Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Google Cloud Integrates with Self for AI & Web3
Recorded: July 25, 2025 Duration: 0:43:22Space Recording
Short Summary
This week, the crypto community witnessed a pivotal moment as self announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, aiming to revolutionize user privacy and identity verification through zero-knowledge technology. With over eight million users already engaged, self is set to launch innovative solutions that promise to enhance the Web3 experience and drive mainstream adoption.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Check, check, sound check.
Can you guys hear me?
Nice.
Alrighty. Gracias. Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, I'm going to give it a few more minutes for folks to trickle in and then we'll get
started.
Thanks everyone for joining. I hope everyone is having a great Friday. We'll give it a few more minutes and then we'll jump right in. Thank you. Okay, I think.
Let's see if I think Rich is trying to draw in I'm sure he's on and then we can get started Thank you. Okay.
Okay.
Amazing.
Well, maybe we'll get started and then looks like Rich is having some issues connecting,
but should be on in a minute or
two.
Um, maybe we'll get started and I'll just start with a higher level overview and then
we can dive in and also hear from him.
Um, first off, thanks everyone for joining.
Uh, I see a bunch of familiar faces.
Uh, great to be here.
So, yeah, so this was a really big week for definitely for self, but I think also for the crypto industry more broadly.
You know, I think especially for those of you like me who've been in the space
for many, many years now.
It's really nice and refreshing when there are new use cases that get sort of awareness outside our own bubble.
And I think this is a great example where I believe in the next few years,
I believe in the next few years, similar to how we've had a, you know, chat GPT moment with AI, where even my mom now knows what chat GPT is and stands for.
You know, I believe we'll have a similar moment for ZK.
And, you know, in some ways, big organizations, big companies like Google embracing this technology already now is just really great evidence that, yeah, we'll see this likely as something that will be key infrastructure for the web. right? We're living in a world where AI deepfakes are sort of chipping away at the kind of old
infrastructure that the web has grown up with and will likely break a lot of that old infrastructure.
And so it's exciting to think about how Web3 can sort of be the white knight here and actually
do a lot of goodness as it comes to people interacting
on the internet. So maybe for those of you who haven't seen the announcement, I'll just give sort
of a brief overview. So kind of general schedule for this is you'll, yeah, we'll do that we'll go through some of the um you know the announcement the
highlights um what we're going to do um and then with rich when he's on um hear a little bit of his
background um plans with google cloud particularly as it comes to web3 and then even more specifically with respect to ZK technology like self.
And yeah, just chatting a little bit more about this partnership,
giving some additional color beyond the release
and maybe also kind of a look forward to what's ahead.
And I've known Rich for a couple of years now.
And yeah, he's definitely one of the most thoughtful people
as it comes to thinking about bringing this kind of new technology to not just google but all of
the developers that they work with uh so yeah so maybe um kicking off just with a quick summary
here um maybe if if you guys give me a show of hands
who here has some context on self,
has maybe gone to self XYZ and looked at the website
and has sort of a basic understanding
so I can tailor the intro.
I don't have to start with sort of everything.
Yeah, do I see some show of hands?
No, okay, so a little bit, okay.
There's some coming here.
Excellent.
Yeah, so basically, you know, think of self as a technology
to allow any application to let users,
their users reveal certain parts about their sort of personal information without revealing other things.
So, for example, an application could maybe only care about their users being above a certain age and requesting a proof from the user that that's the case.
And, you know, on the user side, what happens is the user uses their biometric ID, like,
you know, European ID card or passport to basically generate these kind of proofs and ultimately disclosures to the applications to
reveal just that without revealing anything else. And that's a kind of a breakthrough right from
sort of the way this would be currently done where really the only way to reliably get to
that information would be to run sort of a full kind of KYC check or process, right,
that would, you know, obviously reveal a lot more information
to the application than just that one piece of information.
So these zero-knowledge proofs are quite powerful
in protecting users' privacy,
but also opening up a whole lot of new use cases.
Now, you know, when we look at this announcement from this week,
there's a bunch of different use cases that Google is going to use
self for within their products and would touch on all of them was
rich. But it became very clear that in our conversations that, yeah, you know, this kind
of technology can enable things that you currently wouldn't be able to do with traditional technology.
And I think that's where we got excited
and you know obviously there's kind of a long-standing partnership on the on the cello side
with google google was i think cello was the first evm chain other than ethereum that that google run validators for and so we've known the team um for for some time and and have really you know
always when we have kind of new ideas or new things,
we go to them and get their feedback.
So it's been great to see them immediately understand
the power of self and help, you know, brainstorm
and chat with us about where this could be used.
And so the three things that, you know,
as part of the announcement that we announced, Google will kind of integrate self for, I can touch on briefly, and then we can go into more detail with Rich, are Google Cloud has an AI search tool.
So kind of think of your kind of chat GPT type or Gemini type kind of interface interface and you go in and you ask questions, right, you get answers.
Here, this is kind of specific to sort of kind of Web3, you know, kind of on-chain kind of prompts.
And one thing that we wanted to solve for is that, well, these queries are expensive, right? And you kind of want to make it accessible to everyone,
but you also want to have some mechanism of preventing people
from or bots abusing the tool.
And so the idea was to say, hey, if you are,
if you're able to verify with self that you're a unique human,
not a bot, then that can give you access to more queries.
So that's, I think, a really powerful use case.
I think it's one thing that, you know,
I feel as LMs become more commonplace for search
and more use, right?
There's already now we're seeing capacity constraints.
And so, you know, ideally we want to build an internet
for people, not for AIs, for bots,
and or give people sort of good treatment
and prevent app use.
And so that's kind of one way of achieving that.
Rich, I see you made it on, excellent.
Let's have you come up as a speaker um maybe while while we do
that i'm i just um started by giving sort of a high level overview of the announcement um and
now that you're here maybe we can um even just kick off with some kind of introductions
and then dive kind of back into that.
Welcome.
Hey, Rene, yeah, thank you for having me.
And sorry for being just a smidge late,
was having a lot of fun discussions actually
that are very relevant to the topic today.
So I'm excited to chat with you more
about the work that we're doing with Self and Celo and your team and kind of what the future holds here.
Just for background, my name is Rich. I run our global strategy for Web3.
That's sort of the Google speak for crypto.
And I'm excited to talk about the work that we're doing with Self and how we're thinking about that, unlocking more use cases and some more value for developers as they explore things like verify credentials and decentralized identity.
So thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.
Beautiful. Yeah, no, great to have you on.
Yeah, and then, you know, by way of intro, folks here know me probably as co-founder of Cello and then more recently, co-founder of Self.
Self is relatively young.
So we spun it out of Cello late last year and then also teamed up with the Open Passport team.
And it's been just incredible to see, well,
the product launch at East Denver, but since has just been like just a ton of interest,
both from within the Web3 space where there's already a bunch of leading protocols that
have been integrating it for all kinds of different use cases, but now increasingly also from the sort of Web2 traditional internet space as, yeah, privacy in the context of kind
of verifying identity or doing, yeah, all kinds of things with kind of people online is becoming
much more of a kind of a hot topic. And, you know, Rich, before you joined, I sort of made this comparison.
I don't know if you agree with that take.
You know, AI had sort of this kind of, you know,
chat GPT moment.
My mom knows what chat GPT is
and people have become so used now to using, you know, LLMs.
And, you know, I see Gemini in our, you know,
like, you know, LLMs and, you know, I see Gemini in our, you know, like, you know,
hangouts, taking notes and like all of that has become just so, so common in so little time.
Right. And I, I was sort of saying, well, it's possible that we'll have a different or that we
have like a similar moment soon for, for zero knowledge, for zk technology as um particularly with sort of ai
kind of accelerating um we will need more and more of this technology right to to help um you know
see who's who's a human online who's who's a bot but also for all kinds of other use cases
i don't know if you share that optimistic view,
but I kind of hope that there will be, you know, a bit of that kind of moment where suddenly my mom would also kind of know
what ZK means and think it's cool.
I think, so I'm very much aligned.
And in some ways, I mean, we're all we're all kind of pre wired to talk about the underlying technology that makes these use cases possible.
needs to know what ZK is or how it works. Although I do think it's quite elegant. It would be great
if she could wrap her heads around it, but it would be nice to know that she understands what
it empowers from like a digital identity perspective. And, you know, the idea of being
able to have a credential in a wallet that allows you to verify things like age or country of residence without having to give the
full sort of data set or reveal the full data set is really powerful. I mean, the analogy that I
always use is people are pretty familiar with this concept, so it's not to be too tongue-in-cheek
about it, but when you go to a bar in the US, typically there's an ID check and
you show the bouncer your ID and he gives it back to you. There isn't like this permanent
state where the bar has got your ID that they hold onto it forever and ever, even after
you leave. And I think there are a lot of services where the identity transfer is actually
that, where you're leaving all this information with a third party,
perhaps far more than they might need to actually render the service.
And so zero knowledge and what that enables is actually quite powerful
in that dynamic where everything should really be,
you know, maximally, perhaps portable and customizable such that, you know, an end user can share or choose to share what components of data are perhaps relevant to getting a service, but no more.
And so I do think it's a very powerful moment just in terms of not just proving out ZK, but also just proving out the possibilities of identity.
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
Actually, that's an example I use a lot as well.
And I go even further with it.
I'm like, you could imagine if you wanna really go
all in on sort of the ZK kind of comparison,
you walk up to the bar and you basically have taped off
everything on the ID except your sort of you
know birth year um to you know really just showing that you're over 18 because you know why does the
bouncer need to know where you live or what your last name is right but but no i think that's like
that's kind of the future hopefully that we can move towards that um you know, as we, as we transact increasingly online on chain, we don't leave
sort of these permanent traces, right, of, of quite frankly, often very sensitive information
that, you know, we want kind of to protect our privacy. Cool. Well, let's jump back into the kind of announcement
from this week.
And, you know, yeah, well, first off, I mean,
I'm super excited about this partnership.
And like, you know, we're already in the days
that have followed, you know, like, you know,
kicking off the work scene, sort of the emails
between the teams going back and forth.
It's super exciting.
And I can't wait for this, all of this to go live. Maybe for the listeners to break, I just started
to kind of break down the different use cases a little bit. And maybe we can kind of jam on this
and give some color. Also, I think not everyone may be fully familiar with sort of the Google
Cloud Web 3 offering. So I think also maybe a chance for you to jump in and give some more color.
But I had started talking a little bit about the AI search tool and
how self could help there to kind of create the best possible experience for
unique humans, right? Versus bots.
Maybe next talking a little bit about the faucets.
And I've used the Google Cloud Testnet faucets.
It's a super nice, easy experience.
So that's awesome to see as part of this partnership also
for people to be able to get access
to a cello testnet tokens.
And we can talk about that a little bit.
The one thing that is very new here, and I'm not even sure a lot of people realize that
when they kind of read the announcement is that we will be pioneering a mainnet faucet.
So this is kind of first ever for, yeah, for you guys. And I think there's
very few examples of that in kind of the industry where we will use self to allow people to, you
know, prove that they're human, but also that they're not on the old fact list, right, to be
compliant and then claim real, you know, real mainnet tokens, which is kind of cool, right?
So maybe, yeah, Rich, kind of over to you if you want to give maybe a little bit more context,
just what you guys have been doing around testnet faucets so far and the strategy there and
kind of how you're thinking about this mainnet faucet so far and the strategy there and, and, you know,
kind of how you're thinking about this, this mainnet faucet and why this is exciting.
Yeah, no, I mean, I might have to start hiring you to do the pitch for me.
I think you've got it. You've got it nailed down. I mean, look at a high level. If you,
if, if folks who are listening aren't familiar, so we, if you go to Google search, you type in Web3 portal, that's what we call it.
That's sort of the developer hub that our team has been building out over the last couple of years.
And really the vision around the Web3 portal was to create the center of gravity for the developer community.
I mean, one of the things that's probably most apparent to anybody who's been in the crypto space for some time, and arguably I think this holds true for folks
who are developing in or around AI and agentic, is these technology primitives are not just
changing what people build, but also how they build.
In other words, the reliance and use of open source, the composability of the technology
just really kind of changes the developer journey.
And so what we tried to do was basically say, well, look, as a platform for developers, how do we show up and meet the
ecosystem where they're at? And so the portal is really that manifestation. So it has services on
there that look and feel like API or cloud-based tooling that you may be really familiar with,
whether you use the RPC providers or if you've used a major cloud before.
But one of the things that we found is that it actually feels a little disjointed for people
to have to go into like a cloud console to get access to something. And then if they,
you know, they spun up a VN, they have an RPC and then it's like, okay, well, I want to write
something in a test net, or I want to, I want to deploy a smart contract and you're on a test net.
It's like, okay, well now I got to go, I got to find a faucet that works and then you go you find the faucet and there's this whole long hand you know depending on
where it's hosted a lot of times it makes you like yeah I feel like another use case for ZK is like
you know you got to put in your email address you got to sign into some form and these are all really
like slapdash ways to prevent you know abuse or or you know kind or create some sort of a civil resistance to people constantly
dripping the faucet and depleting it.
And so what we started to do is basically combine those traditional cloud tools with
the Web3 primitives that are popping up and are essential for developers.
And that's where the use of the faucets has come up, as well as the public data sets that
we have there and so you know renee just to kind of like uh piggyback off the point you made um our faucets
are the only ones in the ecosystem where you don't really have to do anything to get a drip um you
don't need a main net balance you don't have to sign up uh you could just click drip it will go
right to your wall we use other mechanisms and other signals to kind of help alleviate concerns of abuse. But then there's this sort of secondary
question that we heard from the protocols, which is like, okay, you know, are there ways to increase
the veracity of the signals we get from the drips on this faucet? In other words, if everyone is
dripping from this faucet, you know, do we know it's the same person? Is it the same developer? You know, these are proxies for identity, but
they're not as closely knit or tight knit to something like what self offers. And so I think
there's a really interesting opportunity to basically combine the open tooling like faucets
or others with some of these protocols like self to again,
provide like a really interesting,
a really interesting resolution for the developer community. So they know, Hey,
look, this isn't just a bunch of people, you know, kind of, uh, spamming, uh,
it's not one guy just spamming, uh, an API or, or a link to a faucet. Um,
it's actually like provably individual people
who are accessing this.
So I think that like that's going to be something
that we want to continue to explore.
And I also think it becomes a really unique way
to kind of lean into some of the technology
that this community is creating
and kind of bake it
into the way that we're offering our own tech to enable them right as opposed to maybe using some
kind of like a web 2 version for identity or verification yeah 100 no and i mean it's like i
i don't know uh what sort of how that how those markets have evolved but i remember a few years ago like discussions uh of
you know like the secondary market uh prices for testnet you know ethereum testnet tokens sky
rocketing right so there's also uh even for testnet um having sort of civil resistance is actually
is quite powerful um and um and so i think yeah it's it, it's kind of interesting to see you guys, you know, and this is for me, I think, in our discussions, really looking to remove friction from the process, right, really optimize for the best possible developer experience, make it as open as possible, right, while, but while also, you know, respecting sort of developers, you know, privacy and,
you know, like, yeah, you don't want to send someone through like, you know, the lengthy
forms and, and processes if, if you can actually solve for what you're looking for with just
sort of requesting a simple disclosure by yourself.
So yeah, I think that's a think that's a big win-win.
Maybe on the mainnet faucet, I think that's something that is kind of interesting because
it's a slightly different, or it's a bit of a shift even, right? Where I could imagine also
just regular people, right? Like, you know, I have a wallet, maybe I don't wanna like go through
like some kind of more cumbersome on-ramp process.
I just wanna give it a try, you know,
and I can easily as a user kind of go to Google, right?
And get some mainnet, you know, assets to use the wallet
and, you know, use some of the, you know,
mini apps have become like a big theme now.
And so I see that much more as a way you know use some of the you know mini apps have become like a big a big theme now and and so um
i see that much more as a way to just actually onboard more people to web3 which ultimately
benefits developers too right that are building these these apps but um i was pretty excited
about that because it actually expands the audience also of people that can um yeah that will use
these faucets right right now faucets is a very technical term most regular users probably have
no idea what what faucet means or what it stands for but uh with sort of the mainnet faucet i think
we're opening up um sort of that that kind of technology right if you want to to a whole new
set of people that may be
first time crypto users, and just want to have an easy way to have a small balance to, to try
some of the products we're all building. Yeah, and I think, so that's another really good point,
which is, you know, some of the things that we have decided to lean into on the portal are ones
that are clearly sort of are characterized or positioned
as developer tools, right? So there's a particular audience that we're trying to attract there.
But we get hundreds of thousands of visits a day at that site. And so one of the things that we're
also finding is there are some parts of the portal and there are some parts of crypto that non-crypto people find quite interesting and want to engage in. Those experiences could be a nice way to keep these systems, you know, more or less open,
but also kind of covering you for the abuse that we all know kind of happens, right? Where people
just are going to like throttle the faucet to try and get funds or everyone is always doing some
sort of a game theory play in crypto, I feel like. So as anybody launching products, you're always
thinking like, okay, what's the game theory here for a really enterprising developer? And you spend so much time kind of guarding against that. And things
like self or sort of these decentralized identity protocols, they actually offer you a way to make
it really simple for a non-crypto native person to basically carry a credential with them that
gets them access into what might otherwise be a crypto native experience.
And I think that's been one of the charges for our team is really to kind of make every developer a crypto developer. No one says like, oh, I'm an internet developer today. I think like anybody
who's building an application, it's pretty much a given that it's going to be online and on mobile.
And so I think in many ways, we want to get to a state where, you know, people say I'm a developer
and their applications just happen to leverage crypto native primitives, but they can do so
without feeling like they have to go through some rude Goldberg machine to get there. And that's
one of the things that I really liked about, you know,
kind of Renee, and when we talked with you and your team, and Merrick about the vision,
there, it was really that simple, like when you guys were walking through sort of the process,
and how, how it would integrate with some of our tools. And, you know, kind of just as easy as
almost a QR code to our team that that looks and feels like that's experience that experience
that we want to externalize to our community right like we have sort of the saying where you
know it's uh five minutes to wow and um in some ways that's what the portal does really well and
so being able to offer it as a platform for self is something that i think is a creative to what
we're creating there for our community so um and then I think, you know, there's just there's a whole host of like new use cases that come with this, right?
That as we start to wrap our heads around it and experiment, those may become more obvious over time.
And it'll be just that much easier to implement something we're already familiar with and using as opposed to maybe having this conversation a year from now when the use cases become more obvious 100 no i mean yeah i that's i mean there's all the kind of you know existing
kind of problems of the internet you know like age verification and stuff that we we can solve but
almost what's a little bit more exciting is kind of the new stuff people will build with kind of this new primitive um and yeah be fun to to jam
on that more um yeah look i uh i mean self we're at just over eight million users right now like
there's um with sort of the across kind of passports and the biometric ids from you know
the european union and some of the other countries
that have those IDs that are supported, right?
There's over a billion people on passports alone,
and then many more.
I mean, I think Europe is a couple hundred million, right?
So there's a large audience here
that suddenly has access to tokens in a compliant way, which also previously
there was just a lot more kind of red tape for folks that wanted to kind of do these things in
a compliant way. And so we've seen even just for like something that, you know, like the OFAC kind of compliance, right?
Which for most people is not something they think much about,
or maybe it may seem boring, right?
Can be a big unlock to allow this sort of next generation
of developers build, you know,
kind of better compliant products.
And then I'm excited for, yeah,
what kind of experiments we'll see um maybe uh I know
we're uh coming up on time here um which my my last question for you or or maybe kind of what
I would love is uh for you to kind of look a little bit ahead you know what's sort of your
you know vision for the future you touched on some things already with the experimentation,
but maybe even you see a lot
across the whole kind of Web3 ecosystem
and trends more broadly with Google Cloud.
What are things that you feel,
we have a lot of builders here,
a lot of people, founders on the call.
What are things that you think are going to be sort of some of the key things that are going to shape the next 12, 18 months in this space?
Maybe I'll frame it like that, but feel free to take it sort of more broad as well.
Well, I think maybe one of these will just be kind of a general call to the folks that are building here or, you know, on the call right now
or are listening to this as a recording is,
you know, we are making a lot of investments
and spending a lot of time thinking about
that future of the developer experience.
And we just see a lot of interesting opportunities
to engage with the community directly
around things like these MCP servers, right?
That are offering certain tooling or capabilities to these LLMs. And I think that's an area where, again,
in the crypto space, that MCP tooling will bridge a really critical gap between kind of what these
LLMs come out of the box understanding and knowing, and then the tools that they need to have access
to in order to execute things that are relevant for the
crypto native applications.
So there's like, if anybody's working on that MCP stuff, please reach out because I think
that's an area where we're interested to see what people are doing and building and working
together.
I think the other thing, Renee, and this is where it ties back to this proof of personhood,
it ties back to the identity thing, is I see these
systems being critical, not just in terms of like, oh, am I talking to an AI or human,
but I also see them critical in terms of saying, is this AI in an agent to agent transaction
acting on behalf or has delegated authority from a user, from a person, or are they just
kind of like doing their own thing?
And I think we recently rolled out this A to A protocol,
agent to agent protocol,
that's starting to tinker with these ideas
and set these standards.
But I do think these types of decentralized identity
or ZK-powered identity solutions
are going to be a gateway for me as a user
to basically authorize an agent on my behalf to go do things
and for that agent to be able to represent that that authority was properly delegated.
That's going to be like a huge unlock. And I do think as agents start to move from just
information relay to commerce, it's going to be a necessary building block in the stack. And so
that's kind of my vision. I think there's going to be a whole lot of stuff that makes these LLMs far more capable
on the MCP side.
And then in addition to that, some of these crypto native tools will end up being
accelerants for the agent to agent interactions, which are starting to become a bit more
a bit more real world, honestly, than they were even just two years ago.
So yeah, I love that. a bit more real world, honestly, than they were even just two years ago, so.
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's kind of wild how within sort of the span
of maybe kind of a year to years,
we'll go from, you know,
literally someone clicking a button, you know,
yes, no, that they're over 18, you know,
to do age verification, to, you know, to do age verification, to, you know, actually sharing a credential so
that, you know, like in an agent to agent interaction, someone can kind of verify programmatically
that it's, you know, a real human, you know, kind of, you know, behind it.
So, I mean, that's like, it's kind of wild because it does feel more than, I mean,
any sort of technology shift that I feel like I've witnessed
as a builder, as a founder, kind of bring us
into a totally new era of the internet, right?
I mean, mobile, remember that being sort of a big shift,
but I mean, I don't know, this feels so small
compared to what we're witnessing here. And it's kind of great to see you guys at the forefront of enabling that for builders. about this partnership and what we're going to build here together
and excited to see where it also goes in terms of the new use cases it can enable.
And yeah, encourage anyone to reach out to your new team.
MCPCR, big topic for us as well.
We're seeing a lot of people kind of experimenting right now.
And it's kind of nice to finally also see AI and Web3 worlds kind of move much more closely
together for a while, even from a talent perspective that was pretty separated.
But now, you know, I do think the smartest people are building at that intersection.
And that's, yeah, that's really nice to see
because at the end of the day, I think, you know,
Web3 can make AI safer, better, you know, more useful,
and AI can accelerate sort of Web3 as well.
So it's very, I see it sort of as very kind of mutually
kind of productive areas.
Excellent.
Well, thanks Rich for the great chat. And thanks
everyone for listening. Happy Friday, everyone. Keep building.
Happy Friday and thanks for having me.
Ciao. Thank you.
