So many familiar faces, so many new faces.
I mean, this is going to be great.
I've hosted hundreds of spaces and never have they been so jam-packed with talent, with people
And so because of that, I think I'm probably more excited than I ever been for today's conversation,
which, you know, for those of you who are tuning in, I know the title isn't very descriptive.
We're going to be talking about cross-collaboration between organizations and how that helps to grow a kind of a richer environment, ecosystem, if you will, and really how that helps to accelerate some interesting interoperable experiences.
And, I mean, I think if you look at the people who are up here, you should already have a sense of the impact of that conversation because, you know, I'm going to lean in this way because I think ontology tends to lean in this way too.
There's a lot of people that are building with decentralized identity or decentralized data.
So because of that, I think that we have so many people here who are going to make this a really fun experience.
I think I brought up everybody who needs to be up here.
I do hope that we haven't overextended our space here in terms of the people that are up here.
I'm trying to add as a speaker, Anchor, Lamari, who I thought you were already a speaker here earlier.
We have, let's see, four, eight, nine, ten people on the space.
I know there used to be a cap to how many people you could have on the space.
I don't know if it's still ten.
If you make two people co-host, we can extend to two more speakers on stage.
So if you do this and I co-host.
You know, I'll sacrifice myself.
So for those of you who don't know, that's an inside joke.
Donnie and I have been hosting spaces for a very long time.
And because of that, we've together experienced a lot of the problems that come with Twitter spaces.
One of those things we recently discovered is if you have someone be a co-host, then that will potentially rug them.
If you make Polaris one too, we can get that last person up.
If you make Polaris a co-host too, if you have two co-hosts, you can get that last person up.
So it basically doesn't count the hosts as speakers.
Pays to have people who are just so talented and have been doing this for a long time.
Donnie, I know you do this outside of just ontology spaces.
So I respect the fact that you have all of this knowledge.
Welcome, everybody, to Ontology's sixth anniversary space.
I'm your host, Humpty Calderon.
You can usually find me here every Thursday, along with my colleagues, Donnie and Polaris.
Some of us contributors to the ontology ecosystem, but all definite supporters of a decentralized future.
We're excited to be hosting this space today really with people who, in some way, are working with ontology,
whether that is through some sort of integration of a product of ontologies or by, you know, they themselves building a product on the ontology ecosystem.
Or in the case of the Decentralized Identity Foundation, partners for engaging a wider community of developers to contribute in the space of decentralized identity.
So with that said, hopefully that lays the groundwork, the foundation for the conversation.
Why don't we start with some very brief introductions?
I'm going to ask everybody to keep it within, I don't know, 30 seconds.
That way we're not spending like 20 minutes just on introductions.
I'm just going to start here directly to my right.
Donnie, how are you, man?
Just doing the usual thing and trying to find something to obsess over, as usual.
Every morning it's a new thing.
And it usually ends up somewhere in the space of Web3, quote unquote, whatever that means anymore.
Oops, I just unmuted the wrong account.
I was almost going to speak from both the ontology account and my personal account.
I am behind both of the accounts today.
So the ontology account won't be speaking, otherwise you're going to get an echo because I've launched a space from there and I'm speaking from my personal account.
Polaris, how are you doing, man?
And thanks, Humpty, for asking.
It's been a fantastic week for me.
I've been, like, working with my kids this week, trying to get them to understand Web3 a bit more and just try to understand their perspective, like, you know, the complete innocent perspective, like, and just, like, working from ground up.
So it's been very interesting because I've got, like, a five-year-old, eight-year-old, and an 11-year-old, and each of them have got their own perspective.
So, yeah, it's been a fun week for me.
Honestly, this is what I live for, man.
I love hosting these spaces, really just bringing people together, doing kind of like a mastermind, if you will, exploring kind of the different challenges and opportunities, and trying to figure out how, you know, the technology we're all building can facilitate a better future, really.
Like, just that, to me, is a very exciting kind of thing to do on a regular basis.
I think we have David behind the, or Dave behind the Goshen account.
Thanks, I appreciate you inviting us on tonight.
From our side, for anyone who doesn't know, Goshen is part of the, sort of, the Ontology ecosystem.
We're incubated by Ontology.
We're a layer two optimistic roll-up.
And one of the kind of interesting things, and just to kind of keep things super brief, that we're working on at the moment is a Bitcoin EVM layer.
We deployed the first kind of Bitcoin EVM contract on Testnet way back in June and recently deployed on GitHub.
So, working towards deploying on the Bitcoin network itself and start to kind of deploy decentralized applications there and all the other fun stuff that hasn't been kind of done before.
So, that's kind of what we're working on at the moment.
I can't wait to hear more about that as we continue.
Then, after this, we have Galactica, who's been a long-time supporter of our spaces, and they're also working in the space of decentralized identity.
So, it just, for us, for me, made a lot of sense to invite them here and add some context from, you know, their perspective on what they're building and what they're seeing.
Who's behind the avatar today?
It's good to see you, man.
It's actually Dave, but since there's another Dave, you can just call me by my suede name, Citizen42, if you like.
So, yeah, it's been a really, really, really good week for us, too.
In fact, I just got off a call with our Sentinels, our ambassadors, giving them a sneak peek of possibly the most advanced governance system known to blockchain.
So, it's a really good time right now.
For anyone who doesn't know us, which doesn't surprise me, we don't have that much traction just yet.
But Galactica is a layer one.
It's an EVM-compatible chain based on the Cosmos SDK.
Essentially, we're trying to bring nation-state-tier social interactions to blockchain.
So, we use zero-knowledge cryptography as the foundation of our tech stack to cater for users' privacy requirements.
And then we solve for civil resistance by giving identities persistent meaning with their reputation on-chain.
So, that's us in a real nutshell.
I'll have a lot more to it.
Thank you for inviting us, too.
And, you know, first of all, I got to say, your voice, gosh, just, like, hypnotizes me, honestly.
You have a fantastic voice.
Secondly, Dave, David, that used to be my moniker, my alias, you know, instead of Humpty when I was younger, just because, you know, who the heck wants to be called after an egg?
There's a two-day limit, though, of first thinkers.
So, I think X will boot you, Humpty, if you transfer to Dave.
I've grown to, you know, just own and be proud of that.
I think that's a rad name.
You know, today's the day I found out about the origins of your name, Humpty.
Like, after all these years, bro.
So, you take names after an egg.
I didn't want to be rude, you know.
I don't know how that would be something you'd be confused about.
I was like, yo, what am I supposed to say?
Like, you know, Humpty this?
Buddy, don't worry about it.
You don't say anything, man.
Humpty, Humpty sat on a wall.
Dude, honestly, whenever I go and visit my kid at school, that's what her friends say.
And look, I mean, growing up with a name like that, you grow tough skin, so it's fine.
Tell us a little bit about yourself, Intrinsic.
Just happy to have you up here, too, because as we'll get into in a little bit, you're also someone that we're, you know, collaborating with, I guess, in a way through the Decentralized Identity Foundation Hackathon.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Humpty.
We are a developer platform for building decentralized identity products, so, you know, everything in the realm of giving users control of their data, making it cryptographically verifiable, making it, you know, transferable between different applications and contexts.
So, you know, we are excited to talk about all things, you know, building great applications and product experiences with, you know, credentials and decentralized identity.
Because at the end of the day, what users really want is a great experience, and, you know, you need to have a product that works and makes sense for people and solves a problem for them.
So, we work with a lot of great teams across different industries and verticals to, you know, build applications and wallets that help them, you know, access the things that they want with their identity.
So, yeah, happy to be here and, yeah, excited to hear from everybody.
You know, if anybody in the audience ever was curious what the heck is decentralized identity, you couldn't have come to a better space because there are literally, I think, like five or six builders here that are.
So, this space is for you.
Simon, how are you doing?
You're one of the newer additions to our collaborations and to the space.
So, it's really great to have you up here.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of some of the things that you're working on as well?
How's it going, everybody?
Yeah, it's great to be here.
I recognize a lot of these names haven't been really interested in decentralized identity for a good few years.
So, it's really great to be here, actually.
So, I'm an advisor for ConsenSys.
And as you know, or may or may not know, ConsenSys has built a Layer 2 ZK EVM roll-up.
And it's actually the first time we've built a ZK EVM roll-up.
So, we're sort of learning on the job.
And one of the things that we're learning is that identity and reputation is crucially important to the health and ecosystem.
So, we're exploring the space and getting to know everybody and really kind of trying to understand how everything works and how it can benefit an ecosystem.
So, we're trying different things.
So, I'm leading the ConsenSys contribution to a project called Verax.
And there's some collaboration between Ontology and Verax, which is how I know you guys.
And it's basically like an on-chain attestation registry that DAPS can use.
It's been built for linear in a way that can, you know, adapt to the ecosystem as it grows.
So, that's one of the things I'm looking at.
But as I said, I've been interested in decentralized identity for years.
And, like, Ontology was one of the first projects that got me really interested in the technology.
And a lot of the stuff you did, and a lot of the stuff you did with the DIF was stuff that got me really hooked years ago.
So, it's an absolute privilege to be here.
And I know, I may be wrong here, but ConsenSys, I believe, also incubated projects like CERTO, right?
I believe that'd be a project that stemmed from that kind of initial decentralized identity experimentation, right?
Yeah, CERTO, which was a great project.
And Veramo, which is incredible.
Veramo's just being donated to the DIF, which is really exciting.
And actually, a huge, I guess you could say, ConsenSys has had an outsized impact on the decentralized identity space in Web3,
because, obviously, Uport started in ConsenSys, and now there's a sort of Uport mafia, or at least that's what I call them.
And you've got amazing projects like DISCO, the XYZ, Intuition of Systems, Three Box Labs, which have developed ceramic.
And, you know, yeah, so they've had a huge impact.
So, yeah, the history goes back a long time.
But, as I said, we're still learning.
The space is still evolving.
And, I mean, that's a perfect segue to introduce Lamari.
I said I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this, but it's really hard not to geek out and kind of fanboy around some of the people that we have up here and kind of your contributions.
But so let's just keep going with it.
That's a nice segue to Lamari Decentralized Identity Foundation.
Yes, Veramo has recently donated to them.
Can you tell us a little bit about the impact of that and maybe how that's helping catalyze some of the work that is happening over at the hackathon that's going on now?
Thank you so much, Humpty, for inviting us to be on again.
It's really great to be here.
I am the Senior Director of Community Engagement for the Decentralized Identity Foundation.
And just, you know, briefly for people who aren't so familiar with us, we are an incubator for specifications, some of which do go to standards bodies where it makes sense.
But it's really a place for collaboration and rapid development.
Some of the pioneers in Decentralized Identity are still around us.
They've been in this space since the beginning.
And recently, we did see the donation of the Veramo code to Diff.
And they're very active participants in our hackathon.
So we're seeing a transformation from a community that creates specifications.
We'll continue to, but we're also adding in that developer community as well, bringing that in to the fold.
And we're seeing all sorts of wonderful things coming out of this hackathon.
So I can speak more to that later in the interview.
If you have any questions about it, let me know.
But that hackathon will be closing soon.
And we're really excited to see what the results will be of it.
And yeah, I think there were, so it's just to kind of give some context to the audience.
I shared kind of an outline of some of the things I wanted to explore.
And Lamar, you got back to me.
You're like, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Here's some points that I really want to dive deeper into.
So there's going to be a lot of opportunity, hopefully, for so many of us here to contribute to some of the different discussion points that we've talked about previously.
But also, just so everybody knows, I've kind of dedicated two hours.
I've asked for one hour from everybody, but I've dedicated two hours to this.
So anybody that wants to overextend beyond the first hour, I'm here.
I'm happy to continue that conversation because there's just so many people here, honestly, to not give everybody an opportunity to speak and share kind of some of the things that they're building.
One of the newest people that was added to our speaker lineup here is Anker.
And I believe you are kind of someone who's deeply involved with Check, but also with the Decentralized Identity Foundation.
Yes, hi, my name is Anker Banerjee.
I'm the CTO and co-founder at a Cosmos-based Decentralized ID project called Checked.
We've also been working on a project around portability of your Web3 reputation called Creds.xyz.
But one of the reasons why I'm here is I'm also one of the steering committee members within Decentralized ID Foundation.
It is obviously a member-led organization and a lot of familiar faces over here who participate, contribute to those standards, contribute to reusable tools.
And very excited to, like, you know, be celebrating a six-year sort of like anniversary milestone for one of the other projects that are out here in this space.
Also happens to be the number of years that I've been working in the Decentralized ID space.
So I'm kind of also fanboying over the lineup that's over here.
Yeah, you know, to me, it's really interesting to see, you know, the sixth anniversary of Ontology.
And I think that Randy, who's up next, can kind of explain that a little bit better.
I think the anniversary really kind of is a milestone for their mainnet.
But Ontology has been a longstanding contributor to the Decentralized identity space.
Originally, I believe, becoming a member of the DIF in 2016.
So this is not something that, you know, Ontology thought it was new and novel and cool, wants to jump on a bandwagon.
This is something that Ontology has truly believed in and been innovative in, in terms of its product ecosystem as well.
Randy, head of marketing at Ontology, how are you doing?
I think it's my first time to join the Live Stress Depox because it's 4 a.m. my time, to be honest.
Yeah, I appreciate everyone here because I come across the many, like, familiar places that we've been coordinating how to push the real adoption of DID and also the reputation.
So for the past six years, there's actually two, like, important dates for Ontology.
So one is the mainnet launch, which is on the 30th of June in 2018, while today, while the 28th of November is actually the launch of the projects of Ontology.
So the difference is, is that Ontology projects has been focused a lot on decentralized identity and data from day one.
So you can see that other than the main blockchain we are building up, we also have a couple of the tools like OntoWallet and Orange Protocol, which is a reputation protocol, helping the projects, especially the Web3 projects, to segment the users, also giving the proper, like, incentive to the real humanity.
So we are working hard to work with every project who focus on the identity and who focusing more on the, like, the quality of their community members and who want to build in a long term.
And we're definitely going to get into some of that product stack or tech stack, because a lot of the people who are on this stage have been integrating some of these things as well to their own product ecosystem.
And last time, I don't know if you corrected me if I mispronounced that.
So if I am mispronouncing it again, please do let me know.
My name is Rizal Scarlett, and I work at TBD, which, okay, first off, I'm fairly new here.
It's my 10th week, but I feel more confident than I was in the last Twitter space.
But I say that because when I first joined, I didn't know TBD standed to be decentralized.
I thought they were still waiting and thinking about the name.
So just putting that out there.
And what we're working on is, like, we're building open protocols right now, and particularly we're focused on making, like, finance be more accessible to people and focus on that decentralized aspect.
TBD is actually, like, a business unit within a company called Block.
So Block is, like, made up of, like, Cash App, Square, Tidal, and all that.
And what we're doing is we're building two tools, or I'm focused on two tools, one which is called Web5, which is, like, this SDK or this, like, framework that makes it very easy for you to build decentralized applications that are focused on, like, decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, and decentralized web nodes.
And then we also have another thing called TBDEX, which is essentially a liquidity protocol.
Basically, it makes it easier to exchange money or to exchange different types of currencies globally.
I lost my mute button there.
Anyways, yeah, no, that's fantastic.
I didn't know that you were so new to the ecosystem last time because you really just did a fantastic job at explaining, you know, not just TBD, but also explaining your role at the Decentralized Identity Foundation.
So, again, for context, that was the last phase where we hosted these many familiar phases where we talked about, you know, our contributions and kind of the impact and goals and all the fun stuff about us all joining the DIF hackathon.
So, glad to hear that you've, I guess, familiarized yourself a little bit more and just really excited to kind of also see the work that TBD has been doing.
Last but not least, we have Rob, who is with Alchemy Pay.
Hey, I'm doing really well and thanks for having us on and congrats on your sixth birthday, by the way.
So, that's a great effort by the Ontology team.
Yeah, so, hello to everyone.
I'm the ecosystem lead at Alchemy Pay.
What we do, we have Fiat Crypto Payment Gateway.
So, that's on and off ramping in kind of just about every scenario you can think of in terms of moving Fiat funds, you know, USD, Euros into cryptocurrencies of all types.
Yeah, so lots of different scenarios.
This week was a really good week for us.
So, we just announced that we're providing.
So, we're working with Ontology in terms of providing an on and off ramp with them.
We also just announced our license in Iowa, which is a money services license, which is great.
Last month, we also obtained our Arkansas money transmitter license, MTL.
So, and then Trust Wallet is now working with us this week.
So, in terms of using our on and off ramp.
So, it's really great what's been going on and being connected with you guys.
In terms of digital identities, I think ZKKYC is something that we're really looking into right now.
The idea of being able to keep data safe, secure is, I think, the number one thing for any company working with funds, payment service providers, of course.
But the feasibility of it is quite exciting.
I do think there are possibilities in the future that that could happen, you know.
So, definitely interested in hearing from some of the people here at this panel, you know, what their particular areas they're working on, you know, and sort of getting a broader understanding of the space would be great.
So, yeah, pleasure to be here.
So, we're 28 minutes in and we're just getting over the intros.
So, I'm going to try to get through some of these, I guess, topics and try to hand them off as best I can to some of the people that expressed interest in some of them.
But definitely, they're open for conversation and discussion amongst all of us here.
The first thing, and I think this is really just to set the stage in terms of collaborative development.
So, apologies if I put the wrong term there earlier.
I think I put cross-functionality, which confused a few folks.
Collaborative development or collaborative, yeah, development between organizations.
I've already heard here from a few people in terms of opportunities in creating better product experiences.
I heard about, you know, portability and reputation from, you know, people like Galactica.
And I certainly, that's something that Ontology is interested in developing with Orange Protocol.
And I've heard of like ZKKYZ and I would even add reusable KYC from Rob in terms of like, these are some of the opportunities in the space.
So, the question firstly, and I'll hand this off to Lamari, but after that, anybody can definitely tack on their thoughts, is what is the role of collaborative, you know, cross-collaboration, I guess better said, amongst organizations?
And how does that facilitate, you know, better product experiences and even interoperability between these products?
Well, for me, I'm speaking more from the standpoint of a nonprofit that incubates specifications.
Although our members are developing products, they are mainly startups.
And we do also have some big, large organizations as well who are collaborating with us.
And some of the specifications that are incubated at DIF are going into their ecosystems, into their products.
I could say that DIF as a place for rapid development is very big on collaboration across organizations.
So, for example, on our calendar, we block off the major meetings that happen at the W3C to make sure that people in our community are able to go to those meetings, like the workgroup ID at the W3C, for example.
And many people in our community were involved in the creation of both the DID core spec and also the VC data model.
We could also look at the BBS signature scheme, which is a great work item at DIF, supporting signing multiple messages and producing a single output digital signature.
And the great thing about this is it allows zero knowledge proofs.
And it's gone on to the IETF from DIF.
However, at DIF, we still do have a workgroup in progress.
But it went to a place where it can be seen by more eyes and it can be worked on by more people to facilitate greater collaboration and also to further stimulate adoption.
So you will continue to see some of the major work items at DIF move out to other standards organizations.
We want to see more collaboration and more maturity in our work items.
And meanwhile, we want to bring in new work items at DIF and foster greater creativity.
And that's also the main function of the hackathons that we've begun launching in the past year.
So we have a major hackathon, which will be closing soon.
And we are seeing potential work items on the horizon, which will be announced eventually, that are coming out of that.
So we're seeing a really amazing creative process of not only fostering that creativity, but also bringing a lot of newbies up to speed so that there is a greater pool of talent that can be pulled from all the various organizations.
So that's what we're up to at DIF in terms of cross-collaboration.
I would say, you know, the DIF, Decentralized Identity Foundation, is like a hub for collaboration.
And the work that y'all have been doing with hackathons, I think it's a good example of how you can bring individuals and organizations together to kind of, you know, extend on some of these developments or introduce new novel developments.
I see Galactica with their hands up.
Did you want to add something to this?
I mean, it's more of a generalized take.
Like, I really appreciate that kind of work that's been doing.
But like, in a more general sense, like, we coined this term, initially when we started about two years ago, we coined this term a cipher state.
And we did that for ourselves because we were working on Balaji Srinivasan's work with network states.
And we kind of wanted to bring that concept over to, like, the blockchain space, the pure digital space.
Now, the concept itself is all about interoperability.
We build, basically, it encompasses any protocol that has sufficient identities, sufficient data points in order that it could be considered civil resistant.
So once you have a bunch of us, you have like, you have ontology, you have all these other beautiful protocols that we have up on stage here.
And each one could be considered a cipher state in its own right.
And once we start building this interoperable web of truly sovereign protocols in which we, like, our users own not just their assets, but also their data, their identities, and their reputations, that's when we get true interoperability and a true sovereign internet for all.
So it's an absolutely beautiful subject that you brought up here, Humpty.
And I just wanted to put out that more generalized take.
Yeah, thank you for that.
So in terms of, and unless somebody else wants to add anything to here, we can kind of continue on in terms of specifically when it comes to product development.
I wonder if anybody wants to relate, like, an anecdote from their personal experiences in terms of how this cross collaboration has helped them kind of accelerate some of the developments that have been happening within their organization, whether that be through, you know, individuals or a hackathon even.
Does anybody have any specific, I guess, examples of this that they would like to share that can then maybe be a catalyst for kind of continuing this conversation?
I think I'll say, Humpty is that, like, Trinsic tries to adopt and incorporate a lot of the standards and, like, protocols that get developed.
So, like, Lamari mentioned, BBS Signatures, Trinsic has, along with some other platforms, kind of productized that for developers.
So you can go in and basically use this new and great signature scheme to create, you know, zero-knowledge proofs and enable selective disclosure without having to go through, you know, a ton of work to, like, to reinvent the wheel.
So I think that, you know, there's different roles for different companies and layers here.
There's protocols, there's standards, and then there's, like, the folks who kind of productize all of that and deliver it to developers.
And then there's the developers who take, you know, the infrastructure and, you know, along with designers and others, turn that into applications for end users.
So a lot of these technology items and standards that we all care about are not necessarily things that the everyday user cares about.
They just care about, you know, what the product looks like and the fact that, you know, they might get a better privacy guarantee or they don't need to share all of their data in order to get access to something.
So there's different, you know, roles for everybody in this software lasagna of different standards, protocols, you know, infrastructure and end user products.
I don't know if I've ever been more hungry when someone talks about software.
Lasagna is definitely one of my favorite foods.
So you definitely just made me hungry right now.
I wonder, maybe for those of you who are currently, and maybe this goes to Rizal or somebody else that wants to take this,
who are contributing to hackathons, you know, guiding developers,
what has been your personal experience in terms of how this cross-collaboration has helped you kind of accelerate some of your own personal developments or organizational developments?
Wait, could you repeat or rephrase this, the question?
So the question was, for those who are currently contributing to hackathons, you know, as an organization,
how has participating in these types of events helped to accelerate some of the developments happening at the organizational level?
So, so far right now, we're actually doing three hackathons.
So in addition to the dev hackathon, we're doing one that's like based in Africa called DevCareer and then another one with DevPost.
And I think at our level, maybe I'm not sure if I can answer like the interoperable part,
but I think at our level, we are figuring out like, hey, here's the pieces that might not make more, make sense to people.
Um, here's things that we need to like break down a little bit easier and better.
Um, and I think things like, um, we have like this concept called protocols, which allows people to be able to share like data back and forth and decide who's able to get access to that data.
Um, and who, or who, or how people can essentially get access, basically like the behavior of the access, um, or the permissions.
And I think through like working with people and seeing how they're building the tools, it makes us be like, okay, maybe we need to like simplify this part or even improve our documentation on one side to be able to like empower them.
Um, I think that's how I would answer that.
Actually, that segues into, I think the next question that I had there is like, how can we support these people that are, uh, helping to build, you know, on our, on our product stack?
Um, and certainly as someone who's participated in hackathons in the past as well, I would say documentation is huge in terms of helping, um, you know, people understand kind of not just the technology that you're building, but also how they can, uh, build with that technology.
Absolutely. So I appreciate that perspective.
Um, if no one else has something to add on that front, we can continue in terms of talking about like organizational collaboration, uh, and feel free to raise your hand today.
For the first time I figured out how to have my mobile device in front of me while I'm also on my desktop without having an echo.
So, um, so I can actually see when you're raising your hand, as opposed to in previous, um, spaces.
I have told you that I can't see if you have your hands raised, so just go ahead and unmute.
So I guess I'll talk about specifically some of the things that I've seen ontology do well.
And I wonder maybe if this will spark some discussions or personal experiences, or even like how you see potential collaborations between, you know, your organization and ontologies through a product like orange protocol.
So one of the things that truly fascinated me about orange protocol, when we first started talking about this internally, uh, just for context, I was deeply involved in kind of some of the initial development of that, uh, platform, even bring it on to, uh, some of the developer spaces like East Denver, um, and, you know, bringing it to the eyes of developers and hackers, et cetera.
So orange protocol takes the very, I would say vague is probably the wrong word, probably better said like heavy, uh, concept of decentralized identity and makes it tangible in that you can easily create an identity, uh, decentralized identity.
When you log in to orange protocol, I thought that that was quite, uh, interesting and valuable because it just lets people know that, Hey, you don't need to think of decentralized identity, like, and something that is so abstract that you can't tangibly use it.
Um, and then leveraging, um, and then leveraging kind of some of the other, uh, things that come along with using decentralized identifiers, like verifiable credentials to be able to, uh, you know, generate these attestations or proofs of someone's, uh, activity in a way that's both self-sovereign and private.
Um, and then continuing on that kind of, um, how can we make this valuable to most people is we extended the way that this reputation, and I put that in, I did air quotes, you can't see that, um, in a way that is, uh, public, but, uh, abstracting away that data using these soul bound tokens.
Right. So obviously also kind of, uh, uh, bridging the conversation between camps that for a while seem to be on two different sides, but I think over time, there's been an understanding of how that value can be, uh, extended across both, uh, off-chain and on-chain, uh, primitives like, uh, verifiable credentials and, uh, SPTs.
So to me that that was really interesting. And also the opportunities to collaborate with organizations and running campaigns for them, for their members to generate these attestations or proofs, and then leveraging that within their products or community platforms like Discord, for instance.
Um, and so I know that there are conversations going on with, uh, you know, people in the audience, and then there have been, uh, previous campaigns that we've ran, uh, with other organizations to be able to leverage, you know, their data, um, to be able to, you know, this is open data, either lives on-chain or off-chain through it, that we can call through APIs.
What are your thoughts in terms of, like, the collaboration across organizations using decentralized data and leveraging, you know, decentralized identity, for instance, uh, to provide, uh, provenance and, um, I guess, a home for the, uh, activities and these proofs that we generate using platforms like Orange Protocol?
And maybe Galactica, you want to take this on, too, because I believe that, uh, you mentioned developing a similar product, or at least in this space.
Yes, I mean, that, uh, that kind of touches on an awful lot of what we do, to be honest.
Um, so, um, there are kind of, uh, there are kind of two, two forms of identity, uh, on Galactica.
There's one, Suedonymous, which kind of, like, takes, uh, takes the, um, the same kind of reputation framework that Vitalik, um, proposed in his paper last year, The Centralized Society.
So, you know, basically your, your Web3 footprint, your, your history, your, uh, everything that makes you, you, on-chain.
Um, and then allows you to use those as data points for your reputation.
Uh, so that happens with our Suedonymous identities.
And then we also have, um, what we call citizens.
So, citizens to, uh, our cipher state.
And they're the ones who own the protocol and make all the decisions and governance, all that kind of thing.
Um, and the citizens, uh, are identifiable through our zero-knowledge KYC framework.
Um, so, you know, there's, there's an awful lot of ways to get to, um, some form of verifiable and persistent reputation.
Um, there's a different ways to skin a cat.
Uh, so we just try to give people, uh, choice.
You know, it's, it's mainly user choice at the end of the day.
You've got to give people options.
Uh, you've got to give people freedom.
Um, you've got to make sure that, you know, you give people, uh, the chance to have the, uh, the rights and attachments that, uh, they want to have, uh, rather than just shoving some single, the singular system down their throat.
You want to make it composable.
Uh, so yeah, that's, uh, that's kind of the way we're doing.
I mean, optionality agency, I think within these, uh, experiences is huge.
I think, again, I, that's the reason why Orange Protocol saw value in developing a platform that leveraged both, uh, decentralized identifiers, but also SBTs, right?
To give people that optionality.
Do you want to integrate these off-chain proofs, uh, without necessitating some sort of like on-chain primitive?
Or do you want to work with more familiar primitives?
And I use the word familiar, uh, also, I guess, in air quotes, because that is very contextual or, or, or subjective.
Um, but I, I would say for those who are crypto-native, on-chain primitives would be more familiar.
So giving people the agency to work with those, I think is, um, of, of tremendous value.
I wonder, Simon, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about Linea and its voyage campaign and how you see
the value of, you know, these attestations or these proofs that users can generate, uh, based on, I believe there was an article that was recently shared and I'll try to find it and pin it here on the space too.
So, um, well, as I said, we're, we're kind of still finding that out, right?
It's very much like, uh, uh, a journey of exploration.
Um, you know, one of the things that I'm most excited about for, for on-chain attestations is the ability for users to take their data from data silos that, you know, they only really own and have control over in a very notional sense.
And so we're all familiar with the kind of like silos that you have in web too, and even, even, you know, companies that use verifiable credentials and all this amazing technology, but you know, they use it in a way that really is means that the user is limited to the permission that that platform gives them for controlling their data.
Um, and so we're seeing a lot of teams integrating with, um, with, with Verax, which, which I'll describe a bit in a minute, um, that are using like, uh, very innovative and pioneering zero knowledge proof technology that basically allows you to create a claim or an attestation from any web browser, any web browsing session that's secured with SSL, which is basically everything these days.
Um, and like, that's an incredibly powerful primitive, um, the value that it unlocks, it is, you know, it's, it's, it remains to be seen, but I have a very strong suspicion it's going to unlock a tremendous amount of value.
Um, and you know, the use case of the design spaces is huge.
So we're seeing a lot of those teams at the, at the, um, developing things that, for example, you can prove pseudonymously that you're a human being because you can prove that you've taken at least 10 or 12 Uber trips, which is quite difficult for bots to do.
You can prove that you have a certain bank balance, or maybe that it's range bound within a certain range.
You can do that pseudonymously.
You can prove that you've passed KYC with some large recognized institution, um, but you can do it in a way that allows for selective disclosure.
And, you know, a lot of this isn't new.
It's, it's, this is kind of stuff, uh, you know, ontology has, has, uh, developed in the past using verifiable credentials.
Um, but I think where we're seeing like the new enthusiasm and interest for putting this stuff on chain is that it allows it to be programmable and composable.
Um, in ways that are very familiar to people.
Um, so now you have smart contract developers that can, that can kind of say, oh, you know, I can, I can cherry pick different on chain attestations and compose them together and kind of get a much, uh, more accurate view of who my users are, um, and the value that they bring to my DAP or DAO or community.
Um, and it's very accessible because it's a very familiar space.
Um, and that's something that we're really trying to support in Linea.
Uh, so we're working with a lot of different teams across the ecosystem, many of whom have a lot more expertise than we do, um, including ontology, obviously.
Um, but a lot of other teams too, who are kind of specialized in zero knowledge proofs and we're collaborating, um, and building out the on chain attestation for, for Linea, uh, and really learning how to, how it should evolve.
Um, what the use cases are, uh, how to adapt it to the needs of the ecosystem and really just generally just earning, uh, learning a lot from the various different teams.
Um, so it's an, it's an incredible voyage.
Uh, and as I said, I strongly suspect it's going to unlock a lot of value and there's going to be a lot of different use cases emerging next year.
I think I'm going to have to switch, uh, the, the account that you're seeing me speaking from.
Cause I think I got rugged from my personal account.
I'm going to try to see if I can join for my personal account again soon.
But, um, in the meantime, we're talking about now, I don't even know which account I'm actually speaking from.
I'm speaking from ontology.
Um, no, thank you so much for the very kind of like comprehensive, uh, explanation and just the, the deep thought that Lydia, uh, has had in terms of, you know, the space that it wishes to develop, I guess, for people who are participating in that voyage.
Um, and really kind of also the technology that is being, um, you know, kind of explored and definitely, uh, thankful, grateful, uh, excited, uh, looking forward to kind of some of the different applications or integrations that can be done there with, uh, orange protocol and beyond.
Um, you know, one person that I wanted to hear from that I don't think I've heard from yet.
And this whole, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, exploration, actually, uh, some of it, I would say, spawned from something you mentioned early on in the introduction is Rob, in terms of how you are, uh, over at Alchemy Pay thinking about ZKKYC.
KYC. I don't think it's any surprise that your organization, because of the products that you
have, that you would be interested in looking into that. I think that there's still a lot of
uncertainty, at least here in the United States, in terms of which way the wind will blow when it
comes to KYC. But better to be prepared than not. I wonder, what are some of the things that you've
seen or have just been testing or having a conversation with developers and organizations
in terms of how that could potentially be used with Alchemy Pay?
Yes. So ultimately, it's about one of those aspects of the user's journey into crypto and
into Web3. So KYC, know your customer processes are a necessary part of being compliant as a payment
service provider. So that's something that, you know, I mean, the whole regulatory landscape is
different, but generally you've got anti-money laundering, AML procedures at the heart of it
anyway. So, you know, you must be compliant, otherwise you lose your channels basically very,
very quickly, you know, so you've got no choice. Well, there are choices, but you make the right
choices, you know. I think with ZKKYC, it's the idea that you can really have your, you don't want
to be sharing your passport photo, new details with every single provider out there or every single
platform that you're participating in or using, you know. So really, the idea is that it's
stored elsewhere. And then we have kind of proofs that we have tokenized, in fact, the idea that we
know these people have passed KYC at another stage, so we can share that. And then only when required
by authorities, if necessary, you know, you then have to have access to that particular transaction,
let's say, you know. So it is complex and that's why it's still something that's, you know, the
feasibility in terms of global finance is still being studied, but it's an area that we're pretty
fascinated by. And I think there must be a way of making it all come together. And we're certainly
talking with a lot of projects in regards to it, because it is, you know, anything that makes that
first entry into crypto or in this space, I think is really, really useful. So yeah, but at the
moment, yeah, it's a question of whether it is feasible. So yeah.
Yeah. And I think I'm speaking now for my personal account again. So apologies for that interruption
there. I think Galactica, you have your hands up. Did you want to add something to that?
Yeah. Yeah. Just very quick, very briefly.
Dave, sorry. I keep calling you Galactica. That's so rude of me.
That's all right. There's too many Daves, man.
There's a Dave limit. We can't exceed the Dave limit.
But yeah, Rob, we need to have a chat. We need to set up a group or something,
because we've been attacking this ZKKOSC subject for, like I say, pretty much the entirety of the
two years we've been developing our protocol. We've come up with a pretty decent solution,
which I think works very well. And we're already testing it in DevNet. So we definitely need to
have a little chat, I think. So yeah, we should have to do some of that.
Love it. Collaborative, cross-collaboration happening live. I saw Dave putting the thumbs
down. I'm guessing that has to do with your Dave squared, or my Dave squared comment and nothing
else. As we're reaching the top of the hour, I do want to recognize that I did only ask people to
lend us an hour of their time or donate an hour of their time, because I don't know how I would
repay you back, aside from being extremely appreciative of people coming on.
What are, I guess, in terms of looking forward, maybe this is the way that we can start closing
it out. What do you think we can expect in terms of advancements using a lot of the technology that
we've talked about? Let's narrow it down and talk about like, you know, decentralized identity,
ZKKYC, you know, this portable reputation. What do you think we can expect from that in the next year?
And then if we want to really put your futurist hat on in the next 15 years, why don't we start
with Lamari? Just because you're with the Decentralized Identity Foundation, I wonder if
you have like a perspective there in terms of what you're seeing now and like potentially like
what we can start seeing in 2024 and beyond.
I can say a couple things, but I also would like to yield my time to anchor as well. And I did mention
last time, the use cases for the medical industry being something very near and dear to my heart, just in
terms of having data portability with our medical records. I foresee someday that this will be a
possibility. And having worked, I did actually work in a hospital for a kidney transplant program for
about nine months. And I saw really horrible disruptions to people's cares and delaying care
because of this problem. And in some cases, it was life threatening. So I see that and also really
amazing use cases for being able to access spaces. There is someone in our community, a group, a company
called Passive Bolt, who is working on this decentralized access to places, giving people access
to things remotely. But I know anchor is here, who is also extremely knowledgeable and very insightful
on this topic as well. So I'd like anchor it also speak.
Sorry, because I just need to disappear. So I just want to say thank you, everyone. I really appreciate
you letting me up. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming.
Anchor, did you want to add to that?
No, just wanted to add to that. I think putting my futurist hat on, we've often within the
decentralized ID space explored a lot of use cases that are taking the existing ID world and
transplanting that, trying to do that using some form of decentralized ID. I think a big thing that
people will start caring about is authenticity of people online, especially as a lot of generative AI
content starts coming out. People will care about it almost like a fair trade label, or rather
labels of authenticity, like a B Corp label that you see. There's some very interesting initiatives that
have been happening in the space from DIFF members. There's a thing called the Content Authenticity
Alliance that has even created a logo that can be slapped onto AI generated images. But I think to more broadly,
more broadly, where I think we are seeing in this sort of like, six year space for a lot of like projects that have been,
we've been working in this space, we've got a lot of people from the wider decentralized ID space, I kind of describe it as identity is like a highway. And we are all car manufacturers who are building different kinds of automobiles and vehicles. And that's great. That's exactly what we are sort of
we've got. We've got a common goal of finding centralized identity in the way that and shape and form that has been done by a lot of centralized platforms. So very excited to see the development of the space. And I think I had to make one prediction, people will care more about authenticity online, perhaps not real ID or real profiles. But just getting to know that there was a real person behind it, perhaps.
Yeah, I love that perspective.
Like weaving AI in there. I know that that was definitely something that I included in the original outline, you know, to try to understand how like, AI could potentially either, you know, kind of assist or be the catalyst for why we start to care to borrow some of your words in terms of the, you know, this technology that assists with authenticating things that are real,
instead of things that are just like, you know, instead of things that are just like produced by some sort of like, you know, hybrid intelligence.
I wonder if, Rizal, if you wanted to share, especially because now that we know what TBD stands for, to be decentralized, we're looking into the future.
Is there a perspective from TBD in terms of like how this technology can continue to kind of develop into the next few years as well?
Yeah, I have a couple of things to say on, on this topic, including the AI part.
So I'll, I'll, I'll speak from like the TBD's perspective and then my perspective on the AI part.
So for TBD, I think where we're looking forward to is like on the verifiable credentials part.
I think that's like where my team seems to be very excited on like, okay, here's how you have like this wallet and you're able to prove your identity through like, through this wallet that's on your phone.
Maybe you can say like, hey, yes, I did complete this degree or I did complete this and that, or this is my license online.
I think that's part of like the web five package is this verifiable credentials thing.
And I think that's where we're spending a lot of our like time and energy and our excitement in.
And then in addition to that on the AI part.
So before I came to TBD, I worked at GitHub and I was mainly focused on like GitHub Copilot and different LLM stuff.
So I'm always really excited to learn about like, how can we combine or, or look forward to adding AI into the future of like decentralized identity.
And the other day I was talking to somebody from a data scientist from Danube tech and she was talking about like how AI can come into play by like maybe searching the blockchain and a ledger to make sure that like, like just to identify if there's like sensitive data and that can be detected and give a warning if that happens, which seemed really exciting to me.
And then another thing that I had seen is a community member has been building a project with web five.
And what he did is he actually like, it's like a place for you to like store any like data that you wanted.
It's kind of like Google drive the way he made it, but like a decentralized Google drive.
But what he did is he also incorporated on the use of like vector databases so that inside of that inside of this decentralized Google drive, he's able to use like a chat assistant and ask it questions.
So let's say he uploaded his renter's insurance and he doesn't remember the exact date of when the renter's insurance expires or whatever.
He can literally just type in a question and be like, hey, when does it expire?
When does this end? And then the AI will quickly respond.
So those are like exciting things that I'm looking forward to.
That's fantastic. Before we continue, as I do see your hand up, Goshen, I want or Dave behind the Goshen account.
I wanted to recognize, firstly, everybody who's just been so gracious with their time who attended.
I already started seeing some people dropping off. So I wanted to just thank the people who were up here.
Zach, Intrinsic, who just dropped off. Dave with Galactica, you know, also having both Anchor and Lamari with the Decentrified Identity Foundation,
having, you know, Dave with Goshen. Randy, you know, my colleague at Ontology, Polaris as well.
Donnie, a good friend, longtime collaborator. Rizal, you know, thank you so much for coming up here representing TBD.
And Rob, who was up here with Alchemy Pay, just wanted to be gracious and say, or grateful and say thank you.
Also, please, please, please, if you're listening, if you found any value in this conversation,
do make sure you go to our original tweet where we're announcing these folks and go ahead and give them a follow.
Give their organizations a follow. I think everyone who we had up here is doing really big things,
not just in the space of Decentrified Identity, which, you know, for me is certainly something that I can geek out about a lot,
but just generally, you know, to advance decentralization, Web3 development.
Please do give everybody a follow. And so, yeah, well, we can continue. Goshen, you had your hand up,
but I just wanted to recognize the people who had been up here already that had to leave.
Yeah, I appreciate that. I won't be too long just to kind of give people, other people a chance to jump in at the end here.
But certainly from the from the future perspective, like I kind of spent a lot of my time talking to new protocols
and people are kind of pioneering new spaces. And I think for DID kind of fits into a lot of the kind of current infrastructure
that's being built in these sort of areas. So if you think of like DeFi, SocialFi,
we go from a situation where large kind of conglomerate companies are profiting off our networks and our attention
to us kind of taking ownership back of that and kind of getting generating value from our networks
with DID being kind of a big, important aspect of that.
And then you've got DeFi trying to kind of present an alternative to this sort of traditional finance system
where DID could potentially offer a future where there's kind of a transcendation of borders
and people can access things like credit markets from anywhere in the world and stuff like that.
And there's no kind of it just kind of takes away a lot of the sort of barriers that are there.
So that's kind of that's sort of where I've seen the future.
I've seen kind of people building and kind of completely innovative new protocols in these areas.
And then DID providing kind of the vehicle, I suppose, for people to to facilitate these,
no matter where they are and kind of building on that sort of ethos.
Yeah, that's amazing. And you know what?
One thing that I just realized, and I don't know if I called attention to this earlier,
but I think there were like four or five different blockchains represented in some way
during this whole conversation.
I think, Goshen, you're talking about, you know, building Bitcoin layer two.
We had two Cosmos projects up here.
We have Ontology, obviously, who's building, you know, on their L1,
but also building on Ethereum.
And Rizal, I believe TBD is building on Bitcoin.
Um, I don't think we are.
I've been wrong many times before.
I got to double check, but I don't think so.
I think with TBDex, we're enabling people to like one of the things we're building,
we're enabling people to be able to exchange Bitcoin more easily for cash.
But I don't think we're building on Bitcoin, yeah.
But regardless, I just wanted to kind of point that out.
Because for me, seeing so many different, you know, ecosystems,
I guess infrastructure being represented, you know, at the, you know, at layer one,
I think to me just speaks volumes about just really this whole idea of collaboration
and interoperability, because we're able to really add much more functionality to the products
that we build and to the networks that we build on when we use, you know, these different,
this interoperable layer, if you will, or introduce that interoperable layer to these
products and these blockchains.
So I think that was really cool.
I want to give Randy an opportunity here to maybe close us out.
I realize this is super early for you.
So thank you, like a million percent for coming on.
And I just love the fact that this was your first space with us.
Did you want to just make a few kind of, kind of calls to action here in terms of closing
it out and talking about the anniversary and things that people can do?
So, as we talked a lot about building protocols, and the thing is that we actually have many,
like, amazing protocols existing in the market now, contributed by our, like, partners and
the ones in the space now.
But the thing is that when I was talking to a couple, like, DID providers and builders, the
obstacle for them is that how we can apply these protocols in everyone.
daily life, and how we can push the adoption for these protocols.
And I think that's the reason why we are hosting the spaces and also the campaign for
ontology's sixth anniversary.
It's like an example, or it's, it's provided a way for people to actually interact with ontology
for their previous contribution to networks.
And because when you log on the Orange campaign, you can easily see that there's some couple
tasks listed on the site, it leads you to verification of how long you have been in the ontology
discord channel, like how many stakes you've been, stakes on the ontology networks.
have you ever tried out our latest products, the S, D, O, and T, et cetera.
And once you finish this all verification, you will be able to calculate your points.
points. And therefore, according to everyone's different points, you will be able to mint your
SOBAN token, the non-transferable NFTs for three levels.
So, also that each of the NFTs will be able to unlock the different levels of the rewards provided
So, to end this space, I would encourage everyone to take a try run there.
It's fun, and it shows that ontology's appreciation for every community members who's been with us
I love it. Thank you so much. That's really wonderfully put. I think unless anybody wants,
like, if I missed anything here that we should be talking about, that's a good place to close
it out. I wanted to, again, just thank everybody, honestly, from the bottom of my heart. This is
really great to see the number of people that stepped up and said, yeah, I'd love to be a part
of that. Let's have this conversation. I think that there was a lot of insights that were generated
from, you know, this kind of idea of, like, collaborative or cross-collaboration, but also in terms
of, like, how we can build in interoperability through that and certainly talking about, like,
our product ecosystem in terms of, like, how that can be leveraged as well to do the same.
I would invite anybody who's interested in learning more about ontology, just to close
it out here, you can definitely follow the host account here if you're on the space. If not,
you can go to ont.io, or you can go to the X account, which is x.com forward slash ontology
network. There's a link tree there, and you can follow all of the different social accounts. You
can find me on Discord usually, but you can also find me on Telegram. There's a very active community
of, you know, moderators there that are happy to kind of help answer some questions. With that,
I want to wish everybody a fantastic rest of your week and weekend, and we'll see. I think I should,
I should be able to host this space again next week, but regardless, we'll figure it out in terms
of what we can do next week, because I will be out on a retreat. With that said, thank you,
everybody, and we'll see you next time.