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Consumer ZK: Building Next Gen Privacy Apps
Recorded: June 12, 2025 Duration: 1:06:09Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders explored the launch of innovative projects leveraging zero-knowledge technology to enhance privacy in consumer applications. The conversation highlighted trends in user engagement, the importance of user experience, and the potential for ZK technology to revolutionize privacy in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you all right test test can you hear me yep i can hear you can hear me yep perfectly fine i had an issue last week as a speaker
from my personal account looks like it might be happening again some with these spaces there's
always uh one struggling or two depending on how many are uh speaking you
know oh absolutely yeah um so i'm gonna speak from here i'm just gonna keep my personal account up
and uh yeah we'll we'll just play it off that way let's see i do have a few more folks coming up
here so i'm gonna give it just a few minutes I believe yeah
I have at least two more people that should be joining but in the meantime
how are you doing Francis I'm doing good I'm doing good I know we had a
little time zone clarification but I'm actually I'm in Eastern usually you
know obviously a New York time zone so so all good. I'm glad.
This time works perfectly for me.
Okay, perfect. How about yourself?
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Yeah, I'm based on the West Coast, so in California.
How's the weather over here?
It's quite mild, actually, still, so I'm not unhappy about it.
As long as it's balanced, this balance.
Yeah, I'm excited for this space, man.
And I appreciate you guys inviting us.
And of course, there's going to be some.
So learning more about you guys as well.
Yeah, I think this is going to be a good one. We've been hosting.
What's the process for joining?
I don't see any links.
Okay. So someone's trying to join.
I'm pretty sure I shared
the faces link with them.
Hang on. Give me a moment.
Take your time.
Try to do simple things at the same time here.
Copy link.
And then replied.
Okay.
Cool.
So the other person should be coming in shortly um yeah so we've been kind of hosting
spaces around on-chain gaming uh or web through gaming and for the last couple of weeks this is
the first in like i don't know about about a month since uh you know kind of taking a break from that
primarily because i know we've had conversations ongoing
with several of our friends who are in the ZK space,
and I wanted to make sure that I made space
for those conversations,
even though the gaming spaces will continue.
The purpose for those, the gaming spaces,
were to figure out kind of what the thinking is for game developers,
whether they're building on-chain games or traditional games,
in terms of identity systems for their games, interoperability between their own kind of uh i guess uh production or the different
games that they're producing and kind of like how are they looking at these elements in game assets
whether they are you know kind of like financial in nature or more of like uh badges that you could earn based on
completing you know what xyz types of activities and how they're thinking about those to see if
there's an opportunity for you know did the vcs to kind of operate in this space um so anyways
that's kind of what we were doing there and they actually been quite
uh useful at least to kind of progress our thinking and see kind of what opportunity
there but obviously today is going to be fun because ontology and you know a builder in the
zk space space excuse me is always interested in hearing from our friends,
but also thinking about what does ZK look like in consumer applications? And what examples are there
in the consumer space to, you know, kind of promote privacy? And what are the challenges that we're seeing as well?
So we're going to be talking about that today. I love that. Excited.
Yeah. And I shared an outline with everybody. So, you know, I have a couple of questions here,
but just think of this as a, it's more of like a guide. I definitely don't like to script these spaces.
I like to kind of go off the flow.
So we're having a really good conversation about whether it's a product or an idea, a concept.
I think that would be, I really like to dive into those and explore that.
I love it.
So we'll make it a conversation just uh idea sharing which
we have plenty of obviously
yeah okay cool we got sam connecting now so that's great how are you doing sam
you might still be connecting
yeah x has been quite horrible when it comes to um what's it called uh the spaces for me at least
yeah sometimes i usually have to jump off and try to jump back on
yeah what sucks though is if you're hosting the space and you jump off that's
it you've rugged it so there's no way of recovering it it's it's quite you know
pedestrian that's true that's true usually it's it's it's a mic issue I
think I'm not sure if they've gotten better over the time but it's still
sometimes randomly happens even for me so So it's just, it's become,
people are just used to it at this point.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to
get it started here. Hopefully
Sam can connect. I do see on my screen
at least that, Sam, you're still connecting.
If you're having issues,
just bounce out and
jump back in.
We'd obviously love to hear you
and don't want to lose you in this conversation.
But GM, everybody, welcome back to another Ontology Space.
Well, we're going to be talking about ZK,
Consumer ZK, excuse me.
So what does it look like to build
next-generation privacy apps?
And we're going to set the stage, first of all,
by introducing our guests and what they're building.
And we'll then jump into an exploration of ZK use cases.
Like, what else is out there?
What are some of the things that have piqued our interest?
I know for me, I have a few things that I've seen, you know, when I've gone to conferences like Tefcon in Thailand,
I saw a couple of ZK projects that I'm keeping a close eye on, not just for collaboration,
but also because I'm very interested in seeing if that, you know, kind of, if that becomes like,
you know, kind of if that becomes like an adopted kind of new form of using ZK technology.
And yeah, we'll then kind of make this into like a little lab here, and we'll start exploring like
what else can we build. So if you're in the audience and this type of conversation speaks to you, I would highly encourage you to raise your hand, come on up, and join the conversation.
So with that said, let's go ahead and give Francis a warm welcome and give us an introduction to yourself and to ZK Pass and what y'all are building.
Thank you. Thank you, Ontology.
And Sam, glad to know that you made it on stage. I know that sometimes we thought you were having difficulty connecting what we are is a ZK TLS protocol.
What that means is we're basically a private data oracle.
And how I can best explain it is imagine a world where you can prove something about yourself,
like your age or credit score, without ever showing the actual details.
That's exactly what we do.
We're a privacy first protocol,
and we are built on zero-knowledge proofs,
or ZKPs, as you guys see in the space,
letting you basically keep your data secure
while still proving what matters.
So yeah, that's a little bit in a nutshell.
Been in this space for a while, some years,
since around 2016,, everyone has their own
journey. And I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of the people here. Thank you.
Who wants to go next?
Okay, that's a no. I said I was trying to speak from my personal account. And I asked,
can you hear me? And you asked who wants to go from my personal account and i asked can you hear me and
you asked who wants to go next i'm like they can't hear me so my personal account is still rugged it
looks like it's up here but i can't speak from it so we'll go with sam uh sam how are you doing
give us a brief intro about yourself and what y'all are doing over at vera
absolutely hope you can hear me loud and clear. And apologies for the...
Awesome. That's great.
This is actually my first time on a Twitter space, X space.
So it's a few kind of teething problems getting in here,
but it looks like we're all good.
So that's great. Great to be here. Appreciate it.
So I'm the CPTO at Vera.
A little bit about me, 20 years in tech.
Come from a really kind of heavy engineering background and spent most of my career working across large scale, high volume distributed platforms,
which naturally kind of led me into the Web3 space.
Around 2017, I got into Web3 kind of jumping into the deep end as part of the EOS launch.
So I was one of the kind of lead teams in launching that network and a bunch of the
other kind of graphene based networks. So wax, telos, Fido, et cetera,
spent a couple of years building and running infrastructure on those networks,
building solutions on top of those networks,
trying to bring the web two world into a web three.
And from there i moved into the
exchange side of things so cto of an exchange for a couple of years based out in india and through
that journey i was introduced to the co-founders of vera so vera is a web 3 browser and a web 3
browser that's really kind of focused on UX and simplifying and abstracting
all of the complexities of Web3. Back when in the EOS days, we were kind of really arrogant and
thought if we build it, they will come and people will figure it out. Fast forward 10 years, that
hasn't happened. Web3 is still pretty complex, pretty difficult. So we have to take that user
driven, product-driven approach
to really abstract away all of those pain points
and make it as simple as tapping your credit card
on an ePost terminal to pay for your Starbucks
and you get a notification
that your transaction went through.
So Vera is trying to do that
through simplifying everything
from setting up a wallet
using pass keys and biometrics to getting something into your wallet and then a whole discoverability
channel to do something with that wallet once you're and doing that in a way that's kind
of beautiful UX and super easy.
So you don't have to think too much about what you're doing.
Just one comment.
I really love Vera's website. When i was checking you guys out i was having
fun with just browsing it so just a comment that's amazing thanks i'll give that feedback
to our design team we have uh amazing design team who are very kind of passionate uh about what we
do lots of lots of conversation sitting around kind of finessing all of the details. So really appreciate that. I'll give that feedback.
Actually, that might be a good starting point.
I love when things just surface that way, by the way.
That's my favorite conversation.
Let's talk about the design element of ZK.
So ZK, I think, is a concept that, at least in in the Web3 space is familiar to a few of us, right? I can't speak for the majority, but I think that for the most part, anyone who's been involved around like Web3 crypto for any amount of time, we've seen ZKV mentioned somewhere.
crypto for any amount of time, we've seen ZKB mentioned somewhere. However, I think for the
most part, even those that know about ZK don't truly understand what it is and why it's important
and how it impacts their daily lives. So let's talk firstly, and I don't know who wants to take this,
whether it's Francis or Sam,
what is ZK?
And then we'll
pause it, is there a problem
with the way that we're presenting ZK
to the public?
Who wants to take the question of what is
ZK first, and then we'll kind of like break
it apart even further together?
Well, since I sort of did a first intro, I want to, I'll give it to Sam if he doesn't
mind, because I sort of try to minimize as much as I can on explaining ZK, which is where
I had that whole Imagine introduction there, right?
But, you know, from a technical perspective, I'm going to give
it to Sam because I want to hear what, because it's mainly better understood from engineers.
And then when we try to elaborate it to the masses, that's where sometimes you could say,
okay, did you do it correctly or not? Why is it that it's only adapted in some areas and not
everywhere else.
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, Francis.
Thanks.
So I think in a really kind of simple approach,
ZK is a, I like to think of it as almost a black box,
that's a yes or no machine.
It's as simple as that.
You give it some input and it will give you back
a yes or a no.
And using the power of
kind of cryptography and really cool really scary maths we can uh boil that down to effectively
imagine like a smart contract on a blockchain you give it an input it'll give you a response
so it allows you to elicit information or validate information without seeing the whole picture.
You can just get a bit of an understanding.
And a really kind of great example of that,
I spend a lot of time in India.
And in India, taking the example of identity verification.
So you'll have to give your passport details
to a lot of people.
And that's generally shared over WhatsApp, if you can believe it.
So somebody who is as kind of privacy focused as I, I find myself sending snapshots of my passport over WhatsApp a lot,
which is really scary because once somebody has that information, they can kind of do whatever they want with it.
So instead of me having to send that photo of my passport,
they can just ask a question.
Is this person from this country?
Is this person older than this age?
To kind of answer the questions that they need to answer
and do that very simply with just that yes or no.
Is Sam from the UK?
Yes or no?
They don't need to see my whole passport for that.
So just summing it back up the, for me,
the kind of whole zero knowledge approach is just a yes or no machine without
giving any kind of real data points.
I love that. Can I, can I add on if you don't mind?
By the way, before I continue, you, you forgot to give your intro. Sam and I sort of did that, but we didn our side, like MTN, which is the largest telecommunication company on the continent of Africa.
This is a company that's in like 19 active countries, you know, 297 million users and so forth.
And man, believe it or not, some places were on, like the branches are all different in different countries.
And onboarding still, to a degree, leverages WhatsApp, meaning the documents are uploading, uploaded through WhatsApp.
And this is like an institution that is so big, right? for news cases, but when it comes down to privacy, ZK is a very strong addition of empowerment for
people and organization alike. It just depends on how they want to incorporate that. And most of the
adaption curve that we're seeing or that we can challenge is how easy is it, right? Simplifying
that experience,
which is I guess what Vera has been doing in the sense of,
okay, how do you make things easier?
But I think also because it's such a technical product or I guess,
concept developer tools are probably where we'll also see really good successes,
whether it's SDKs or whatever we're creating,
because then engineers that are creating seamless application
or consumer application can leverage this,
and you may not necessarily be in the forefront.
It could just be something in the back or as an Oracle and then that works.
Then of course, adapting to the ecosystem.
That's my input. But yeah,
ZK is just basically saying yes or no, very simple and direct.
Okay. So I'll give an intrude on myself since apparently I didn't do that. And then I'm going
to ask a follow-up question to all of this and maybe even add a little bit of context.
Hey, everybody. I'm Humpty. I'm behind
the Ontology account today. I was trying to speak for my personal account, but I'm getting rugged,
and this is the second time it happens, so apologies for that. But if you're interested
in following me, you can go to Humpty0x or just the little beady head that's sticking out right
here. You can follow that. I've been contributing to Ontology for over three years. I came to it when I was
really diving into what is kind of one of the more emergent and important problems to solve,
at least in my own personal journey. And I landed on decentralized identity. And Ontology has been building decentralized identity tools since 2016,
when it first joined the W3C.
So as I, or should I say, excuse me, not the W3C,
the Decentralized Identity Foundation.
And so has been a contributor since then building DID tools.
Okay, so in terms of is there a packaging problem for ZK, before I get to expanding on that,
there is something that Sam was speaking to in terms of the way that ZDK works is there is a platform on which you create
these identities, right, or this information. And then there's a verifier that sits in the middle
and basically just attests to this information being correct when it's queried. And then there's the user, the person who holds these proofs that can be attested to.
So with that context, is there a packaging problem for ZK in terms of the way that they
function or the way in which they're presented?
Meaning, and I think Vero might be the best answer for this,
but we'll see, we'll get there.
In terms of how people perceive ZK, is it too hard?
Is it even a consumer product in terms of the way that we sell this to the public?
Or by the time it gets to them, do they even need to know that there is ZK involved?
I'll go to Sam first because I think, like I said, I think Vera in terms of the way that
its packaging is quite unique and interesting as well.
Yeah, that's a really great question.
So I would probably, we could ask a similar question.
Do people know about asymmetric public key cryptography?
Probably not.
That's what powers most of the blockchain world.
Powers kind of all of the stuff that we're kind of doing in Web3.
That's how we deal with SSL.
That's another good one.
Most people don't really know what SSL is.
So I think it's one of those tools
that we as kind of engineers and developers
should use and harness to make life safer
and simpler and easier for people.
But I don't necessarily know that
or i don't necessarily think people should really have to know about it so if i had to explain i
always like to use the analogy of um if my parents or my grandparents kind of don't understand
something if you can't explain it simply uh to a person like that then you're not going to kind of
get the the masses on board so i think
it's one of those things that we sort of abstract away um and again coming from a consulting
background back in the day if i was building a website for a client they don't care if i do it
in asp.net or javascript or uh cold fusion if you got any of you guys remember that they just want
something that works.
They don't really care what happens underneath.
And I think that's the way that we have to look at it.
That's the way we have to kind of package it.
The whole ZK side of things, I think that's more for the techies and the engineers.
What we have to do is just talk about the benefits and the reasons for using that.
And I think with something like ZK Proofs,
the benefits are massive and a lot of people will understand that.
But that becomes another kind of
really interesting point of debate
where I think the huge advantage of ZK Proofs
is privacy and data security,
which I still personally don't feel
that the majority of people understand
the importance of privacy. And I think that's a kind of a separate abstract challenge that we
have to solve. Until we can help people understand why privacy is important, the rest of it doesn't
really matter. I'll add my two cents. Sam, I really love the way you pointed it out.
It shouldn't really matter on the technology itself.
If we really think about why this whole topic started with ZK,
and I'm not even just talking about,
like I say, ZKTLS or anything in this manner.
If we remember why rollups came out was because layer
twos just basically
bashed transactions together on layer ones, right, to decrease congestion and all these
other things. It was for a necessity. Then when we looked at, you know, all of these
other consumer application like airdrops for proving your human proof of humanity and such,
it's so that, you It's so that protocols can prevent
botting and all the other kind of means that people use to kind of scam or get more projects,
right? Get more tokens on for projects and kind of have a fair distribution.
So everything we've seen in technological advancement has always been solving some sort of problem.
Enterprises wanted to figure out how to leverage ZK proofs, obviously, for transaction shielding
of senders and receivers.
Because if your address on smart contract details, even if they don't know the name,
they can track transactions.
And to a degree, sniping and hacking can happen as well.
Like we've seen or heard of examples.
And then we start to think about the way that we can solve this or prevent this happening.
I think that's where ZK Proofs came in.
And I believe that's what really matters.
I don't think there's a problem of adaption.
I remember pitching for seed rounds.
And that was in early 2023 or, you know, towards
the mid 2023. And people didn't, we weren't even using ZKTLS. It was just more so the technology
and what it enabled. And then the terminology of ZKTLS then kind of started popping up towards
the end of that year, towards 2024 and so forth. So I think the adaption of what they are
and the benefit of them is being heard.
It's just a matter of whether it matters
to the people on their day-to-day.
And I think they will start to realize that
as we continue to see things like AI pick up more
in the use case and how much data is really out there,
especially private data and so forth.
So I believe that it is more so,
it's just something that over time people will appreciate and right
now they're excited about the theoretical you know thing about it but
they're not really seeing the use cases so once more apps use it once more
consumer or the bridges of web 2 or 3 they'll appreciate it but it will be it
won't be one of those tech that people just say,
oh, you know what, we need to do XYZ,
just be, hey, is this incorporated?
If not, why is it not?
Because it's absolutely necessary.
That's kind of my view.
Yeah, well, you mentioned a few things.
Hang on, let me break this down
because I don't want to get too far away from it.
You talked about two things here.
One of them having to do with, you know,
the popularization of ZK and how, you know, you don't necessarily need to talk
about it from a technical perspective, but for the most part, and maybe my
neat, my circle's too small, but for the most part, whenever we're selling ZK,
with the exception of a handful of products, and I think Vera's there, we are putting the tech first.
Okay, so that's the first thing.
Second thing, to be fair, we're talking about what we're pitching in a seed round.
Like, investors are a whole different animal, right?
This is not a consumer.
This is someone who's investing in the technology.
So that they have to have specialized knowledge
or at least enough research done to understand what it is and be able to invest in it as a solution for some future applications.
So I just wanted to clarify that.
But the thing about, you know, I'm not batching them together.
You're absolutely right.
What I was getting towards is in pitching ZK to investors, you had to kind of sell them on the solution, on the problem that
it's solving. And yes, they should, believe it or not, not many knew. And even the top VCs out
there, we had to like walk them, like hold their hands, right? And even then, they had doubts,
like, is this really going to pick up? So it had to be about also their risk tolerance and such.
But I'm using that as an
example from how the consumers need to also understand just the problem that it's solving.
And I believe that's really the most important thing. So I was adding on or echoing Sam's points.
But it depends also on the application. If the application is targeting engineers they need to talk
the tech right even for us we've had engineers come to us and say hey guys
like like I read your document but I have questions there's some things I'm
not fully you know grasping and then you have to take that educational route but
you you know that's just an engineer you're talking to versus consumer
applications you know like when we talk to, let's say,
Swagcoin and it's like, hey, we want to do XYZ.
Whether they decide to work with you or not,
it's a different educational discussion.
We're realizing that maybe if we're answering consumer adoption,
we don't talk tech, but you still need both because tech or
engineers are the ones that are building these consumer applications.
So you have to understand how to maybe cater to two sides, but make it where the benefits are really outweighing anything else.
Oh, Sam, you were going to say something and I interrupted you. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate the clarification.
clarification. No, I think the only thing I was going to mention just in between that was I think
when Francis was talking about how this will become ubiquitous and people will ask why you're not
doing it because it's just there, which is like SSL or TLS today. There's kind of no excuse for
not having an SSL certificate. You should be doing the most that you can to protect your users.
And I think that's what we're starting towards in the ZK world.
And Humpty, what do you think?
I'm actually very curious because there's a dilemma which is,
and thank you, Sam, there's a dilemma where, you know,
you need engineers to build application leveraging this tech
in order for to enhance
adoption but then you also need consumers to to sort of I want this tech and scream this tech
because then it's sort of it's one of those things where your customers tell you what exactly your
product is before you can you can narrate and and put all the documents together and then the
consumer can just tell you no you really are this are this. And then you rebrand, right? So there's two paths. And even for us, we face those. And a lot of product and
projects, even in AI, that sort of put things out there and then end up getting feedback and then
go back into the drawing board. I'm really curious when we talk about adaption and consumer,
are we factoring both or do you think there's one that overweighs the other?
Yeah, I see. So this is kind of where I think there's a challenge in packaging.
We, and I say we as builders, as developers, right?
Like, especially if we're protocol builders or building the infrastructure, at least in Web3, we tend to market it as if it's a consumer
product, but it's not necessarily something that we're building for use at a consumer level.
I think it was Sam who was bringing up the point about how the internet works and all of these
protocols that function on the back end. When those protocols were being built, they weren't necessarily advertised on social platforms,
you know, as something that is important for everyone.
Because at the end of the day,
like the people who are on social aren't necessarily the ones
that are going to be building with those primitives, right?
Like ZK tech, right?
However, I think it's quite unique because in crypto and in Web3,
no matter what you're building, you're talking about it in public.
And there is a, I think, a broad group of people
who are interested in this tech to succeed.
And we kind of just package it up and socialize it, you know, and
put it on like Twitter or Instagram or wherever. However, I think like ZK is important as a, as,
as, as a primitive, as a product that will be something that is universally used by everyone,
but that product will look very different at the application layer. Right.
And that company who builds that product with ZK integrated to it is going to talk about it
in a very different way. They're going to talk about it in terms of what its value is
to the person who's using that product, whether it's, let's talk, let's, let's assume it's Apple.
And they talk about, you know, that they have the highest grade encryption.
And that's why their phones are the safest to use. If that is important to you,
that's the messaging that you're going to receive. If you are WhatsApp, and by the way,
I just got a message on my own WhatsApp reminding me that they use end-to-end encryption. So all of my conversations are private. Not even they can read it. Again,
it's presented in a way where it's easy to understand. It's privacy first, but it doesn't
talk about technology on the backend. Now, if WhatsApp or Apple eventually adopts ZK as a tool to reinforce
that privacy, right? Then they will, but we won't know. The public won't know. Unless we're really
nerdy and want to dive deep into their tech specs and understand that at that level. So I think that
that's what I mean in terms of like, how are we presenting this to a consumer? And I guess the next question to continue with this like exploration of
the ZK space currently, what are we seeing on a consumer level that uses ZK that is actually
gaining traction? And again, Polaris, go for it, buddy. Yeah, we haven't heard from you yet. By the
way, Polaris is my collaborator here on our weekly spaces. I think he needs to come to speaking stage.
Yes, I am. I'm here, bro. I've just been dealing with this. It's so crazy, though, because I've
been really enjoying both the inputs from francis and sam welcome to the stage
but i'm currently experiencing an issue with with zk knowledge and and i'm dealing with like
basically magic eden right now so so we've got the runes protocol and we've got the ordinal's
protocol on the btc network and it practically you know, uses the concept of zero knowledge. And now what's
happened is I bought some runes and it's the transactions gone through from my side, the BTC
is gone. And it's on the protocol. It's clearly stating that, you know the the transaction is there we've got the transaction hashes there
but i've never received my runes and on the on the magic eden uh user interface it's saying that
the transaction is still pending so basically i've lost my btc and i'm just like stuck over here now
uh so you know when you guys mentioned about like you know consumers so here
here you go this is like a live situation which has happened uh in terms of zero knowledge and
like you know there's still a long way to go and after this space i'm gonna be grabbing magic eat
on twitter and like just on x and i'm probably gonna need an explanation because i normally
have never had any issues.
But clearly there is a there is some sort of because you've got another because you've got a middleman in between, which is dealing with decentralized information.
You know, things can happen. So now let's imagine, like, if you're dealing with, like, all this data, right.
let's imagine like if you're dealing with like all this data right and uh and if if the if the
if the knowledge hasn't been streamlined correctly and if like you know the uh if there's still a long
way to go for the so zk proof to kind of like you know evolve itself in in in such a superb manner
as in like the encryption which apple is doing uh i think we've still got a long way to go
because like eventually all of these grassroots movements start from like you know tech degens
who are like literally using their technology on a very on a regular basis and if there's room for
improvement from from that side then you can imagine you know, when you're going to do that on a higher scale, we're going to have a lot of issues.
And I'm not saying that this technology is not needed, but I think that, like, can you imagine, like, that someone's information gets intercepted by a completely different individual and I know
WhatsApp like you know as being used in India and like you know the way Humpty is using it it's great
amazing but when you're talking about like digital databases like you know used by
databases used by huge countries and if there's issues like this where you're holding a third
party responsible for encrypting it and decrypting it, there is elements of it getting corrupted
somehow or somewhere. I would say first, man, I feel for you,
and I hope that it gets resolved with that type of situation.
That sounds like a stressful situation.
It does sound, though, that the transaction has happened,
obviously, because you have the hash on the Bitcoin.
Obviously, it's in the meme pool, or it's confirmed. And it sounds like
it's probably just, it might be a delay between that because you said on Magic Eden, on their UI,
it's saying pending. So it's got to be a delay or mismatching the status of reporting. So I'm sure
that that shouldn't be a crazy issue. But you're right. That's because
there's a third party side. The whole point at times between there's two things that I can
segment the consumer side of zero knowledge proofs, which is supposed to give you as a consumer
the ability to disclose what to disclose as far as the information, in this case, it's a transaction,
it's supposed to give you the power for that, meaning where you decide to store it, what you
decide to do with it. If it is just a ZK proof of masking, those are a little bit different.
So sometimes it also does depend on what actual ecosystem you're interacting with and how much privacy you are having or you want to have.
Because others might say, well, you know what,
I don't want to leverage this protocol
because it's a third party or it's a middleman
and you can find some peer-to-peer approach.
But then that's also choice-based.
I don't, you know, personally, I don't know, obviously,
but I don't think your transactions are lost or Bitcoin is lost.
I think it's more so just the reporting between the two platforms.
But I can't speak on this, so I'm just hoping to ease your concern.
But going into the second part of what you mentioned with respect to the users are the ones that are using it.
Is it really needed?
And so forth.
I think we're very, very early on this ZK adoption.
You guys obviously know this week
there was that announcement about Privy as an example.
If you guys remember, Privy started in 2021, right?
And they only had that big break
when they had the Frentech app, right?
And the integration was in 2023.
I'm just giving a little bit of an adoption timeline. And now you see the strap acquisition
for them. Or sometimes adoption, it could take longer or it could be a little bit shorter,
but we're seeing these consumer application or we're seeing the big tech companies do this.
I know that Inc., I think it was a bank. I don't know, it was a long time ago,
but they were saying they're using ZK Proof.
I don't know whatever happened to that announcement,
whether it was just for PR play or real use cases,
but it's more so depending on what it is being used for.
If it's a bank incorporating it for its consumers,
that is a direct to the consumer of what they need.
If it's for uh you
know other middleman application that could be a different story so um that's the only thing i
would say to this uh and it also does depend on how much you care personally about this uh zero
knowledge interaction with your data yeah that's a nice response. And I totally appreciate you trying to consolidate and consult.
But the thing is that, in terms of the first thing, I'm like an avid user. I use multiple
platforms all the time. And this is a bug because the two transaction
hashes are different and the transaction hash from my side is different the one which is showing on
the magic Eden side it's saying that like you know the it's there is no it's not even validated on the main pool.
And it's never happened before.
So this can happen there.
This is just a very grassroots basic thing, like a transaction being sent,
something being utilized with that transaction, and then you're eventually getting.
This can also be translated into when someone is sending A information or, like, you know, getting a proof of knowledge, you know, zero proof of knowledge information.
And, you know, it gets intercepted in between and the end user ends up getting a completely corrupted data.
ends up getting a completely corrupted data.
And if it falls into the wrong hands,
then you can imagine like, you know,
things can literally go to the next level.
Humpty, go for it, bro.
Yeah, I want to get us back on track
because we have less than 15 minutes to go.
So the question posited was consumer ZK,
what are some examples that we've seen in the wild?
And maybe Sam, you can speak to Vera
in your own approach to ZK
in a way of abstracting this from the consumer
so that it is palatable and easy for them to understand,
or not even understand,
just use as a function of the browser.
Or not. or not who you can come back to you probably stepped away no no no no sorry i uh yeah i was i was muted i was talking you guys couldn't hear me classic mistake um so yeah really great
question um we're still in that kind of implementation stage of building that in. So
that's a really great examples of how that works. We have as part of our product, we have a really
kind of granular reward system where we can incentivize and reward virtually any action
within the app. And this becomes really powerful because it allows us to give rewards to users for anything that happens in the app or on the web or even on chain.
Now, the conflict there is that in order to do that, there's a lot of information that we have to know about what people are doing. This is where ZK is the perfect application,
because if we're able to infer
these actions without actually knowing what's happening,
the user remains completely private,
the behaviors within the app are completely private,
but we can still reward for those events.
That becomes a very interesting model and interesting approach to have a completely
private but super powerful rewards engine that you can give rewards for virtually anything.
And that's what I'm really excited about.
And that's what we're spending a lot of time on because it's a big part of the
privacy angle for us. Yeah, I wonder if you could actually expand on like the difference between
if you were to do this without ZK versus like the intention or why this is more valuable with ZK
because I think that this is a really interesting use case. And I think for
anybody who's listening, who's maybe not too familiar with ZK, they might ask themselves,
well, why don't you just take that information, calculate it and send the rewards the way maybe
a lot of other projects do? Yeah, absolutely. And the simplest answer to that is this is a browser.
A browser is a highly sensitive application on your phone.
You might be doing banking.
You could be doing messaging.
You could be doing emails.
It's a very kind of secure sandbox.
So you really don't want somebody snooping on those kind of things that you're doing
to extract that information.
So this is where ZK is the absolutely perfect application, because we still want to be able to
kind of understand the behaviors, understand the events, reward people for doing certain things, but without becoming too invasive.
That's the perfect response.
I appreciate that. Short and sweet in terms of like the amount of data that could be reviewed or accessible
to someone, not wanting to have that be like a honeypot, if you will, or someone to get
more information than is necessary or any information at all.
So thank you for that.
Maybe if you don't mind, I'll ask one more follow-up question.
And this is, because it sounds like Citizen is still in development,
when you are considering who or what to work with in terms of implementing this,
what are some of the questions or challenges that come up?
That's very interesting.
So one of the biggest challenges for us in general
is that our product is based on the Chromium stack.
So we have a lot of issues around
how we kind of integrate third-party libraries and SDKs.
So we have to take a very kind of primitive approach
and we generally build things ourself from the ground up.
So for those of you who don't know, the Chromium stack is huge.
It's a mixture of Java and C++ and Rust.
The Chromium source code is 100 gigabytes.
So to compile the entire application from scratch takes around 12 hours.
It's a very challenging ecosystem to work with,
but that also gives us a lot of power and flexibility.
So from the top kind of aspect, that's the biggest challenge.
We have to work with people who work at a very low level.
So we can't just take a JavaScript SDK and integrate it.
We have to integrate this through a more kind of API approach. And secondly, we have to make sure
that the people we're working with are aligned with us in terms of the vision and approach to
privacy. There's a lot of companies out there who will facilitate these services, but there's a lot
of kind of terms and conditions around that.
So we want to make sure that the people that we're working with
have the same kind of level of respect for user data, user privacy.
We don't want to be sharing a lot of information,
sending things back and forth.
So those are probably the two biggest constraints that we have.
By the way, I think that this just kind of reinforces a lot of what we've
been talking about from the very beginning, right?
In terms of like ZK for the public or consumer ZK, I think you described very eloquently
like what is the purpose of using that on Vera?
is the purpose of using that on Vera? And how is the value proposition of that shared with a consumer
for why it exists? And then from the B2B side of things, what is it that you're looking for in
order to adopt maybe some third-party ZK for your product?
I think, by the way, that's very beautiful and why I love that we have such a diverse set of panelists up here today to kind of discuss those things.
As we're reaching the top of the hour, again, because we were supposed to have like this almost like vision board.
like this, almost like vision board. And I hope to use this as a jumping off point if any of you
are interested in coming back so that we can maybe build something in public. We don't obviously have
to code it, but I'd love to have us look at a potential future where, say, and I think I put
in our coordination document a few ideas,
what is it that we could build that provides some sort of private or privacy,
or it's privacy-enabled kind of product that we use already where this could be something that is usable or implementable
in the next couple of months or year.
So I'd love to hear from the panelists.
I shared a few ideas here, but you feel free to bring your ideas to the table too.
What Web2 products exist today that we'd like to see or would be interesting to see with some sort of ZK integration?
or would be interesting to see with some sort of ZK integration.
And the ideas that I propose here are like,
we have Calendly, excuse me,
where you could potentially have some private scheduling.
You have Airbnb where you could have some private host
or even the reputation of the people who are hosting
or staying in someone's home.
LinkedIn, where you have private proof of your work history, or even Tinder, where you have
private proofs for the people that you're matched up with. So go ahead, take on any of these or
share new ideas on things that would be interesting and like what would make them interesting to have
some sort of like privacy associated to them?
There's always this one silence after you ask a question, so I'll just jump in to break it.
I was just waiting because Polaris had raised his hand.
Oh, he did. I didn't see him. Go ahead, Polaris, please.
Go ahead, Polaris, please.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I was just wondering about the Vira browser.
Like, where exactly is that information being stored, Sam?
How do you deal with that information?
And how is this zero knowledge being applied to that data?
Yeah, great question.
So right now, it's basically just an event stream. So a stream of things that happen, and we infer knowledge from that. Where the ZK comes into that is basically flipping that on its head. So what I mean by that, you have just launched a new project. You've launched a new chain and you want to bring users onto your chain.
We're a distribution channel. We have, as of today, almost 5 million users. So if you have
a great project, we want to put our users in front of your project. Now, we don't want to
kind of spy on those users and see what they're doing and how they're interacting with your project by sending
all of that information up. So flipping it on its head and using the ZK approach, we can implement
that in this kind of privacy preserving way. So rather than getting events to say, okay, Polaris
came onto this project and interacted with this website, we can query the app and say, has this thing happened?
Yes or no?
And that allows us to then reward you for that interaction.
You're able to increase your user base.
The user is getting rewarded, so they're benefiting.
So I hate the expression that that kind of win-win-win situation
because that never really happens.
But this is the kind of closest thing that we have to that.
Okay.
Francis, you were going to add to some of these potential innovations in privacy.
Yeah.
Hamtia, I was actually going to say that there's theories out there for like the Tinder one where it's like privacy preserving matching, right? Which is kind of an interesting concept because, you know, it goes. Anyway, I'll divert.
Some of the, especially for us, because we're a ZKTLS protocol, which implies that, you know, we're more consumer facing first than anything else because we kind of just, you know, HTTPS, as long as there's a browser base or HTTPS, et cetera, we're compatible.
some people come with some intense ideas everywhere from reputation of gaming. Like, you know, if I'm
starting a, you know, a new game, because there's always games coming out, why can I just move my
reputation from one to the other, where I'll just continue my journey, even if it may not be the
same exact game, but there's a way to match that. And you can sort of have that without game studios
sharing their information. So I thought that was, those are pretty interesting, everywhere from also a person's reputation because you have your online
journey and part of that is everything we do you live a footprint and so what if
people can, everywhere from people validating or vouching for you and then
also using whatever you've done online or transactions and then creating sort of
like a reputation score that then can, you know, you can use for so many different things.
You can use it for uncollateralized lending, as an example, instead of needing a credit
score or things of this nature.
So we're seeing these ideas that I'm mentioning are actually, I don't know if these will be
products that we see now, but like, you know, we've been pitched these as far as the ecosystem.
So the one thing I would just mention is because it's a consumer facing app,
there is something Sam said that is very much strong and aligned with myself as well as our company,
which is that, you know, you have to ensure that people are the privacy and the private data is taken very seriously.
So just to I can't speak for everybody else out there,
but ZK Pass and ZKTLS that we have,
we do not access or store your data at all.
All we do is just verify and validate it from data points,
data sets to wherever it's going.
We don't access or store it and that's important because that enables us to
have the flexibility to talk to anyone everywhere in the world.
As long as they're building something, whether it's Web 2 or Web 3,
we can sort of collaborate and synergize with them.
So that's my input on some ideas that I find exciting
and what we can see down the line in the future.
I'll say the number one is probably the reputation side
because it can be leveraged on so many different angles.
And I know we're getting close to time,
but I just wanted to just quickly add something
on top of that.
Francis, that was really great input.
Once we were chatting, my wife is listening in.
She sent a message to say bank statements.
So this is a really kind of great example.
I live in Dubai.
100%.
I spend a long time in Dubai, residency in Dubai.
Every time I'm renewing the visa,
you basically have to give six months worth
of bank statements.
Now they've changed that you just get the IBAN,
the government have direct access to your bank statement.
But that's like, that feels very invasive.
So if we can apply at that level, a ZK approach,
where they just, for this kind of visa,
they just need to see that you have a certain amount
of salary coming into your bank every month.
Then you don't have to give them the entire history.
Yeah, you bring up a good point.
In fact, one, I think that could be a conversation all in itself.
And that is, how do we move forward as a standard ZK that is usable across governments around the world.
Like something that can be leveraged by, you know, almost like a universal passport,
if you will, for attesting, you know, all of these different proofs.
And so if I am, say, living in the US, and I plan to live in Dubai for an
extended amount of time, I can prove the data or the information that's required while keeping
my privacy intact, right, which I think is the point that your wife was making. And I think that
that's, yeah, that's incredibly valuable. And I think I've seen some examples of this adoption at some government level, but it's a very slow going and I'm not even sure how standardized this is. where there is this standardized approach to being able to kind of leverage this technology universally
so that no matter where you're from, you can use it and trust that the information that's being shared is authentic and private.
I think it's going to happen.
Yeah, but I think it's going to happen, Jens.
It's not a delusional thing. I think it really will happen because it may get to a point where certain organizations have to, I mean, we already know that they have to comply, whether it is GDPR in Europe, for example, is the toughest thing you can think of with HIPAA and so forth for health and stuff. So I think it's
going to happen. I hope it's ZK proofs. I hope it's ZK leveraged. We know that there's other
verification things that comes out in our times. But I think this tech is actually very, very strong.
I mean, Sam, Hamza, you guys can either agree or not,
but I haven't found anything better so far in our research.
And we continuously research to see what we can do to improve.
No, absolutely.
I think even recently, Buenos Aires have started embracing this as well.
They have their Quark ID.
So they're kind of bringing this concept
of that self-sovereign identity at the government level. I think if we can see more kind of countries
doing that, that would be amazing. But, you know, in terms of geopolitics, that's a whole different
ballgame. 100%. All right, gentlemen, we've reached the top of the hour actually a few minutes over
i have to say thank you to all of you to sam and francis for coming up this has been a really fun
conversation and like i said we've been focusing on gaming but i know that i wanted to make space
for uh these conversations on privacy which have been our bread and butter for the last year or so
uh so we will be continuing this conversation.
Hopefully, Sam and Francis, you're open to coming back again.
And we can...
If you're meaning to call me.
Yeah, so sorry about that.
I keep getting a phone call.
So yeah, with that said, thank you, everybody everybody also for participating. We'll keep this conversation going. Francis, Sam, you're definitely invited. Welcome back here to continue the conversation. Sam and Francis, if you wouldn't mind letting people know where they can follow you. We'll start with Francis first. Go for it.
Thank you for having me, Amti.
Actually, this space flowed well, and there's no crazy ideas out there.
It's really just innovation and ideas.
So I appreciate your time as well.
I enjoyed the hour.
Yeah, Francis Berwad, please follow our account.
Actually, Zika Pass is in here.
I see that.
So follow us if possible.
Myself, of course, this is my account.
And if there's any ideas, shoot them my way.
My inbox and DMs are always open.
And, you know, I hope to learn more from you guys in the community.
So I appreciate it.
Definitely will come back if I'm ever invited again.
So thank you, gents.
You are definitely invited, and you're welcome anytime, buddy.
Sam, go for it.
Yeah, and the same.
Thanks for having us here, Helmti and Polaris.
Thanks for having us here, Omti and Polaris.
Great to be here.
Great to be here.
At Veeera Browser, V-E-E-R-A Browser is our Twitter handle.
And if you want to connect with me personally,
at Sam underscore Noble, you know, B-L-E.
Happy to answer any questions.
Would love to come back to this conversation.
It's been really fun.
It's been my first panel in quite a while.
Having been in blockchain for 10 years, I've been in a lot of kind of roadshows and stuff,
but it's been a couple of years since I've done this.
So super fun. Thanks for having us. Really great.
And you said this is your first X-Space, right?
My first X-Space, yeah.
Usually I'm on stage talking.
That's a record.
Yeah.
That's a record.
Put it on the blockchain. Right on stage talking. That's a record. Yeah. That's a record. Put it on the blockchain.
Right on the blockchain.
We'll do a very final credential on it.
In the Web3 world, I'm not a camera guy.
There's a couple of my team members on here, SP, who loves cameras.
I'm not a camera guy in the Web3 space because I usually pace around and like to think.
So I really love this space for me.
Awesome.
Yeah, and I've met SB at DEF CON.
So definitely a very personable person.
Yeah.
All righty.
Yes.
Thank you, everybody.
Appreciate your time.
And we'll see you next time, next Thursday, same time.
Have a great weekend.
Cheers, everyone.
Thank you so much.
Take care, everyone. Talk soon.
