. And you want people to be able to make those types of attestations.

• 1:13:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  The problem with all of these attestations though, right? In web two is that they're all kind of siloed. And so there's no way to export the social graph of attestations outside of Twitter. And this community notes feature, as grand as it is, it's just like just locked inside of one ecosystem, which is, which is Twitter and Elon Musk's platform. And so it's tied to Elon Musk governance tokens, right? Can't export it. It's not very much like web one dot O. It's not a standard.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  I like bring up the example of like eBay, like there's like people who build up like a really good reputation on eBay. And then they want to sell something on like Amazon or they want to sell something

• 1:13:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  They got nothing. They start from zero.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  They're nothing. Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Why are you, why am I nobody? Why can't I bring my attestations with me? And, and also what's cool about this is like, say someone builds like a Twitter on top of attestations. And then like that's certain, the front end goes down or someone wants to make a better version. They don't have to start like a completely new network effect, like to, to get attestation. They can basically bring all those same tweets and all that's, all the same follow attestation and everything. Just build a whole new front end on top of it.

• 1:13:59David Hoffman?

  I'm never gonna be able to see Twitter as a web two siloed attestation network. I'm always gonna be able to see that. See, something you just said, I really want to double down on. Whereas like you have this primitive EAS and maybe you have a form factor for attestations, call them tweets. And then we just have 10 bajillion tweet attestations get signed by digital signatures. There could be many different front end UIs to look as, like I said, lenses for looking at all of these attestations. And so no longer, there's like the protocol, the primitive EAS. And then there could be like a handful of applications all looking at the EAS attestations.

• 1:14:40David Hoffman?

  But no, no one of them is actually the silo anymore. They're just now lenses for looking at the primitive.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  And we want to be able to, as users, choose what we're consuming, right? Like today, we get fed the content based off of our own like echo chambers in Twitter, right? But what if we want to filter for like, I wonder what the Solana ecosystem is up to or like these different narratives? Like if you actually could just filter that out in the UI versus preventing it or like forcing it? Like giving users the choice of the type of content versus prevention, I think is really interesting.

• 1:15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about this, at this point in the conversation, somebody, some listeners here are probably getting nervous because not once have we talked about privacy, right? And we're talking about all of these attestations and of course, you're, you know, your on-chain address holds assets. And I mean, like, how does privacy fit into this conversation? Is, is what you're building kind of, does it consider privacy at all? Or is that another layer on top that would need to be built as an application?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, in general, the way we tell people like, like what to attest. Like if you're gonna put something on-chain, like you obviously don't want to put any private data, right? Say like Coinbase wants to do KYC attestation for a particular address. Maybe there's some like a uniswap, but only for securities. And in order to use it, you need like an attestation from some like accredited like KYC.

• 1:16:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler's ETH address would have to sign off on that.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah Coinbase is attesting to your KYC. For example, they don't need to attest to who you are. All they need to do is say that this address has passed the test, right? So all they're saying, so maybe you would have the schema has passed KYC and then it can just be true. Right? Another entity can use it too. And so the, the services that accept these attestations would just do their due diligence and be like, oh, we trust Coinbase's attestations. We trust these attestations from these entities. And then they would just build that into the app rather than putting private data. And, and that's also one of the reasons why we, we built off-chain attestations. Because like in, in, in the real world, right? You have these apps, you can, you can say that your ID cards, your passport, your driver's license.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  These are essentially attestations, but you can say they're, they're off-chain attestations. They're not, they're not public. You, you, you own them and you show them on a need to know basis. So that's, that's one way, right? Another way is we created like a really cool tools to be able to attest to a lot of private data. Like, so imagine a doctor's office can attest to like all of your medical records. And we built a really cool tool for being able to take all of those records and it, and just, and, and turn them into a Merkle tree and attest on-chain to just the root, the root hash of that tree. And then the tool, we, we added the tools where anybody can then prove pieces of that tree to any other entity.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  And so basically I can, my insurance company might say, oh, we want to make sure that you actually got this treatment that you're getting insurance money for. And then you can just reveal specifically just the pieces of the medical data. And then they can verify for sure it came from the entity. So we, we have a tool for this without using zero knowledge proofs. Uh, and, and, and it's, it's pretty great. But then there's also zero knowledge proofs where, you know, you can attest to private data and then you can reveal. Information about that data without actually revealing that data. Uh, and so the, the, the thing about zero knowledge proofs is that they're so far, every single solution for zero knowledge proofs is currently like really application specific.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  And there's no like generalized like ZK everything uh, uh, solution right now. And so like, we haven't like, we have no opinion right now on, on uh, ZK systems to use. There's a bunch of different things you can use. We don't presuppose what's inside of an attestation. So your attestation could be like a full ZK proof. It could be, you know, one of these privacy prefers preserving attestations that we, we showed. It could be off chain. Or you can simply like, you know, if, if it comes to like a tweet, right? If you're tweeting, that's public in general anyway. So like, you know, you wouldn't really expect privacy from your tweets like they're, they're pretty much public attestations. But yeah, we care about privacy. We, we tell everybody that we, we write in the docs, like be careful what you attest about because

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  the on-chain attestation do go on-chain and they'll live there forever. And so you gotta be, you gotta be very careful. But what's cool is we have, you know, we're building tools and we, we have other teams that are building tools even on top of EAS. Like additional developer tools that help you like help developers solve these types of problems.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have a lot of uh, hackers that, that use EAS that uh, were creating ZKP's off of attestation data, which was really cool to see. So you could still preserve like who your identity was for like a credible uh, attestation. But then we also received a lot of positive feedback on that Merkel tree approach, just to selectively share information.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  And, and also like with Sismo, for example, you can use uh, Sismo is like integrated with EAS. So like you can actually make uh, zero knowledge proofs. So I can say, for example, that I have an attestation. Uh, you know, of a particular thing without revealing uh, which address actually has it, just that I own it.

• 1:19:53David Hoffman?

  Not too long ago, we did an episode with uh, the sign in with Ethereum team. Uh, and I see a lot of overlap between sign in with Ethereum and EAS. Um, maybe you guys can talk about where these platforms do overlap and if you guys are working together, but why am I getting such a strong vibe between this episode and our sign in with Ethereum episode?

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  I mean, I would, I wouldn't say that we're, we're, we overlap much in the sense that, you know, you, you sign it with Ethereum and you, and you sign a message with your, with your wallet and then it's verified on the server. That's, it's, you can say that you're like attesting that you are the owner of this key, but just, that's the only thing you're testing with and sign with Ethereum. You're not, it's not like arbitrary stuff. Like, I can't use sign in Ethereum to attest and say, like, you've passed KYC. You know, you can, you can make a signature and say, just write those words, but that's not structured. And what, what EAS allows you to do is to create a schema representing this intention and then attesting with it, with that, you know, encoded data.

• 1:20:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's similar in that it's permissionless, it's open source, there's no token. I think in those, in those ways, it's similar. And it's also similar because you're using a private, you know, key, Ethereum private key for something that is, um, just feels kind of web two-y and like, that is not a financial use case.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  And we've, we've chatted with the, the Spruce ID team quite a bit. And in those discussions, nothing felt like, uh, competitive at all. It's more just complimentary and like, we're at the stations beyond signing into something, you know, could, could make sense.

• 1:21:27David Hoffman?

  So how are you guys funded? If you guys have no token, no VC capital, like where does, how do you guys pay your bills?

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so EAS has been bootstrapped today. We have received grants. So like, one of the key things that we're trying to solve right now is around like schema coordination. Right? Like how, if you have all these like schemas being created, how do we actually help people organize around the right ones? So Optimism just gave us a, a, a pretty good grant to help build that out. And then we're really leaning into the, uh, the, the new funding mechanisms, like retroactive public goods funding. We're hoping that that's like significant for us. I'm hoping for that. Uh, and then there's also like the PGN network and like these new primitives. But to date, yeah, it's been, uh, self-funded and then just through like grants.

• 1:22:13David Hoffman?

  Well, being the attestation layer as a public good for the OP stack and the optimism collective, combined with optimism's retroactive public goods funding. If we can just smash these two things together and fund public goods from now until infinity, that would be one of the bull cases for Ethereum. That has been articulated from the very, very start. So I wish you guys the best on this endeavor. If people want to help fund this effort, what should they do? What should they know? Where should they go?

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  We are, we're live on, so Gitcoin grants, like their round 18 is live right now. So we're actually, we have a page that's up for that, for quadratic funding there. And then really just like the way that public goods get funded through these mechanisms is through impact. And so like being able to just build useful applications in turn just helps us as a protocol gain further adoption. So like really learning about attestations and building with it, I think is, is pretty critical.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  You know, we've really, we've been around in this space. Like I've been in Bitcoin actually since 2011 and I've built some of the first Bitcoin wallets, like the first ever Chrome extension wallet in 2013. You know, I really like Vitalik, Vitalik was actually a advisor at the time. And you know, like I've been building in this space for a really long time. I'm very passionate about this technology and everybody on the team really is passionate about this because of like what it brings to blockchain. And so like, you know, we, money was never like a thought really when we were building this.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  It was just like this, like there's a bunch of the cool things that we want to be able to build and we can't build it, can't just build the project because otherwise we're just going to build another silo. And so we had to build this thing so we can build non-siloed apps. So like ultimately like we want to be able to build cool stuff on top of it, but not until we finished our work here, like, you know, getting EOS adopted and, you know, understood by the majority of developers in the space.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  It's really important for us to like see adoption with the AS because then like we, just like any other builders, can start to build like really amazing for-profit businesses. But for now, like this to become a standard, we have to like keep it credibly neutral and make sure that that those, that ethos never changes because then we're just going to end up in the graveyard of like projects that tried. And I think like now we have like these really cool mechanisms like retroactive public goods funding, the PGN network and some others that like can help projects. But it's still, it is hard for public goods to go from zero, zero to one, for sure.

• 1:24:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think we've talked about a lot of other identity, I guess, providers in the space and sort of the overlaps. We talked about WorldCoin. We talked a little bit about this idea of proof of personhood. And I think it's pretty clear that those sorts of identity solutions can be testers on top of something like EAS. One primitive we haven't talked about though is soulbound tokens. And, you know, like, how does, how does the idea of soulbound tokens fit into what you guys are doing? Is it related or is it completely like different and orthogonal?

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I remember actually Vitalik, I think it was in 2020, announced like soulbound tokens at ECC. And, you know, I think it was like the wrong solution, right? Because the point of, you know, NFTs became really popular. Everybody built like into their wallets, the ability to view NFTs, EtherScan adopted it, right? And so when people think of like, what tools can I use to solve like identity or reputation, you know, they they're like, all right, how can we use NFTs for this? Because like, you know, when all you have is a hammer, you know, everything looks like a nail. And so like, the NFT was

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  the only tool that anyone ever had. But NFTs aren't good for this. So if I want to be able to test that Bryce, that I trust Bryce, for example, right? What do I do? Do I deploy a whole new smart contract that inherits the soulbound token interface? Where do I store that he's a friend or not? Like, and how do we know that this particular NFT is a friend type NFT? Do we have to register in a completely different smart contract? Like, there's no, and every new soulbound token can be part of a completely different smart contract. So like, if I want to see what are the soul, what are the identities that Bryce's address have received? Like, there's no, no way to pull this, you know? And everybody can be designing like a completely different smart contract with a completely different interface, different functions that don't work with each other. And there's

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  no way to know, you know, easily like.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Like, and so EAS like attestations are a whole new primitive for being able to describe any kind of, you know, intent. Whereas NFTs are still useful when you, when you have some sort of an asset that you want to move around, you know, but when you want to be able to just say something about something, an attestation makes a lot more sense. So.

• 1:27:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys are, you guys are bearish on soulbound tokens as a, as kind of a concept and.

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and, and.

• 1:27:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would say like, you know, there's no such thing as anything that's, there's no such

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  thing as a soulbound token because I can, I can just sell you my private key and now it's not soulbound to me anymore.

• 1:27:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can always sell your soul, I guess.

• 1:27:42Speaker 00

  You can sell yourself.

• 1:27:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  That, that.

• 1:27:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're good.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a lot of devs, a lot of devs were just building with SBTs because they're like the existing solution. But if you talk to a lot of engineers in the space today, they just see it as like, it's just a little too clunky. Like if you do have something a little bit more elegant, but it's not that they were wrong. And to begin with, it's just, that's just what was available.

• 1:28:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Well, I feel like we very much haven't reached into kind of the, the age of, of attestations or the age of identity across crypto. I mean, the first, you know, 10 years of this whole crypto project since you've been here, Steve, has all about, been about the kind of the property rights layer and then sort of the money layer and the assets layer. Do you think we're entering the age of attestations as, as a service? And, you know, what, what makes you optimistic about that? If so?

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  You know, what's amazing now is like, I, we tell the story about EAS to, to, to developers, like, you know, like seasoned, you know, CTOs who have never, don't even know who, who I am or that I've been in the space. You know, they hear about the idea and they're like, their, their eyes open really wide because they, they get it, you know, it's, it's. It's it's it's no one's really thought about identity this way. We don't know anyone else that's thinking about it this way. And I think it's a it's a really simple solution to a complex problem. And it's super easy to use. Developers can use it right away. We we have a website, you know, so we have the smart contracts, but we also have EAS scan,

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  which is like the ether scan of attestations. You can you can browse through all schemas, attestations, you can make attestations, attestations on them. We also have like everything indexed like in GraphQL endpoints. So it's super easy for anybody to be able to pull attestations and display them in their UI. We built a ton of tools. And, you know, EAS is useful for so many things that like, I think, you know, it's like the if you build it, they will come kind of thing. And that's how I feel about it.

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  The the narrative is definitely shifting towards non-financial use cases. And I think that we're helping solve a lot of the edge cases to get builders building faster. And so I I think like it's exciting to see like just through the hackathons, how many people have actually like explored use cases we haven't even thought of. And so I think it's going to be really fun to watch.

• 1:30:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's great, guys. I I think we'll end it there. A really exciting project. And thanks for giving us a tour into why attestations are so in part important for for crypto. We appreciate your time.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  Thank you. Ryan, David, pleasure. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks, Bankless community, too. A lot of fun.

• 1:30:25Speaker 00

  Seeing it grow over the years.

• 1:30:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, some action items for you today. We'll include a link to the EAS website with the docs in the show notes. Also, viewer episode, David mentioned it, signing with Ethereum, unrelated, but also related in some ways. Spiritually related. This, of course, is a, you know, public good, open source, permissionless, tokenless, and also free. So what could be better than that? Got to end with this, though. First and disclaimers, of course, got to let you know crypto is risky. You got to be very careful what you attest to. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is a frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.