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A | Probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now in 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 One of the things that we think about is like right now, if you just, if you take some historical content, hash it, timestamp it on chain using an attestation, you can now prove, you know, a thousand years from now that this content existed before we had the AI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 attestations to almost save history. And I think we should. |
B | 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 attestations. That word attestations, that's going to be the focus of today's episode. Number two, we talk about why web two 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 ten years as soon as we unlock the power of attestations. Number four, we end with thoughts on Worldcoin, on privacy, on soul bound tokens, and a host of other items related to decentralized identity. David, why was this episode significant to you? |
C | 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're skipping a step, they're skipping 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, 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 adaptation service team is working on building today. |
B | We have nothing to disclose for this episode, but of course you can always check out bankless disclosures@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. Bankless nation, we are super excited to introduce you to Bryce, Patrick and Steve Dak. 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. It'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. |
A | Thanks. |
D | 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. |
B | 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 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 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 and identity. And so David and I like took a look. We understood a few things. This looks like open source primitive, it's tokenless, it's free, it's a public good. This is music to our ears on bankless. So we're hoping by the end of this episode we know enough about eas to be dangerous, and we sort of get the shape of where identity might be going, at least from a public goods perspective. Does that sound like an okay agenda? |
A | Absolutely, yeah. |
D | Great. |
B | Okay, 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? |
A | All right, so basically, simply speaking, an attestation is simply an entity making a signed statement about something. 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 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. 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 it's a very complex kind of abstract concept that no one has really solved because, you know, I think people have been trying to solve it the wrong way, almost building one layer too high and not building upon a primitive to be able to describe such complex things. So we started to think about identity, and we're looking at all the platforms that existed out there today. And we saw that most of the platforms that are doing identity, they're almost all like glorified KYC companies. They build these like siloed platforms that you essentially, as a company or developer, have to adopt a. And then you're kind of locked into that platform. So say, for example, there's Polygon ID or brightid or any of these platforms that allow you to do some sort of KYC. They essentially are testing about you passing your KYC, but that attestation can only be used within that platform. And so if some other platform wants to KYC you and you want, and you're like, maybe a smart contract that wants to valid 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 decentralization. It's not interoperable. And also, none of it actually solves identity. Identity and reputation is very complex. I might, you know, like Bryce's, you know, selection in music, but I might not like his food taste, 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, 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. The government attested to my passport and my driver's license. University can attest to your diploma, and your employer can 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, 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. |
D | Yeah. And 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. Realize, 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 and beyond with different use cases to really help try to bring everyone together. |
C | When you guys say that attestations are primitive really gets me excited, especially when you define the primitive so easily as just a statement that someone attests to something else. And when a statement like this is so simple, you can get this instinct that the expression of this primitive can be massive. And I think why these conversations around identity and these primitives can be so difficult is that a lot of the listeners, especially crypto newbies, 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 new monies that were created. You almost have to unlearn the paradigm of the dollar in order to understand bitcoin and ether. And 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 piecemeal 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, we'll go back to you. 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? |
D | Yeah, if we check ourselves out of 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 in 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 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 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 he's trusting that you're actually going to follow through on that. And so 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 from that. But we haven't had a way to do that online and on chain. |
C | Is this just an identity conversation? Is this a conversation specifically, attestations, what do they do? They give us our identities? Or is there something grander here? |
A | So attestations can be used for a lot more than identity. 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 at the stations, because they're simply essentially signed statements of entities saying things about things, it 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 can be used for ticketing. There's, you know, if you start and what's interesting is in real life, 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, like, a digital way to do this in a structured, standardizable way before. And so that's what the magic of, like, you know, with Eas, 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 Eas has kind of brought. |
D | Yeah. If we think of like 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 a way to attest 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 interoperable for people. |
B | Okay, so I'm trying to, like, put, put this together, make this make sense in my own mind. So a few things maybe have been talked about. The first I just want to make concrete is this idea of an attestation. It's somebody saying a thing about someone else or making some claim on chain. What this mechanically looks like is on chain with, say, a metamask type of prompt. I'm signing something with my private key. I own RSA eth. That's my ens, and it corresponds to an actual ethereum address. And I can sign things on chain. I can digitally verify. And I have to, let's say I'm using my ledger for this hardware device, or metamask. You have to click through and actually attest that something is true. Is that what you mean by an attestation? Is that all we're talking about here? |
A | Yep. Yes. Yes. But it's structured in a particular way using the EAS standard. But yes, every attestation is signed with a wallet with a private key. So you have the authenticity knowing that this attestation came from the entity that's claiming. |
B | And so it's coming from the entity that owns those private keys, that has, like, physical access to those private keys. |
A | Or a smart contract. It can even be a smart contract at a test, 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. |
B | Okay. |
D | 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 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 want to make sure that EAs was accessible off chain. So EAs is also an off chain protocol for making digital signatures as well. |
B | Okay. Okay. I want to get into eas, but, yeah, that's an interesting point. I guess all a tweet is an attestation that my account, the person who holds my username and password and is two factor authenticated into my Twitter account, is saying this thing that establishes my online Twitter reputation, basically, and is the basis for my social graph. But I want to go back to something, because for somebody who's thinking 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 part that is a little bit mind blowing at first. And the part that's kind of, like, back to the basics of this is, like, what is money? Well, it's a social scoreboard, I guess. And 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 you're saying all my identity is Isdev attestations that my peers, like that the social context through which I'm in make about me. So the nation state will attest that America, hopefully they attest this, that I'm an american citizen and I have a Social Security number. And they will attest that whatever the government database somewhere. And I'm also a canadian citizen, so the government of Canada will attest that I'm canadian. And if I'm a member of a church or something, then my church might attest that I'm a member here. Or if I'm a member of some other community, or if I'm a friend of someone, then they might attest that I'm their friend. Is that really all that identity is? It's just people attesting certain claims and there's nothing more than that. |
A | So it's not the claims 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. Maybe someone who doesn't care about Vitalik might not value that. And so, like, 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 at the stations that are relevant, that prove that I'm actually. I actually pay 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 can be other entities that say, you're human. You know, there could be friends that say that you're human. And depending on who you are and who's attesting, you might value those attestations or nothing. And so that's why I, like, this is the only way that I can imagine solving the decentralized identity problem. You can't presuppose what identity really is. 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. Or something. And maybe that's valuable to somebody somewhere, but to most people probably wouldn't care. |
C | Yeah, 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 realize 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, and everyone can trust that you are the issuer of that message. Like, even the, you know, the primitive days of crypto, when we were in crypto stone ages, we still figure this out. And then ever since then, where there has been, like, a smattering of attempts of, like, people in the application layer trying to go after identity. |
A | Right? |
C | Like, worldcoin, for example, comes to mind, which is recently going through the crypto meta. But even before that, right circles, it was another attempt. Bright id. You guys listed them, and these are all, like, identity apps. And like, that one comic, that one XKCD comic comes to mind where, like, 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 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 guys talk a little bit more about why you need the primitive before you have the app? |
D | 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 world coin, 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 world coin, bright id, you know, et cetera, 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. 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, 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 we truly have a credibly neutral base layer where any entity can make these types of statements from that world coin and all these other protocols can actually become more composable and actually helps them. |
A | One of the things I want to add is, 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. I think this is, 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, and if it doesn't, then you have to use another platform and then you just create more fragmentation, whereas, like, Eastport could use presuppose, whatever they want, build a schema around that and a test with it. And that's the cool thing about EAS. 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 layer. Like any smart contract can say, 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 makes it so much more interoperable. Interoperable and actually useful for decentralized identity and reputation. |
C | Okay, so what actually, is it so easy? It's not just another identity play. It's something, we've been using this primitive word, but what. What actually is the thing? Like, what actually is eas? Is it an ERC standard? Like, what actually is the thing? |
A | Yeah. So EAs has two basic 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 would be a schema for voting, a schema for attesting to whether you trust someone, a schema for testing whether you like someone, a schema for testing to whether a smart contract been audited, etcetera. |
C | And then there's these are, these are types of attestations. Attestation, form factors. |
A | Yeah. So it's the form factor, 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 have, you want to make an attestation, you have to first reference a particular schema, because, like, what is this attitude the station about and what is its data structure? And so the schema describes exactly what pieces of data are in there. So maybe if I wanted to create 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. 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 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. So say imagine you created like an oracle schema, and 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 interesting things like this. And just with these two base primitives, that's the whole on chain component. So because of these smart contracts, any smart contract, any EVM based smart contract with Ethereum EAS deployed can easily verify any attestation and validate it. And then also because 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 friends. There's so many private things that we don't want to put on chain. And so what we created is this off chain attestation protocol which uses EIP 712 to be able to sign 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 insider 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. 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. |
D | And one key thing 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 banklist eth. If they wanted to attest to the authenticity of this episode, you could generate a hash of the episode and attest 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. |
C | So this was great. And I think a lot of people will start to have their imaginations start to go now, and they'll start to see this world open up. And just to maybe double down on some points that y'all made specifically about the form factor of attestations, maybe to put this into the trad world or the world that we currently have. Like, different attestations come in different form factors that we already know of, right? Like, Steven, your story, for example, your birth record has, is an attestation of your date of birth might actually be the originating document that attests to your name too, right? Maybe a different, like 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 related primitive. And so the attestation, the EAS that has all these different form factors for attestations or trying to mimic this world, there's a varying different needs of attestations in various different form factors. And all of these things are various standards that people are proposing saying, hey, all the other form factors that already exist aren't servicing the needs of my kind of attestation. So I'm going to promo, I'm going to advocate for this new type of form factor, and 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 also, you guys said that 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 territory that we could start to play in just because now we're starting to do some crypto native stuff as well. And then the other thing I wanted to just bring attention to is the off chain component, especially. Only so many attestations actually need to become transactions. Actually, we're not really talking about blockchain or cryptocurrency very much at all here. We're mostly just talking about private keys and private key signatures. And so whether or not they actually make it onto the data of an adaptation actually makes it on chain actually is not really the focal point of a conversation like this. It actually is like, hey, all we really need are these private keys and these form factors for consumption. And that's kind of how I would summarize the last little bit of conversation. Bryce, is there anything you want to add to that? |
D | Yeah, I think on the web three side, like the crypto native side, the reason why we want to put something on chain is so smart contracts can interact with it and maybe greater transparency for, especially in decentralized communities where you might want 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 the goals of the use case. But they both have value, I want to be clear. |
B | So you said there was two smart contract registries, like one for the schemas and one for the individual, the attestations themselves. So the schemas that David was describing, that's completely permissionless, right? 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 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 diplomas. Then they could propose something. Even if there were 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 owned by someone, has a degree from their institution. Is that sort of how this works? |
D | Yeah, you're spot on, because I think one of the challenges for a lot of, like, previous attempts at creating some sort of diploma schema and stuff, people assume way too much in 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 in the EV world for your electric cars, there's a lot of research around 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 adopt an existing one. You actually need to follow where the users are and what they care about most and then let standards kind of be built over time. |
B | This is so interesting because I almost feel like I'm learning about HTTP for the first time, HTML for the first time, 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 almost like kind of like a theorem itself, which is, like, 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 are we doing? |
C | People are like, yeah, I don't get it. |
D | You know what I mean? |
B | It feels like it's that it's this type of conversation that we're having. 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. |
C | And attestations do everything. All right, that's the other thing. |
B | Yeah. |
D | Okay. |
B | I'm like, okay, so what do we do first? Like, it could do so many things at once. 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 the application layer, and they're just making way too many assumptions. We have to go down to the primitive and start with the standard for the primitive, like HTTP or something like this, right? And now we have the hyperlink, and we've just created this new primitive. 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 your take on this? |
A | I don't think we're boiling the ocean. I think this is just. This is just the case with this technology that, like, now there's a new technology 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 attesting 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 customers. You know, you don't, you know, if you're starting like a new social network, perhaps, you know that you might run into issues like that. 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 east. And what was interesting to see is just the wide variety of apps people were building. Some of them were in medical, some of them were in cross chain paymaster systems, some of them were attesting to open source software. It was just so many things. And it was cool to see that there really is infinite use cases for this. And people are able to just fit it into their application in some way because otherwise 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 having them all in one standardized place gives value to these attestations, it makes it much more valuable. If world coins started test just being an attester, instead of saying, we are the solution for identity for the world, if they were just like, oh, we're just one of the attesters, scan your eyeballs with us and roll a test. Some people might be like, all right, that's cool, and that'll be valuable for them. But then some other entity can also take part and say, well, we also want to attest that, that people are human and it creates these real interoperable systems. |
D | It is a concern for a lot of people. 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 where the ecosystem narratives have been. EAS is not an identity protocol, even though identity things can be built on it. But we've really tried to help and 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 how easy it is to create a scheme about whatever they want and then sign that data and it's just exciting to see. But I think ecosystems will follow narratives when there is something that's so generalized. |
C | 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 any of the incentives that some of the other, like startups that might have that play in this space. Whereas every single startup is trying to scale and grow and grow and scale to the fastest possible. Whereas like, what you guys are 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, that's lovely. But then also at the same time we're saying like, well, you know, attestations, they could be everything. The whole world could be built on attestations. And so, you know, what, what is, if you guys can speak for eas and, 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's growth aspirations here? |
A | Yeah, totally. Like I think we definitely, we don't want to 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 attesting 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 started using east, 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 saw, we signed documents and we sit, we attest all the time, but there's never been a way to just attest about anything in a digital format that's, you know, standard, standardized. |
D | And I think the world is, we're looking for a more trust full 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 trust mechanisms, it's going to be increasingly difficult with how much fraud and misinformation is going to be launched with AI that I think we need to start attesting now to everything just so we have a better chance at building trust. |
C | Yeah, Bryce, you started to paint that picture. Let's keep going with that. Why do we need attestations in this digital age when we daydream about the future world that eas could bring? Why do we need it in the Internet to progress forward as our next steps as a species? |
D | I'll let Steve talk about relative trust networks. I think what we're noticing is with this rise in AI generated content, it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove the authenticity of what we're consuming online and interacting with if we can actually use digital signatures. I'll use the bankless example. 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. 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 alone and verified timestamps, we're going to be able to build some of that. |
A | One of the examples I like to give about this whole, like, AI situation that's coming 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, 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 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? 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, 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 years where you get a FaceTime call and it's like your family member who is talking just like them, but it's a bot and you have no way to know whether or not it's really them. So digital signatures are going to become increasingly important as time goes on and technologies that allow you to prevent being defrauded and keep content authentic. |
D | 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 node project was actually, the Zoom CEO was like a fake fraudster. And in the web, two worlds, we've all received the CEO emails and employees saying, hey, I need a gift card, go get me one. But now imagine jumping onto a Zoom call and not knowing that the authenticity of that meeting request, or even that the person who's signing into the meeting was actually the real person. |
B | So what role does Ethereum really play in all of this? Is Ethereum sort of, or like blockchain in general, just kind of, I guess, seeding this infrastructure for digital signatures. Because 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 I can sign an off chain message using my Ethereum private keys. So how related is this attestation to what Ethereum is doing? And why did you choose to build this on top of Ethereum? |
A | Eas is completely Evm based. One of the important things that 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 be a theory, Ethereum based, but because it's an e, it's signing with your theory. It's only cable, it only works when you sign with your Ethereum wallet. It's using EIP 712 for signing those. Those off chain attestations can actually be verified by smart contracts on chain at a later time. And so we chose Ethereum because we believe it's the number one blockchain infrastructure base layer. And we're also launching on other evms that are Ethereum layer twos and perhaps maybe some other EVM based chains that are not directly layer twos of Ethereum. But we chose Ethereum because most of the apps seem to be built like an EVM based systems and that's where all the developers are. |
B | I guess I'm also asking. So I think the world is looking outside looking and kind of mainstream is sort of like, yeah, crypto, where's your use case? You keep saying you're good for the world, and we keep being like, yeah, but store of value, right? And they're like, but we have the dollar and we have a bank and we're like Defi, but we have a banking system, all of these things, right? And of course we sort of see the future. We sort of see why the world needs these things. But what they see is kind of like ponzi games and get rich quick schemes and all of these things. I'm wondering if we've, as a byproduct of this whole property rights system that we've created, where we've got private keys that are secured in more people's hands, if we've actually created a bootloader for a identity system, an attestation system. Bankless is so often thinking about Ethereum as sort of a global permissionless property rights system, but we mostly think of it in terms of a property settlement system, or almost like a decentralized banking system without the banks, hence bankless. But I kind of wonder if we've also bootstrapped and bootloaded a global decentralized attestation 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? |
D | I'd love for Steve to also give his opinion, just because when we've like Ethereum or just in general, in the past ten 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 dissect decentralized yet. And I feel like it's because a lot of times we do try to extract value immediately out of the system. We revert back to financial use cases when Ethereum was built, so you could actually create land registries and all these very decentralized aspects of life. But here we are ten years later and we're only decentralizing money. I think it is because we've been missing this attestation layer. |
A | 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 is 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 nine years later, and it's basically, we decentralized a little bit more. But we haven't solved every problem. And it's because while Ethereum brought the ability for anybody to launch a smart contract, how does that work when you want to be able to attest to someone's diploma? Do you make a smart contract specifically to attest to diplomas? Because that's what's been going on. People are like, oh, 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. But they haven't built a smart contract for just arbitrary attesting about literally anything. And that's why I think now with eas, you can actually solve these really hard problems and anyone can. It's not just limited to developers. Before it was like, oh, you want to build something in the space 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. Nothing like that has ever existed before. |
C | 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 imagine that that would be a huge sign of success. Maybe we've gotten there. I don't know. I'll ask you guys that later in the show. But for right now, what projects might listeners be familiar with that are using eas and what are they trying to do with it? |
D | Yeah, so one of the, when we're building a standard, as you're describing for, 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 there at to station station, which was a different primitive related to attestations. And we reached out to them, long story short, we did code reviews and things like that. 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 in the op. |
C | You guys want a thumb war with optimism? |
D | A code thumb war, for sure. But today they adopted us as two, so 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 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 amount of identity protocols that we've reached out to have received us very welcoming because we don't have a token, we don't have all these things, and they can instantly start building with it. So optimism is probably the biggest, well known one for sure. |
C | This really just goes back to the power of credible neutrality in 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 so it sounds like EAS smart contracts are a part of every op stack chain that gets deployed. Is that true? |
A | Correct. Yeah. |
B | What kind of attestations are people doing in optimism right now? What are they attesting to? |
D | The use cases are a lot of like, there are people experimenting around like governance related things, 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, quadratic voting. |
A | 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. |
D | There's also gitcoin. So gitcoin passport stamps, we reached out to them. We were talking, hey, these stamps are essentially just attestations and they've been very welcoming to us as well. And so Gitcoin passport stamps are migrating to be attestations as a primitive because what that does is it also unlocks them to be more composable with other identity solutions. |
C | So when gitcoin stamps becomes eas compliant with the standard, I don't know if that's the right word or not. 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 git coin example, like what were they not able to get? What network effects were they not able to tap into? And then once they complied with the standard, what were they able to get? |
A | So just like other platforms like Gitcoin passport is like its own siloed little ecosystem. So if you want to implement gitcoin passports, you have to understand their docs, you have to implement their SDK, and it's not super interoperable. So say you want to make a smart contract 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, we care about gitcoins attestations from this schema. So if it comes from Gitcoins address and it's from this schema, you know, we trust this type of attestation. Or if it comes from this schema and this other address, we trust it too. You can never do that before when everybody's using completely different protocols. |
B | I remember probably the most interesting attestation I've done recently, maybe in the past couple of weeks. I guess this would be an attestation is actually, it's an op stack chain. I guess the application is on top of it. Friend tech, the thing that everyone's doing these days, in order to start your friend tech profile, you have to attest from Twitter that this is actually your account. I think that counts as an attestation. Basically, when I create my friend tech profile, I also log in using Twitter. I essentially attest that this ETH address on base in friend tech is corresponding to my Twitter account. So I make an attestation there 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, two 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. It can be boughtable, but I have my Twitter password right now and two factor authentic. It is pretty verifiably my account over on the other side. Is, is that a good example of an attestation? What are you seeing in the world of like, web? Two attestations. |
A | 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. |
D | Or buy your x dump. Yeah, or buy your. |
A | 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, of your keys, not your keys, not your attestation. |
D | It's also, it doesn't participate in the interoperability. If you actually did use it like a base layer where if, 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 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 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. |
B | So how would you prefer a friend? What's a better design for a friend tech to kind of attest to my, that I own this, this Twitter account? Like, what would it be a better way? |
A | It's literally, it's literally the only way, though, right? Like you do, you would have to make some sort of post from Twitter that references your address because you need the two way attestation. Because I can just say I own, you know, David's Twitter account, but if there's no way 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 to. And so it's really the only way you can right now. |
D | Here's a way, though, because, or a potential alternative, I think if the requirement for you to sign up with friend 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 tech could have just looked at Gitcoin Passport and integrated that into their 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. |
C | 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, Steve, and 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 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. |
A | Imagine in the future. You can look at any address that you're, like, going to do business with or operate with, and you can instantly see all the attestations related to them. And you can see, like, well, 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 attestation. |
C | Attestation. Degrees of separation. |
A | Degrees of. Degrees of attestation? Separation. Like, how far away? Yes, it's the das, of course, the degrees of fit. So you'll be able to build, like, a really true, true decentralized reputation. Like, right now, if a friend of mine asks me, like, in West Palm beach where I live, and they say, like, hey, do you know any plumbers? Maybe I know a plumber and I'll tell them, and then they'll trust me. Or maybe I know I have a friend. Maybe Bryce knows of a plumber. And then I'm like, well, you know, they're like. And it kind of works like that, right? But 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 kind of find some, like, value in entities that you don't even know. So, like, there might be, like, five people who have attested somehow, even, like, multiple degrees away to some entity, 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 work with them and then maybe they screw me over, I can then see exactly who. Who, why? Why did this person get rated so high? And I can tweak my. My attestation weights to different entities. And now I have a new view that might be more in line with reality. |
D | Imagine in the. In the near term future where, like, the web of trust gets more, you know, visual, and you put on, like, your apple, you know, vision pro, and they're just navigating your different web of trust. But 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 so 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 greater trust score to them. |
A | 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'll give my brother a good rating. You know, I'll give 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. You know, David Hoffman thinks that this is a great app and then opens up. There's an attestation from an open zeppelin audit on the smart contract, too. So you get a nice little check mark, and users can start to build, start to gain trust in these things and know, exactly why do I trust this? Well, you can see these attestations from these entities and then even negative attestations. So you can kind of make up your mind based on who's attesting. |
C | I think that starts to really illustrate the need for an application layer on top of eas. As soon as the number of attestations out there starts to get pretty unwieldy, all of a sudden we're going to need, like, attestation service providers to help recoaless all of the 10,000 different attestation that are made every single day. And so, 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, what do we do? We provide identity to web three. 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. But what we are going to need, once there are enough adaptations out there, we are going to need the application layer to help us actually provide a lens for viewing all of these attestations. 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 not in your head. |
A | Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a huge thing. And we're working with a few different teams. That's their thing. They've typically looked at on chain data for all sorts of Defi platforms and aggregated and come up with all sorts of scoring. But now if everybody starts 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 social score? What is his. There can be infinite categories. And so, yeah, like, providers that aggregate all this data and make sense of it are going to be really important. But then also open source tools that users can themselves run and also aggregate the. And derive scores, too. I think that'll be interesting, too. And so you can have all these other entities that, like, attest to, like, what this entity score is. So, you know, 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 that data. |
B | It's interesting how, you know, on kind of 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 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 this particular content creator has me as a follower. And then more people who follow them, obviously 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 link to a specific article, the way Google indexes these things is links really matter, a pagerank system. And so by effectively linking back to a Wikipedia page, I am attesting that Wikipedia is a great source for this particular topic. I wonder if we get to the stage in crypto and web three where the attestations are 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 an optimism chain or doing this, interacting with this protocol I'm, in effect, attesting to it in some way. |
A | If you take a look, we've actually built some really cool things on top of east. One of the things that we created as an example is called Speaketh eth, or, sorry, speaketh.org. and essentially, it's like a decentralized social network, similar to a Twitter, where every post is an attestation, every like is an attestation, every follow is an attestation, every reply is an attestation, every name changes an attestation. |
C | Is that just what Twitter is? Whenever I tweet something, I just attest to the fact that, yes, everything's God is just attestation. |
B | Attestations all the way down. |
D | And even. Even the community note feature, right, like now 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 could, you know, attest their voice, that this content is credible. Well, in the decentralized world, even Wikipedia, as you're bringing up, Ryan, like, it's a great way to post, like, some sort of information, but you look to the wisdom of the crowd to make sure that the history is actually the history, and you want people to be able to make those types of attestations. |
B | 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 1.0. It's not a standard. |
A | 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. |
B | They got nothing. |
C | They start from zero. |
D | Yeah. |
A | Yeah. Why are you. Why am I nobody? Why can't I bring my attestations with me? And also, what's cool about this is like, say someone builds, like, a Twitter on top of attestations and then, like, that's 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 get access. They can basically bring all those same tweets and all that. All the same follow attestation, everything, just build a whole new front end on top of it. |