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D

And they could.

C

I'm never going to be able to see Twitter as a web two siloed attestation network. I'm always going to be able to see that. Steve, something you just said I really want to double down on. Whereas like you have this primitive east and maybe you have a form factor for attestations, call them tweets. And then we just have ten bajillion tweet attestations get signed by digital signatures. There could be many different front end uis to look, 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 east, but no, no, one of them is actually the silo anymore. They're just now lenses for looking at the primitive.

A

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

D

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 eco echo chambers in Twitter. Right? But what if we want to filter for like, I wonder what this lana 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.

B

What about this? At this point in the conversation, somebody, some listeners are probably getting nervous because not once have we talked about privacy, right? And we're talking about all these attestations and of course, 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?

A

Yeah. So, like, in general, the way we tell people what to attest, like, if you're going to put something on chain, like, you obviously don't want to put any private data, right? Say like Coinbase wants to do a 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.

B

Gary Gensler Seath address would have to sign off on that.

A

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 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 that's also one of the reasons why we built off chain attestations, because, like, in the real world, right, you have these. You can say that your id cards, your passport, your driver's license, these are essentially attestations. But you can say they're off chain attestations. They're not public. You own them and you show them on a need to know basis. So that's one way. Another way is we created really cool tools to be able to attest to a lot of private data. So imagine a doctor's office can attest to all of your medical records, and we built a really cool tool for being able to take all of those records and turn them into a merkle tree and attest on chain to just the root, the root hash of that tree. And then we added the tools where anybody can then prove pieces of that tree to any other entity. And so basically, 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 have a tool for this without using zero knowledge proofs, and it's pretty great. But then there's also zero knowledge proofs where you can attest to private data, and then you can reveal information about that data without actually revealing that data. And so the thing about zero knowledge proofs is that so far, every single solution for zero knowledge proofs is currently really application specific. And there's no, like, generalized, like, ZK everything solution right now. And so, like, we haven't, like, we have no opinion right now on 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 preserving attestations that we showed. It could be off chain, or you can simply, like, you know, 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 pretty much public attestations. But yeah, we care about privacy. We tell everybody that. We write in the docs, like, be careful what you attest about because the on chain attestations do go on chain and they'll live there forever. And so you got to be, you got to be very careful. But what's cool is we have, you know, we're building tools and we, there's other teams that are building tools even on top of east additional developer tools that help you help developers solve these types of problems.

D

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

A

And also with Cismo, for example, you can use, Cismo is integrated with ease, make zero knowledge proof. So I can say, for example, that I have an attestation of a particular thing without revealing which address actually has it, just that I own it.

C

Not too long ago, we did an episode with the sign in with Ethereum team, and I see a lot of overlap between sign in with Ethereum and Eas. 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?

A

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

B

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

D

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

C

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?

D

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 pretty good grant to help build that out. And then we're really leaning into the new funding mechanisms, like retroactive public goods funding. We're hoping that that's like significant for us. I'm hoping for that. And then there's also like the PGN network in like these new primitives, but to date, yeah, it's been self funded and then just through like grants.

C

Well, the 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 you, if we can just smash these two things together and fund public goods from now until infinity, that would be one of the, the bull cases for Ethereum and that has been articulated from the, 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?

D

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.

A

You know, we've really, we've been around in the space, like I've been in bitcoin actually since 2011 and I 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. It was just like, there's a bunch of cool things that we want to be able to build and we can't build it, we 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 ultimately we want to be able to build cool stuff on top of it. But not until we finished our work here. Getting eas adopted and understood by the majority of developers in the space, it's.

D

Really important for us to see adoption with ease. Then we just, like any other builders, can start to build 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 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.

B

I think we've talked about a lot of other identity, I guess, providers in this 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 attestors on top of something like eas. One primitive we haven't talked about, though, is soulbound tokens. And how does the idea of soul bound tokens fit into what you guys are doing? Is it related or is it completely different and orthogonal?

A

I remember actually, Vitalik, I think it was in 2020, announced soul bound tokens at ECC. And 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, reputation, you know, 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 the only tool that anyone ever had. But nfts aren't. 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 soul bound 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 soul bound token can be part of a completely different smart contract. So, like, if I want to see what are the sole, what are the identities that Bryce's address have received? Like, there's 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 no way to know, you know, easily, like. Like. And so eas, like, attestations are a whole new primitive for being able to describe any kind of intent, whereas NFTs are still useful when you have some sort of an asset that you want to move around. But when you want to be able to just say something about something, an attestation makes a lot more sense.

B

You guys are bearish on soul bound tokens as kind of a concept.

A

Yeah, I would say, like, you know, there's no such thing as anything that's. There's no such thing as a soul bound token, because I can. I can just sell you my private key, and now it's not soulbound to me anymore.

B

You can always sell your soul. I guess.

D

You can sell yourself.

B

Great.

D

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, that's just what was available.

B

Okay, well, I feel like we very much haven't reached into kind of the age of attestations or the age of identity across crypto. I mean, the first ten years of this whole crypto project since you've been here, Steve, it's 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 a service. And what makes you optimistic about that?

A

If so, what's amazing now is we tell the story about eas to developers like seasoned ctos who don't even know who I am or that I've been in this space. They hear about the idea and their eyes open really wide because they get it. 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 really simple solution to a complex problem and it's super easy to use. Developers can use it right away. We have a website, we have the smart contracts, but we also have EAS scan, which is the ether scan of attestation. You can browse through all schemas, attestations, you can make attestations on them. We also have everything indexed 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 eas is useful for so many things that I think it's like if you build it, they will come kind of thing. And that's how I feel about it.

D

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 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.

B

Well, that's great, guys. I think we'll end it there. 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.

A

Thank you.

D

Right, David, pleasure. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks. Bankless community too. A lot of fun seeing it grow over the years.

B

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 view our episode. David mentioned it. Sign in with Ethereum. Unrelated, but also related in some ways spiritually related. This of course is a public good. Open source, permissionless, tokenless and also free. So what could be better than that? Got to end with this, though. Risks 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.