Bankless - 187 - The Ethereum Attestation Service

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

On today’s episode we welcome Bryce Patrick and Steve Dakh from the Ethereum Attestation Service. EAS is a new public good, open, permissionless, and token free. Is this the key unlock for decentralized identity through crypto?  ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-eas/  ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 📣 AAVE V3 is Here! http://app.aave.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:27 What is an Attestation? 11:51 Attestations as a Primitive 14:35 What Are The Good For? 19:15 Defining Identity 22:39 Primitive Before the App 25:55 What is EAS? 30:31 Attestation Form Factors 36:51 Use Cases 40:19 EAS Growth Goals 42:17 Why Do We Need Attestations? 46:10 Why Build This on Ethereum? 52:46 Who is Using EAS and For What? 1:00:04 Web2 vs Web3 Attestations 1:05:17 Decentralized Reputation 1:08:05 The App Layer on Top of EAS 1:15:08 Privacy 1:19:48 Comparing To Sign In With Ethereum 1:21:22 How is it Funded? 1:25:08 Soulbound Tokens 1:30:00 Closing and Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES EAS https://twitter.com/eas_eth  https://attest.sh/  Steve Dakh https://twitter.com/stevedakh  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now. In audio content, it's probably all legitimate, most likely not AI generated. In the next few years, you can kind of see how that can start to flip. One of the things that we think about is like right now, if you take some historical content, hash it, timestamp it on chain using an attestation. You can now prove, you know, a thousand years from now that this content existed before we had the AI capable to make a perfect replication of that. So right now we can actually use outstations to almost save history. And I think we should.

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The Ethereum attestation service, a new public good, a standard that's open, permissionless and free. There's no token on this one. We talked today about why this might be the key online.

for decentralized identity and non-financial use cases in crypto. As we've said so often on bankless, first we take back our money, then we take back our identity. This might be a key to that solution. A few things to take away from this episode. Number one, why decentralized identity isn't a mystery. It's actually just a bunch of attestations. That word attestations. That's going to be the focus of today's episode. Number two, we talk about why web two and social networks like Twitter are actually just attestation silos. Number three, we talk about why financial use cases are going to absolutely explode over the next 10 years as soon as we unlock the power of attestations. Number four, we end with thoughts on WorldCoin, on privacy, on sole-bound tokens,

and a host of other items related to decentralized identity. David, why was this episode significant to you? The arc of crypto is just iteration and unlock after iteration and unlock. And I think this identity primitive of the attestation is a big unlock. I think a lot of projects. There's been a lot of teams and organizations out there that have gone straight for the identity golden goose. And they're skipping a step. They're skipping a layer. And that is what I think is the Ethereum attestation layer, the attestation service that we are going to talk about here on the episode. I think without the building block of attestations, crypto is much more muted than it otherwise would be. And in order to get to a much more expressive version of the crypto economic

future, we need these attestations to unlock new doors, new opportunities, because they bring in basically everything that's not money and finance into the fold of crypto and allows us to build on top of those layers. And so getting to that point where we have identity and not just identity, but everything that is related to attestations, you're about to learn all about that in the show. In order to get there, we need to first build out these building blocks that the Ethereum Adetization Service team is working on building today. We have nothing to disclose for this episode. But of course, you can always check out bankless disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. Guys, we're getting it right to the episode. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors

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bankless nation we are super excited to introduce you to bryce patrick and steve dack they are builders leading the effort behind the ethereum attestation service this is we're going to refer to this by e-a-s in this episode and e-as is a free open source primitive that's deep in the ethereum tech stack and has aspirations to unlock an entire world of use cases using one simple primitive that of the digital attestation. Bryce, Steve, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Ryan and David. It's a pleasure to be on the show. We've been a long-time listener, so to have the opportunity to come up. It's great. We're excited to chat, help educate more about attestations, and looking forward to the call. I do think that this is going to be an educational episode for

everybody, including David and myself, because part of the reason we're having this conversation is, of course, the Bankless Nation knows that identity is very important to David and myself. We often say, first we solve money and then we solve identity. That's kind of like we're Cryptos is destined to go. We also heard on the back of Ethereum Waterloo from more than a few folks that you have to talk to the EAS team. They're doing incredible things in the space. This is a major unlock for our on-chain attestation identity. And so David and I took a look. We understood a few things. This looks like a open source primitive. It's tokenless. It's free. It's a public good. This is music to our ears on bankless. So we're hoping by the end of this

episode we know enough about EAS to be dangerous. And we sort of get the shape of where identity might be going, at least from a public goods perspective. Does that sound like an okay agenda? Absolutely. Yeah, great. Okay, well, we'll start here. Can you tell us it's in the name Ethereum attestation service? What is an attestation? And what on earth does that have to do with identity? All right. So basically, simply speaking, an attestation is simply an entity making a signed statement about something. In the case of EAS, you're able to make an attestation about literally anything. know, the reason why that's important might not be immediately obvious, but that's why we have this story that we like to tell. So essentially, we've been really super interested in solving

decentralized identity and reputation. And we know that it's like a super hard problem to solve. Identity is relative. Your reputation is relative and it's contextual. So for example, my reputation to Bryce is different than my reputation to David. And it's a very complex. kind of abstract concept that, you know, no one has really solved because I think people have been trying to solve it the wrong way, almost building one layer too high and not building upon a primitive to be able to describe such complex things. So we started to think about identity. We're looking at all the platforms that existed out there, you know, today. And we saw that most of the platforms that are doing identity, they're almost all like glorified KYC companies. They

build these like siloed platforms that you essentially as a company or developer have to adopt and then you're kind of locked into that platform. So say, for example, there's, you know, Polygon ID or Bright ID or any of these platforms that allow you to do some sort of K. They essentially are attesting about you passing your KIC, but that attestation can only be used within that platform. And so if some other platform wants to KYC you and you want in your like some maybe a smart contract that wants to allow users only who are KYC to use it, you'd have to implement every single identity platform. And that just makes no sense for decentralization.

It's not interoperable. And also none of it actually solves identity. Identity and reputation is very complex. I might like Bryce's selection and music, but I might not like his food tastes, but I might still trust him anyway. So we were thinking like, what actually is identity? and we started to think really deep about this

and we started to think, well, at some point we had no identity and then we did. And so we were thinking, well, at what point was that? I remember coming to this realization, like, when I was born, my mom named me Steve, right? You can say that she attested to my name, right? And so I went to school and the teachers attested to my grades, right? And the kids in the class could have attested

to whether they like me or not. The government attested to my passport and my driver's license. University can attest to your diploma and your employer could attest to your employment or whether you're a good employer or not. And so we kind of quickly realized that actually you could represent identity and reputation as an aggregate of attestations about someone. And so if you really want to be able to solve this problem,

what you really need to start with is a base layer where any entity can just attest about anything at all. Yeah, and it's not that all the identity protocols are moving in the wrong direction. It's just that because there hasn't been this primitive base layer, everyone's building their own solution towards it, and they're just one aspect of an identity. And so we realize if you actually want to be able to solve reputation, digital identity, we need to have a common language and a framework that everyone can communicate off of. So we've been reaching out to a lot of the identity protocols and beyond with different use

cases to really help try to bring everyone together. When you guys say that attestations are primitive really gets me excited, especially when you define the primitive so easily as a just a statement that someone attest to something else. And when a statement like this is so simple, you can get this instinct that the expression of this primitive can be massive. And I think why these conversations around identity and these primitives can be so difficult is that a lot of the listeners, especially crypto newbies, newcomers into this crypto world, aren't used to thinking in these grand terms. And trying to get people to understand this new form factor for identity is trying to also get them to understand these new monies that were created. You almost have to unlearn the paradigm of the dollar in order to understand, you know, Bitcoin and Ether. And in the same model, you have to unlearn the fact that your government issues you,

your identity to really learn that actually your identity is an aggregate of all of your social relationships that are like piecemeal. together throughout time. So maybe we can actually just go back to this primitive with that shared kind of context. And maybe Bryce, you can start and Steve will go back to you. Like how does your identity form? How is it a primitive like an EAS? Actually the basement level foundation that is actually needed to make one's true identity. Yeah. If we check ourselves out of like blockchain altogether and we just think about how we interact with each other offline and in the real world, there's a lot of interactions that we have together. Imagine just like getting alone for

something. You might go to Ryan and say, hey, Ryan, I need to borrow $5,000. Well, a simple IOU might be justified from Ryan to give you a loan because he trusts you and all the interactions that you guys have had and the trust that you've built. But if you, David, wanted to go get a loan from a bank, you might have to go to that bank and provide all these documentation and all these different proof points to actually show that you're a credible person. And that's because you don't have that same rapport and there's other regulations that they're following. But the idea is that all these entities are just making attestations about each other. And the value of the attestation from you giving an IOU to Ryan is saying, you know, he's trusting that you're actually going to follow through on that.

And so if we think about how attestations can work, it's really just like any interaction where you're trying to build trust and to make sure that the person on the receiving end, like has some sort of authenticity that you are kind of who you say you are and like you have some reputation behind it. You can unlock so much. from that, but we haven't had a way to do that online and on chain. Is this just an identity conversation? Is this a conversation specifically at a stations? What do they do?

They give us our identities. Or is there something grander here? So attestations can be used for a lot more than identity. We talk about identity first because we like to explain how, like, you can take such a really complex idea and describe it with something so simple. But attestations, because they're simply essentially signed statements of entities saying things about things, it can be for anything. It can be used for supply chain. It can be used for voting.

It can be used for certification. All sorts of things that aren't directly tied to identity. It can be used for ticketing. And what's interesting is in real life, in the real world, we're testing all the time. You know, we say things about other people. We sign documents. But there's never been like a digital way to do this in a structured, standardizable way before. And so that's what the magic of like, you know, with EAS being able to create a schema describing what you're testing about, what you might want to attest about, and then being able to attest with that schema. I think that's really the revolution that EAS is like kind of broad. Yeah, if we think of like a notary service, if you were to sign like a mortgage document or some sort of important document, typically you have to get it notarized in front of someone. That notary is essentially attesting that you were the person that signed that document. But we don't have a way to actually.

have, you know, a way to attest in a more structured way on blockchains. We do have digital signatures, which gives a lot of authenticity to who's signing. And we also have the verified timestamp, but we haven't been able to actually structure that in a way that is composable and more interoperable for people. Okay. So I'm trying to like put this together, make this make sense in my mind. So a few things maybe have been talked about. The first I just want to make concrete is this idea of an attestation. It's somebody saying, a thing about someone else or making some claim, right, on chain. What this mechanically looks like is on chain with, say, a Metamask type of, you know, prompt, I'm signing something with my

private key, right? So I own RSA.a.eath, that's my ENS, and it corresponds to an actual Ethereum address, and I can sign things on chain. I can, like, digitally verify. And I have to, let's say, I'm using my ledger for this, hardware device, I have to, you know, or Metamask, You have to click through and actually attest that something is true. Is that what you mean by an attestation? Yes. Is that all we're talking about here? Yes, but it's structured in a particular way using the EAS standard.

But yes, every attestation is signed with a wallet with a private key. Okay. So you have the authenticity knowing that this attestation came from the entity that's claiming. And so it's coming from the entity that owns those private keys that has like physical access to those private keys. Or a smart contract. It can even be a smart contract that it's. test. Perhaps the smart contract receives some sort of inputs that it validates. And then once it gets these proper inputs, it attests to the entity that they've passed some sort of thing.

Okay. And Ryan, so like with social media today, when you're posting something, you're essentially just attesting to the post, right? And then if David likes your post, he's attesting that he likes your statement. But we haven't had like a core building block to be able to do that. And I think one thing that we realize is like on chain is really good for a lot of things, but we also want to make sure that EAS was accessible off-chain. So EAS is also an off-chain protocol for making digital signatures as well. Okay, I want to get into EAS, but yeah, that's an interesting point. I guess all the tweet is an attestation that my account, the person who holds my username and password and, you know, is two-factor authenticated

into my Twitter account is saying this thing, right? Yes. And that establishes my online Twitter reputation, basically, and is the basis for my social graph. But I want to I want to go back to something because for somebody who's thinking like at the primitive layer, just signing something with a private key and saying, yep, I approve this message, basically. You're saying that that's essentially what identity is. I think that's the part that is a little bit mind-blowing at first. And the part that's kind of like back to the basics of this is like, you know, what is money? Well, it's a, you know, a social scoreboard, I guess.

And, you know, like we all agree something's money, therefore it becomes money, right? that's what you have to unlock to actually understand money. And to David's point, it's something similar involved in understanding identity. So you're saying all my identity is is attestations that my peers, the social context through which I'm in, like make about me. So like the nation state will attest that America, hopefully they attest this, that I'm an American citizen and I have a social security number and they will attest that, right? I mean, whatever, the government database somewhere. And I'm also a Canadian citizen. So the government of Canada will like attest that I'm I'm Canadian. And, you know, if I'm a member of a church or something, then my church might attest

that I'm a member here. If I'm a member of some other community, or if I'm a friend of someone, then they might attest that I'm their friend. Is that really all that identity is? It's just, like, people attesting certain claims, and there's nothing more than that? So it's not the claim so much. That is your identity. It's how the entity looking at those claims values those attestations. So, for example, if I show you an attestation, from Vitalik claiming that he believes that I'm a good person or something and you know it was signed from him, you might find value in that. But maybe, you know, some Solana guy might not. Maybe someone who doesn't care about Vitalik might not value that. And so, like, it's very relative.

Like, if I was to want to take out a loan, I would probably show the entity who I want to take a loan from attestations that are relevant that prove that I actually pay back my loans and that I'm a real person and that I have enough attestations where I don't want my record to be smeared. And then that might be enough for that entity. But for some other entity, they might require something else. And that's what makes it super decentralized because, like, instead of just having one entity saying, like, oh, this person's a human, trust us always, right? There can be other entities that say you're human.

You know, there could be friends that say that you're human. And depending on who you are and who's attesting, you might value those attestations or not. And so this is the only way that I can imagine solve. the decentralized identity problem. You can't presuppose, you know, what identity really is. It can be made up of a lot of things. Maybe I have an attestation that I was part of the Mickey Mouse Club or something, you know, and there's something like maybe that's valuable to somebody somewhere, but, you know, to most people probably wouldn't care. Yeah, there's been a number of attempts at identity ever, honestly, even ever since the Bitcoin talk forums, like the early people coming into this industry

we realized the relationship between private keys and identity, you know, if you sign a message and you are known to be the bearer of these private keys, then everyone can trust that you are the issuer of that message. Like even the primitive days of crypto when we were in Crypto Stone Ages, we still figure this out. And then ever since then, there has been like a smattering of attempts of like people in the application layer trying to go after identity, right? Like WorldCoyne, for example, comes to mind, which was recently going through the crypto meta. But even before that, right, circles. It was another attempt. Bright ID. You guys listed them. And these are all like identity apps. And like that one comic, that one XKCD comic comes to mind where like, there's 14 standards for

identity. We need to make another identity play that aggregates all of them. And then the next panel is like new problem. Now there's 15 different identity standards. I think what you guys are saying is that all of those attempts at identity, you can't go straight for identity at the app layer. You need to build the building block, the primitive down below. And then maybe the applications can blossom. Can you guys talk a little bit more about why you need the primitive before you have the app? As I mentioned before, like all these identity solutions, they're all moving in the right direction. And people will value, like, even with World Coin, right, people have, there's two schools at camp. One is like some people don't care to have their eyeballs scanned and then the

other people do. None of those people are wrong. It really just depends on the applications of, like, do they care about World Coin's attestation, that that person's a very, human and would they consider that as a part of their identity? But if all these fragmented solutions like WorldCoin, Bright ID, you know, et cetera, don't have a common layer where they can communicate, you can't have an aggregate view of who someone might be and to give like builders and users the choice of how they define like who's trustworthy or not. And so while I think like all these are moving in the right direction, they also tend to either tokenize or like try to extract value at the protocol layer, which if you think about like trust and like identity,

it's kind of like oil and water. You can't really mix finance and like trust and identity at the same layer because someone's going to come in with a bigger budget and try to direct the narrative of like what is identity. And it's usually for it might be their gain, right? But if we truly have a credibly neutral base layer where any entity can make these types of statements from that World Coin and all these other protocols can actually become more composable and actually helps them.

One of the things I want to add is in response to your question is with these companies, if you don't have a base primitive, you end up having to presuppose a lot about what identity is. I think this was like one of the biggest fails of like Uport. They built in all of these presuppositions about what identity is trying to use like DID standards. But there's so much more than just what's in that standard. You can attest about, you know, there's so many different types of interaction intentions entities can have and you can't just pre-program them all into a smart contract or an application. I think that's where these platforms have failed because if you have to sign on to something like a Uport, then you have to just assume, like, Uport has everything that you'll

ever need. And if it doesn't, then you have to use another platform and then you just create more fragmentation. Whereas, like, EAS, Uport could presuppose whatever they want, build a scheme around that and a test with it. That's the cool thing about EAS. Like all these platforms that have their own standards can still build their own standards and use their own standards using EAS, but they're still on the same layer. Like any smart contract can say, I care about attestations from this entity or this entity or this entity when it comes to these types of attestations. And that's what makes it so much more interoperable and actually useful for decentralized identity and reputation.

Okay, so what actually is it? EAS. It's not just another identity play. It's something we've been using this primitive word. But what actually is the thing? Like, what actually is EAS? Is it an ERC standard? Yeah. So EAS, it has two basic parts to it.

There's two smart contracts. one of them is called the schema registry, and it allows anyone to register any type of attestation that might want to be made. So, for example, there would be a schema for voting, a schema for testing to whether you trust someone, a schema for attesting to whether you like someone, a schema for testing to whether a smart contract has been audited, et cetera. These are types of attestation form factors? Yeah, essentially, it's a form factor registry for attestations. And then you have the attestation ledger smart contract, which just has a ledger of attestations, each referencing a particular

schema. So like, you want to make an attestation? You have to first reference a particular schema because, like, what is this attestation about and what is this data structure? And so the schema describes, like, exactly what pieces of data are in there. So maybe if I wanted to create like an off-chain ID card, maybe I'd have like a name field, I'd have an birth date field and whatever relevant fields, and then you can attest with it. And anyone can create whatever kind they want and every schema gets its own unique identifier. What's great about that is when you're testing about a particular schema, anyone can know like, oh, this is this schema. This is an attestation from this schema. It gives its own category and anyone can essentially attestead with the same

schema as long as it's not protected. So schemas can actually also optionally have a smart contract associated with them. And essentially, anytime an attestation happens of that schema, it'll run through the smart contract and the smart contract can prevent. at the stations from happening. So say, for example, you wanted to have like an allow list. You can block people who are not in the list. You can make a payment happen. So say, imagine you created like an Oracle schema. Anytime someone attests to a particular truth and they're inside of this some particular allow list, they get paid out automatically. So you can do interesting things like this. And just with these two base primitives, that's the whole on-chain component.

So because of these smart contracts, any smart contract, any EVM-based smart contract with if EAS deployed can easily verify any attestation and validate it. And then also, because we understand that actually, most likely over 90% of attestations that people will make will probably be off-chain. This is like private attestations, things between friends. There's so many private things that we don't want to put on chain. And so what we created is this off-chain attestation protocol, which uses EIP 712, to be able to sign using your wallet.

you're signing off-chain signatures that still follow the whole EAS format and standard. What's cool about these off-chain attestations is they're completely portable. You can pass them from peer to peer. You can keep them private. Inside our UI, you can actually, it generates a QR code for every attestation, and the QR code has the entire attestation and the signature encoded inside of it. What's cool about that is you can easily pass this. Anybody can just scan your attestation, and it goes from your phone directly to their phone

without ever living on a server. or optionally you can put an off-chain attestation on a server and then anyone can verify it. But what's cool here is it's completely gasless. It doesn't cost any money to make. And anybody can verify them. And then even additionally, timestamp or revoke them on chain, even after the fact. And one key thing with attestations is that they don't always have a recipient or someone on the other end. Like you don't always have to say something about someone else.

You could be self-attesting more or less. So imagine bankless study. They wanted to attest to the authenticity of this. episode, you could generate a hash of the episode and a test that bankless actually produced this hash. But you're just, it doesn't have to be about another subject. The power is that this known entity is signing some sort of structured piece of data at this time. So this was great. And I think a lot of people will start to have their imaginations start to go now and start to see this like world open up. And just to maybe double down on some points that you all made specifically about

the form factor of attestations, maybe to put this into the, uh, trad, world, the world that we currently have, like different attestations come in different form factors that we already know of, right? Like, Stephen, your story, for example, your birth record is an attestation of your date of birth might actually be the originating document that attest to your name, too, right? A diploma is another form factor for another attestation, right? Maybe your credit score is another type of form factor for some financial-related primitive. And so the EAS that has all these different form factors for attestations or trying to mimic this world. There's a very different needs of attestations in various different form factors. And all of these things are,

are various standards that people are proposing saying, hey, all the other form factors that already exist aren't servicing the needs of my kind of attestation. So I'm going to advocate for this new type of form factor, and I'm going to submit it and merge it to the EAS system. And all of a sudden, that form factor gets uploaded. And maybe there's a network effect that grows, around that. And then also you guys said that you can also put a smart contract logic into one of these things. And I'm sure that just opens up a brand new world of territory that we could start to play in just because now we're starting to do some crypto-native stuff as well. And then the other thing I wanted to just bring attention to is like the off-chain component,

especially like only so many out of stations actually need to become transactions. Like actually, we're not really talking about blockchain or cryptocurrency very much at all here. We're mostly just talking about private keys and private key signatures. And so whether or not they actually make it onto the data of an adaptation actually makes it on chain actually is not really the focal point of a conversation like this, right? It actually is like, hey, all we really need are these private keys and these form factors for consumption. That's kind of how I would summarize the last little bit of conversation. Bryce, does anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I think on the Web3 side, like the crypto-native side, the reason why we want to put something on chain is so smart contracts can interact with it, right?

And maybe greater transparency for, especially in decentralized communities where you might want, like, the governance of the community more transparent, like how funds are being distributed in this very decentralized world. Putting things more on chain makes more sense. But there are a ton of like normal offline use cases that you just need to prove the authenticity of a signature. So it really just depends on like the goals of the use case, but they both have value. I want to be clear. So you said there was kind of two smart contract registries, like one for the schemas and one for the. for the individual attestations themselves. So the schemas that David was describing,

that's completely permissionless, right? So like anybody could propose whatever schema they want, and if they can organize enough people to sort of participate in that schema, then bam, they've got kind of a standard. So let's say all of the academic institutions across the U.S. got together, and they were like, hey, we want to do on-chain attestations

of our diplomas, then they can, could propose something, even if there were already a few standards in place, they could propose some sort of schema. And they could, if they got the consensus together, they could adopt some sort of standard on top of EAS to attest to whether an individual, I guess, eth address, owned by someone, has a degree from their institution. Is that sort of how this works? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're spot on, because I think one of the challenges for a lot of, like, previous attempts at like creating some sort of like diploma like schema and stuff people assume way too much in like the fields that are required in the schema and you actually just need to allow the community to come together to develop the right scheme over time and we've seen that even like in the evy worlds for like your electric cars right there's like a lot of research around like the best charging port for all electric cars and then Tesla comes out and says no actually we're going to build our own standard we're not going to like adopt an existing one you actually need to follow where the users are and like what they care about most. and then let standards kind of be built over time.

This is so interesting because I almost feel like I'm learning about HTTP for the first time, you know, like HTML for the first time, right? Because it feels like it's so flexible and can do so many things at once. I don't even know where to start or like what to do with at first because it feels like kind of like Ethereum itself, which is like boundless. Yeah, it's boundless. Now we have smart contracts. You know, we have programmable systems where you can kind of like a programmable property rights system.

And everyone's like, all right, what do we do with that? And then 99% of people are like, yeah, I don't get it. You know what I mean? It feels like it's this type of conversation that we're having. It's like attestations can do basically anything. I mean, they are the primitive building blocks to reputation, to identity, to like the way everything is organized across society. Attestations do everything. All right.

That's the episode. We're done. Yeah. Okay. So what do we do first? It could do so many things at once. Are you guys worried at all that we're kind of like boiling the ocean with this approach? I totally see the merits of what you're saying is, hey, all of these other on-chain identity solutions are starting almost at kind of the application layer and they're just like making

way too many assumptions. We have to go down to the primitive and start with a standard for the primitive, kind of like HTTP or something like this, right? And now we have the hyperlink and we've just created this new primitive. All right, but what about the websites? Like, what do we build first? I mean, are you worried at all that we're boiling the ocean here? What's your take on this?

I don't think we're boiling the ocean. I think this is just the case with this technology that, like, now there's a new technology that allows for things that couldn't exist before. And so there are infinite possibilities. The cool thing, though, is it doesn't necessarily require like a massive network effect, right, in order for it to work. Essentially, if you can find one use case for EAS, it's still useful. If one entity decides, you know what, we're going to start.

this venue is going to start a testing to tickets that entities have tickets to this event and they just start using EAS for that. That's it. You know, you only need that entity and their customers. If you're starting like a new social network, perhaps you might run into issues like that. But for so many use cases, like you don't necessarily need a ton of people signed on. So what we found, we've been running hackathons the last few months. And like this recent one that we did, 25% of the teams built on EAS. And, you know, was interesting to see is like just the wide variety of like apps people were building some of them were in medical some of them were like in cross-chain like paymaster systems some of them were like

attesting to open source software it was just so many things and it was cool to see that like there really is like infinite use cases for this and people are able to just fit it into their application in some way because otherwise they're going to have to build some smart contract and a test within their own little platform and then it's not really useful anymore whereas like having them on kind of one standardized place gives value to these attestations. It makes it much more valuable. If World Coin started test just being an attester instead of saying, like, you know, we are the solution for identity for the world. If they're just like, oh, we're just one of the attesters, scan your eyeballs with us and roll a test. Some people might be like, all right, that's cool. And that'll

be, you know, valuable for them. But then some other entity can also take part and say, you know, well, we also want to attest that people are human and it creates these like real interoperable systems. It is a concern for a lot of people, like, if you can do so much with something, you almost feel like you can't start with anything. And I think what we've really tried to lean into is just like where the ecosystem narratives have been. And so EAS is not an identity protocol, even though identity things can be built on it. But we've really tried to help and like bring the identity ecosystem closer together because that's just where the narrative is. And it makes sense. But as Steve was describing, we had builders across like so many different categories that are

organically just seeing like how easy it is to create a scheme about whatever they want and then sign that data. Yeah, it's just exciting to see. But I think ecosystems will follow narratives when there is something that's so generalized. I think there's something pretty refreshing about having a team on here that doesn't have a token that doesn't have venture funding or doesn't have any of the incentives that some of the other like startups that might have that play in this space. Whereas every single startup's trying to scale and grow and grow and scale to the fastest possible. Whereas, like, what you guys are just saying is like, hey, we're going to build out this standard, this primitive, and whatever use cases come on top of it, great. That's fantastic. We've built out some utility for this little corner of the internet. That's lovely. But then also at the same time, we're saying, like, well, out of stations, they could be everything. The whole world could be built on out of stations. And so what is, if you guys can speak for EAS, since, you know, you guys are EIS? Does EAS want to take over the world? Do we want to take all of the world's out of stations and make them on top of, Ethereum signed private keys? Or like, what are your guys' growth aspirations here?

Yeah, totally. Like, I think, you know, we don't want to own anything, right? Like, we're just creating this base layer infrastructure for anybody to use, but it would be cool, I think, and it would be great for the world if we were all attesting using the same technology, because it would just make all these attestations so much more valuable. If identity platforms and KYC platforms and, you institutions and doctors offices all start using EAS, it would create, I think, like, just like a new revolution and bringing like web to web three because it hasn't really been possible before. In the real world, we sign documents and we test all the time, but there's never been a way to just attest about anything in a digital format that's, you know, standardized.

And I think the world is we're looking for a more trustful online experience. So whether it's on-chain or online, I mean, if you go on to any platform, today, it's filled with mistrust, misinformation, fraud, scams, right? Like, every click is a risk. Every download is a risk. And, like, if we can actually use digital signatures and start to build this reputation network using attestations, we can actually start to help people stay more safe online and to actually be able to do things in a more, you know, decentralized way. But without these types of, like, trust mechanisms, it's going to be increasingly difficult with how much fraud and misinformation is going to be launched with AI, that I think, like, we need to start

testing now to everything, just so we have a better chance at, you know, building trust. Yeah, Bryce, you started to paint that picture. Let's keep going with that. Why do we need at a station in this digital age? Like, when we daydream about the future world that EAS could bring, why do we need it in the internet to, like, progress forward as our next steps as a species? Let's Steve talk about relative trust networks. And I think what we're noticing is, like, Like with this rise in AI generated content, it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove the authenticity of what we're consuming online and interacting with. And if we can actually use digital signatures, let's say I'll use the bankless example.

If bankless was attested to this podcast, right, a proof of that like the audio file of this podcast and it's signed by bankless, people have a verified stamp of it. But what you can't prove is like, how do you know that, you know, Steve and I were actually real people on this podcast? right? You would want verification that, because in the future, I could be totally AI generated. You'd want to know that Bryce and Steve actually attested to the proof of that podcast and verify that these people were actually real. And I think just from digital signatures alone and verified timestamps, we're going to be able to build some of that. One of the examples I like to give about this whole,

like, AI situation that's coming and how EAS can be useful is just like think about right now, like probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now in audio content it's probably all legitimate like most likely not AI generated but in the next few years you can kind of see how that can start to flip right and because we have the ability to hash any kind of content and sign it and put it on on chain actually before we go there like just imagine in just the next few generations that maybe even the next generation people can start to deny the holocaust and say like you know what the holocaust never happened. Look at these videos that we actually have. Look at Hitler. He's like a great guy in this video. He's helping these grandmas walk across the street. Like, you know, whatever. And there'll be no way to tell whether or not this is actually indeed historical footage or not. So one of the things that we think about is like right now, if you take some historical content, hash it, time stamp it on chain using an attestation or whatever method, you can now prove a thousand years from now that this content existed before we had the AI capable to make a perfect replication of that.

So right now we can actually use attestations to almost save history. And I think we should. I think it's like a really important thing because AI for sure is going to make things really hard. Like imagine in the next couple of years where you get a FaceTime call and it's like your family member who is talking just like them, but it's a bot and you have no way to know whether or not it's really them. So, you know, digital signatures, you know, are going to become increasingly important as time goes on and technologies that allow you to, like, prevent being,

like, defrauded and keep content authentic. And that reality is here. We were talking to a team that we won't disclose, but they were saying that they jumped onto a Zoom call and the CEO of this known project was actually the Zoom, like CEO was like a fake fraudster. In like the Web 2 worlds, we've all like received like the CEO emails and employees. saying, hey, I need a gift card, like, go get me one. But now imagine, like, jumping onto a Zoom call and not knowing that the authenticity of that meeting request or even that, you know, the person who's signing into the meeting was actually the real person.

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Is Ethereum sort of, or like blockchain in general, just kind of, I guess, seeding this infrastructure for digital signatures? Because to your point, I don't necessarily need to do the attestation on-chain. I don't necessarily need to update a smart contract, do I? But I can sign an off-chain message using my, you know, Ethereum, like, private keys. like how related is this attestation to what Ethereum's doing? And like, why did you choose to build this on top of Ethereum? So EAS is completely EVM based.

One of the important things that does need to be on-chain, it technically doesn't have to be, but the fact that there's a schema registry on-chain, that any time you see an attestation, whether it's off-chain or on-chain, you're able to instantly know what it's about by, like, instantly checking the schema registry. I think that's super important.

Ultimately, off-chain attestation. stations, they don't get stored. So, like, they don't need technically, like, to be Ethereum-based, but because it only works when you sign with your Ethereum wallet, it's using EIP 712 for signing. Those off-chain attestations can actually be verified by smart contracts on-chain at a later time. And so we chose Ethereum because, you know, we believe it's the number one blockchain infrastructure, you know, base layer. And we were also launching on other EVMs that are, you know, Ethereum layer 2s and perhaps maybe some other EVM-based chains that are not directly layer twos of Ethereum. But we chose Ethereum because most of the apps seem to be built like an EVM-based

systems and that's where all the developers are. So that's where we are. I guess I'm also asking, so I think the world is outside looking and kind of mainstreams sort of like, yeah, crypto, where's your use case? You know, you keep saying you're good for the world. and we keep being like, yeah, but you know, store value, right? And they're like, but we have the dollar and we have a bank, and we're like D5, but we have a banking system, all of these things, right? And of course, we sort of see the future. We sort of see why the world needs these things.

But what they see is kind of like, you know, Ponzi games and get rich quick schemes and all of these things. I'm wondering if we've, as a byproduct of this whole property rights system that we've created where we've got private keys that are secured in more people's hands, if we've actually, like, created a bootloader for a identity system, an attestation system, like, bankless is so often thinking about Ethereum as sort of a global permissionless property rights system, but we mostly think of it in terms of, you know, like a property settlement system or almost like a decentralized banking system without the banks, right?

Hence bankless. But I kind of wonder if we've also bootstrapped and bootloaded, a global decentralized attestation operating system computer. And like that seems to me, that is actually undeniably good for the world. Even if you're not into kind of the money games, you care nothing about finance, to have a decentralized, unstoppable, permissionless way of attesting, as long as you're kind of online, there's something incredibly valuable there. And almost, it might be more public goods oriented than actually this whole money use case that we've spent the first three years of the podcast talking about. I don't know, reflect on that for me.

Is this how you see the world? I'd love for Steve to also give his opinion just because like Ethereum just in general, in the past 10 years, we've really focused on decentralizing assets. But there's like this, in the real world, there's so many other things like information and non-financial use cases that we just haven't been able to decentralize yet. Yeah. And I feel like it's because a lot of times, we do try to extract value, like, immediately out of the system.

We revert back to, like, financial use cases. When, like, Ethereum was built so you could actually create, like, land registries and, like, all these very, like, decentralized, you know, aspects of life. But here we are 10 years later, and we're only decentralizing money. And I think it is because we've been missing this attestation layer. Yeah. One of the things now is that, like, because so many people now have these private keys in possession and people have used NFTs.

Now is a really good time for entities to be able to just start to get into like identity. So I was in the space for a really long time. And I remember actually, you know, when Ethereum was coming out, the narrative was around how do we decentralize more than just money? How do we decentralize everything? And, you know, nine years later and, you know, it's like we decentralized a little bit more, but we haven't solved every problem. And it's because, you know, while Ethereum brought, you know, the ability for anybody to launch a smart contract, like, how does that work when you want to be able to attest to someone's diploma? Like, do you make a smart contract specifically to attesting the diplomas?

Because that's kind of what's going on. People like, oh, you know, I want to do KYC. So they build a smart contract around KYC. They build a smart contract around attesting to whether someone's a human or not, you know, but they haven't built a smart contract for just arbitrary attesting about literally anything. And, you know, that's why I think now, like with EAS, you can actually solve these really hard problems. And anyone can. It's not just limited to developers. Before, it was like, oh, you know, you want to build something in the space and you want to build some credentialing thing. Oh, you have to be a

developer to build a smart contract specific to this. Now you can literally be an institution and just say, oh, I'm going to use this no code schema builder, build this schema and then a test with it. You know, it's just nothing like that has ever existed before. I would imagine the big signal that this is actually being adopted are non-crypto institutions, are testing. to non-crypto people about stuff. I would imagine that that would be a huge sign of success. Maybe we've gotten there. I don't know.

I'll ask you guys that later in the show. But for right now, what projects might listeners be familiar with that are using EAS and what are they trying to do with it? Yeah, so we're building a standard. As you're describing before, like how do we just end up not being like another standard that tried to become a standard? That was a real fear in the early like beginnings because we were building EAS and then optimism was building their attestation station, which was a

different primitive related to attestations. And we reached out to them. Long story short, we did code reviews and things like that. They came to the conclusion that, hey, wow, this infrastructure is extremely, you know, versatile and powerful. They deprecated the attestation station and adopted EAS as the core infrastructure for attesting about anything in the OPP stack. So you guys want a thumb war with optimism. More or less. A code thumb war for sure. So we're integrated into the native code base has two special addresses. So anytime a new chain gets deployed on the OP stack, they automatically inherit the EAS contracts. And that was a really big win for us because optimism is like really trying to push the attestation narrative. And they're really leaning into like identity related things.

And we wanted to make sure that if we didn't get them to use EAS, then we would be building two different standards again. And it's the amount of like identity protocols that we've reached out to have received us, you know, very welcoming because we don't have a token. We don't have all these things and they can instantly start building with it. So optimism is probably the biggest well-known one, for sure. This really just goes back to the power of credible neutrality and public goods, wins you hearts and minds. It sounds like what you guys and optimism were trying to build was the same thing, but maybe they were kind of trying to roll their own identity and you guys had already been thinking about this. So it sounds like the EAS smart contracts are a part of every

OP stack chain that gets deployed? Is that true? Yeah. Correct. Wow. What kind of attestations are people doing optimism right now? Like, what are they attesting to? There are people experimenting around, like, governance-related things, like attesting to roles in a Dow as an example. There's people attesting to, there's a project that's attesting to, like, optimism, domains and, like, different aspects of, like, a domain registry. Quadratic voting. We have this dev folio for all their hackathons now. They use EAS for at the

end of the hackathon, all the teams get to vote using EAS quadratically, and then anybody can tally up the votes and verify, you know, who gets paid out. There's also GIC-coin, so GIC-Coypassport stamps. We reach out to them, we're talking, you know, hey, these stamps are essentially just attestations, right? And they've been very welcoming to us as well, and GICTOSPers are migrating to be attestations as a primitive, because what that does is it also unlocks them to be more composable with other identity solutions. So when Gitcoin stamps becomes EAS compliant with the standard, I don't know if that's the right word or not, does this just help with like discoverability?

I don't know if there's like a search engine for EAS attestations out there, but what does actually coming into the fold and being compliant with the ERC standard get you? Maybe you can use the Gitcoin example, like what were they not able to get? What network effects were they not able to tap into? And then once they complied with the standard, what were they able to get? So just like other platforms, like Gitcoin passport is like its own siloed little ecosystem. So if you want to implement a Gitcoin passports, you have to understand their docs. You have to implement their SDK.

And like it's not super interoperable. So say you want to make a smart contract that cares about a Gitcoin passport, you have to make sure to implement specifically Gitcoin passport related code. And then maybe you want to verify that they have a Gitcoin password and a WorldCoin ID or something else. And now you can't because you have to implement too many pieces of technology. Whereas now it's just an attestation of a particular schema. And then, you know, so you can just say, we care about get coins attestations from this schema. So if it comes from Gitcoins address and it's from this schema, you know, we trust this type

of attestation. Or if it comes from this schema and this other address, we trust it too. You can never do that before when everybody's using completely different protocols. I remember probably the most interesting attestation I've done recently, maybe in the past a couple of weeks. I guess this would be an attestation. Actually, you know, it's an O.P. Stack chain, I guess the application is on top of friend.com. Do you know the thing that everyone's doing these days, right? And so in order to like start your friend.com profile, you have to attest from Twitter that this is actually your account. I think that counts as an attestation, right? So basically

when I create my friend.com profile, I also log in using Twitter. And I essentially attest from this eth address on base in friend.com is corresponding to my Twitter account. And so I make an attestation there. That does count as an attestation. That's the kind of thing that you guys are talking about, right? Right. It just seems to me that there's a ton of Web2 types of profiles, social reputation, different things that you might be able to attest to just through an API. And it's not perfect, of course, right? It can be boughtable. But, you know, I have my Twitter password right now and two-factor off. It is pretty verifiably my account over on the other side. Is that a good example of an attestation? What are you seeing in the world of like web two attestations?

It's an attestation, but technically because Twitter can just go into your account and make you a test to whatever you want. Yeah. Or buy your X handle. Or like lock you out, block you. It's not permissionless. And it's certainly not, you know, like using any kind of private key infrastructure. So, like, you know, ultimately, like, someone is in control of your keys, not your keys, not your attestation. It's also, it doesn't participate in the interoperability if you actually did use, like, a base layer where if a friend.com attested to this person passing some sort of verification, other people could start to build, like, their own parts of a social graph, knowing that they were verified in this way. Similar to how, like, social graphs today are building, like, very unique use cases around. It could be blogging. it could be, you know, a social app, whatever it is, you still need a way for people to be more

interoperable. And if you just use an API from one specific partner, you're going to struggle with like making sure that all your APIs are always up to date and making sure that they're not changing the code and things like that. So what's a better design for friend.com to kind of attest to my, like, that I own this, this Twitter account? Like, what would it be a better way of doing that? It's literally the only way, though, right? Like, you would have to make some sort of post from Twitter that references your address because you need. two-way attestation. Because I can just say I own, you know, David's Twitter account,

but if there's no way to like reverse it and say like from that account that you own this address, there's no way to prove it two ways. So it's really the only way you can right now. Here's a way though, because or a potential alternative. I think if the requirement for you to sign up with friend.combe.combe.combeck was for you to have a verified Twitter account, right? Well, that's what get coin passports doing. They're providing the OAuth to allow that a Gitcoin passport stamp for your Twitter account is, if that's an attestation, friend. com. Tech could have just looked at Gitcoin passport and integrated that into their, you know, onboarding process to say, like, if you have a Gitcoin passport stamp, you pass.

If you don't have one, then you need to go get one from anywhere. We just, like, here are providers that we would accept in this way versus them creating their own internal verification. I think maybe that starts to illustrate the role that many attestations might play in the world of the attestation landscape, as soon as you have more and more and more data about, you know, different attestations, all of a sudden it paints the picture of identity, not just for you, but for everyone. Steve, going back to your story, like, you were born, and then you were given a name, and then you were given your next attestation, and then your next attestation,

and then your next attestation, and then all of a sudden, here you are, your name, Steve, and you have an identity. I think, like, if we're going to build this on-chain society with trustless identity is just going to come from attestations on top of aditations on top of aditations providing applications and smart contracts and anyone with the data that they need in order to actually receive attestations so that they can know who you are and what you're up to. Imagine in the future you can look at any address that you're like going to do business with or operate with and you can instantly see all the attestations related to them and you can see like, well, how is this entity relative to me?

Like, for example, has Bryce attested them? Has Bryce's friend attested them? Has someone that I've attested, like, down my attestation, you know, downstream, my downstream attestation. Attestation, degrees of separation? Degrees of, degrees of attestation separation. Like, how far away? Atestation separation.

Nice. Yes, it's the DAS, of course, the degrees of attestate. So you'll be able to build, like, a really true decentralized reputation. Like, right now, if a friend of mine asks me, like, in West Palm Beach where I live and they say like, hey, like, do you know any plumbers? You know, maybe I know a plumber and I'll tell them and then they'll trust me or maybe I know I have a friend. Maybe Bryce knows of a plumber. And it kind of works like that, right? But in the real world, we can only really do that a few degrees out. Like once we get past three degrees, we don't really know what's going on. But digitally,

you can still kind of find some like value in entities that you don't even know. So like there might be like five people who have attested somehow even like multiple degrees away to some entity. And on average, it's a positive attestation. Therefore, I should see some sort of positive value in that entity. And then if I choose to work with them and then maybe they screw me over, I can then see exactly why this person get rated so high and I can tweak my attestation weights to different entities. And now I have a new view that might be more in line with reality. Imagine in the near term future where like the web of trust gets more visual and you put on like your Apple, you know, Vision Pro and you're just navigating your different web of trust. But the

difference is like in the real world today, we get assigned a trust score, right? Like your credit score as an example. And what if you could actually control, like, how you define what is trustworthy to you? And as Steve was describing, like, turning those attestation weights, you could figure out, like, as long as they have these types of attestations or they can, like, prove these attestations to me before I interact with them, then I'm going to give a greater trust score to them. Imagine this, like, imagine you start like this brand new, like, decentralized trust network and everybody you look at in the network, it starts with a zero. Everybody's just a zero. And then you say, you know, like, well, let me like initiate my weights. Like, I'm going to give my mom like a high

rating. I'll give my brother a good rating. You know, I'll give the influencers that I listen to. I'll give them somewhat of a trusted rating because I trust them. And then now every time you interact with some sort of DAP, maybe MetaMass starts to show you, well, this is this person's rating based on all the people that you've attested. David Hoffman thinks that this is a great app, you know, like, and then, you know, like opens up, there's an attestation from an open Zeppelin audit on the smart contract too, so you get like a nice little checkmark. And like users can start to like build, you know, start to gain trust in these things and know exactly why do I trust this. Well, you can see these attestations from these entities. And then even negative attestations so you can

kind of make up your mind based on who's testing. I think that starts to really illustrate the need for an application layer on top of EAS. As soon as the number of attestations out there starts to get pretty unwieldy. All of a sudden, we're going to need, like, attestation service providers to help re-coeless all of the 10,000 different attestation that are made every single day. And so, like we talked about earlier, there's all these different identity plays that are out there. Like, everyone's trying to go, and we are the identity app. What do we do? We provide identity to Web 3. And I think we've now go ahead and kind of nailed that business model in the coffin where you can never go straight for identity.

you have to allow it to emerge. It should be emergent. But what we are going to need, once there are enough attestations out there, we are going to need the application layer to help us actually provide a lens for viewing all of these attestations. And so rather than just there being one identity application, there's probably going to be a many handful of them and they're each going to provide their individual lens for viewing this attestation landscape. I don't know if that inspires any thoughts. Steve, you're not in your head. Absolutely. That's a huge thing. And we're working. working with a few different teams. That's their thing. They've typically like looked at on-chain data for like all sorts of defy platforms and aggregated and come up with all sorts of scoring.

But now if everybody starts at testing about all sorts of things, you can start to define like all sorts of scoring, connections and metrics in all sorts of different categories. Right. So like what is his defy score? What is this social score? What it says it can be infinite categories. And so yeah, like providers that aggregate all this data and make sense of it are going to be really important, but then also open source tools that users can themselves run and also aggregate the attestations and derive scores too. I think that'll be interesting too. And so you can have all these other entities that like attest to like what this entity score is. So, you know, in the example that I gave you before of like, you know, being able to get a relative trust from somebody, maybe that person

isn't within your network. So you have other trusted entities like maybe like the Equifaxes of the world that now instead of like just doing credit scoring, they start to aggregate attestation data and build different views about entities from that data. It's interesting how on kind of the web, the internet, which is a web of trust, I guess, a lot of the attestations that we're doing kind of happen in the background as we're like consuming content. So, you know, I consume someone's content. I might decide to follow them so I get more of their content, right? Well, that is an attestation that this particular content creator has me as a follower. And then, you know, more people who follow them, obviously their social rank moves up. They have more follow.

or that sort of thing. Or like, if I am writing a blog post and I choose to link to a specific article, right? The way Google indexes these things is links really matter, right? On page rank system. And so by effectively linking back to Wikipedia page, I am attesting that Wikipedia is a great source for this particular topic, right? I wonder if we get to the stage in Crypto and Web3 where the attestations are kind of like happening in the background. So we're not actually always signing things and clicking addresses. And yes, I know. this person, but it's just as a function of navigating our way around like an optimism chain or like doing this, interacting with this protocol. I'm like in effect attesting to it in some way.

If you take a look like, so we've actually built some really cool things on top of the AS. One of the things that we created as an example is called speaketh.eath. Or sorry, speaketh.org. And essentially it's like a decentralized social network similar to like a Twitter where every post is an attestation, every like is an attestation, every follow is an attestation, every follow is an attestation, every name, you know, changes an attestation. Is that just what Twitter is? Whenever I tweet something, I just attestating to the fact that I... It's an attestation network. Oh my God, it's just attestations. It's attestations all the way down. And even the community note feature, right? Like now in Twitter you can have like these arbiters of truth that say whether

something's like trustworthy or not, like the piece of contents of people could, you know, attest their voice that this content is credible. Well, in the decentralized world, even Wikipedia, as you were bringing up, Ryan, like, it's a great way to post, like, some sort of information, but you look to the wisdom of the crowd to make sure that, like, the history is actually the history, and you want people to be able to make those types of attestations. The problem with all of these attestations, though, right, in Web 2, is that they're all kind of siloed.

And so there's no way to export the social graph of attestations outside of Twitter. And this community notes feature, as grand as it is, it's just, locked inside of one ecosystem, which is Twitter and Elon Musk's platform. And so it's tied to Elon Musk governance tokens, right? We can't export it. It's not very much like web 1.0. It's not a standard. I like bring up the example of like eBay. Like there's like people who build up like a really good reputation on eBay and then they want to sell something on like Amazon or they want to sell something. They got nothing. They got from zero. They're nobody. Why am I nobody? Why can I bring my attestations with me? And also what's cool about this is like say someone builds like a Twitter on top of

attestations and then like that serve the front end goes down or someone wants to make a better version they don't have to start like a completely new network effect like to get at a station they can basically bring all those same tweets and all that same follow adstations everything just build a whole new front end on top of it i'm never going to be able to see twitter as a web to silo siloed at a station network that's i'm always going to be able to see that see something you just said i really want to double down on whereas like you have this primitive eAS and maybe you have a form factor for ad stations call them tweets and then that's then we just have 10 bagillion tweet attestations get signed by digital signatures. There could be

many different front end UIs to look, like I said, lenses for looking at all of these attestations. And so no longer there's like the protocol, the primitive EAS, and then there could be like a handful of applications all looking at the EAS attestations. But no, one of them is actually the silo anymore. They're just now lenses for looking at the primitive. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we want to be able to, as users, choose what we're consuming, right? Like, today, we get fed the content based off of our own, like, echo chambers in Twitter, right? But what if we want to filter for, like, I wonder what the Salana ecosystem is up to or, like, these different narratives. Like, if you actually could just filter that out in the UI versus preventing it or, like, forcing it. Like, giving users the choice of the type of content versus prevention, I think is really interesting. What about this point in the conversation? Some listeners here are probably getting nervous because not once have we talked about private. right? And we're talking about all these attestations and of course, you know, your on-chain address holds assets and like, how does privacy fit into this conversation? Is what you're building kind of, does it consider privacy at all or is that another layer on top that would need to be built as an application? Yeah. So in general, the way we tell people like what to attest, like if you're going to put something on-chain, like you obviously don't want to put any private data, right? Say like Coinbase wants to do a K-YC attestation for a particular address. Maybe there's some like,

a uniswap, but only for securities. And in order to use it, you need like an attestation from some like accredited like KYC. Gary Gensler. Gary Gensler's seat address would have to sign off on that. Yeah. Coinbase is attesting to your KYC. For example, they don't need to attest to who you are. All they need to do is say that this address has passed the test, right? So maybe you would have the schema has passed KYC and then it can just be true. Right. Another entity can use it too. And so the services that accept these attestations would just do their due diligence and be like, well, we trust Coinbase's attestations. We trust these attestations from these entities. And then they would just build that into the app rather than putting private data. And that's also one of the reasons why we built off-chain attestations because like in the real world, right, you can say that your ID cards, your passport, your driver's license. These are essentially attestations. But you can say they're off-chain attestations. They're not public. You own them and you show them on a need to no basis. So that's one way, right? Another way is we created like really cool tools to be able to attest to a lot of private data. So imagine a doctor's office can attest to like all of your medical

records. And we built a really cool tool for being able to take all of those records and just turn them into a Merkel tree and a test on chain to just the root, the root hash of that tree. And then we added the tools where anybody can then prove pieces of that tree to end. any other entity. And so basically, my insurance company might say, oh, we want to make sure that you actually got this treatment that you're getting insurance money for. And then you can just reveal specifically just the pieces of the medical data. And then they can verify for sure it came from the entity. We have a tool for this without using zero knowledge proofs. And it's pretty great. But then there's also zero knowledge proofs where, you know, you can attest to private data and then

you can reveal information about that data without actually revealing that data. The thing about zero knowledge proofs is that there so far every single solution for zero knowledge proofs is currently like really application specific and there's no like generalized like ZK everything solution right now and so like we have no opinion

right now on ZK systems to use. There's a bunch of different things you can use. We don't presuppose what's inside of an attestation. So your attestation could be like a full ZK proof. It could be one of these privacy preserving attestations that we showed. It could be off-chain or you can simply like if it

comes to like a tweet, right? If you're tweeting, that's public in general anyway. So like, you know, you wouldn't really expect privacy from your tweets. They're pretty much public at the stations. But yeah, we care about privacy. We write in the docs, like be careful what you attesteads about because the on-chain atestations do go on-chain and they'll live there forever. And so you've got to be very careful. But what's cool is we're building tools and there's other teams that are building tools even on top of EAS, like additional developer tools that help developers solve these types of problems. Yeah, we have a lot of hackers that use AAS that were creating ZKPs off of attestation data, which was really cool to see.

So you could still preserve like your identity was for like a credible attestation. But then we also received a lot of positive feedback on that Merkel tree approach just to selectively share information. And also like with SISMO, for example, you can use Sysmo is like integrated with the EAS. So like you can actually make zero knowledge proofs. So I can say, for example, that I have an attestation, you know, of a particular thing without revealing. which address actually has it, just that I own it. Not too long ago, we did an episode with the Sign In with Ethereum team. And I see a lot of overlap between Sign In with Ethereum and EAS.

Maybe you guys can talk about where these platforms do overlap and if you guys are working together. But why am I getting such a strong vibe between this episode and our Sign In with Ethereum episode? I wouldn't say that we overlap much in the sense that you know, you use Signin with Ethereum and you sign a message with your wallet and then it's verified on the server. You can say that you're like a testing that you are the owner of this key, but that's the only thing you're testing with and sign with Ethereum. It's not like arbitrary stuff. Like I can't use sign an Ethereum to a test and say like you've passed KYC. You know, you can make a signature and say, just write those words, but that's not structured.

And what EAS allows you to do is to create a schema of representing this intention and then attesting with that, you know, encoded data. I think it's similar in that it's permissionless. It's open source. There's no token. I think in those ways it's similar, and it's also similar because you're using a private key, your Ethereum private key for something that just feels kind of web-tui. Like, that's not a financial use case.

We've chatted with the Spruce ID team quite a bit. In those discussions, nothing felt like competitive at all. It's more just complimentary. And like where attestations beyond signing into something, you know, could make sense. So how are you guys funded? If you guys have no token, no VC capital, like where does, how do you guys pay your Yeah. So EAS has been bootstrapped today. We have received grants. So like one of the key things that we're trying to solve right now is around like schema coordination. Or like how if you have all these like schemas being created, how do we actually help people organize around the right ones? So optimism just gave us a pretty good grant to help build that out. And then we're really leaning into the new funding mechanisms like retroactive public goods funding. We're hoping that that's like significant for us. I'm hoping for that. And then there's also like the PGN network in like, like, like these new primitives, but to date, yeah, it's been self-funded and then just through, like, grants.

Being the out of station layer as a public good for the O.P. Stack and the Optimism Collective, combined with Optimism's retroactive public goods funding, if you can just smash these two things together and fund public goods from now until infinity, that would be one of the bull cases for Ethereum and that has been articulated from the very, very start. So I wish you guys the best on this endeavor. If people want to help fund this effort, What should they do? What should they know? Where should they go? We're live on, so Gitcoin grants, like their round 18 is live right now. So we're actually, we have a page that's up for that for quadratic funding there.

And then really just the way that public goods get funded through these mechanisms is through impact. And so like being able to just build useful applications in turn just helps us as a protocol gain for their adoption. So like really learning about attestations and building with it, I think is pretty critical. You know, I've been around in the space in Bitcoin, actually, since 2011, and I built some of the first Bitcoin wallets, like the first ever Chrome extension wallet in 2013. Vitalik was actually an advisor at the time. I've been building in the space for a really long time. I'm very passionate about this technology, and everybody on the team really is passionate about this because of, like, what it brings to blockchain. Money was never like a thought, really, when we were building this.

It was just like, there's a bunch of the cool things that we want to be able to be. build and we can't build it. Can't just build the project because otherwise we're just going to build another silo. And so we had to build this thing so we can build non-silod apps. So like ultimately like we want to be able to build cool stuff on top of it, but not until we finished our work here like, you know, getting EAS adopted and, you know, understood by the majority of developers in the space. It's really important for us to like see adoption with the AAS because then like we just like

any other builders can start to build like really amazing for profit businesses. But for now, like this, to become a standard, we have to like keep it credibly neutral and make sure that ethos never changes because then we're just going to end up in the graveyard of like projects that tried. And I think like now we have like these really cool mechanisms like retroactive public goods funding, the PGN network and some others that like can help projects. But it is hard for public goods to go from zero to one for sure. I think we've talked about a lot of other identity, I guess, providers in the space and sort of the overlaps we talked about WorldCoin. we talked a little bit about this idea of proof of personhood.

And I think it's pretty clear that those sorts of identity solutions can be a testers on top of something like EAS. One primitive we haven't talked about, though, is soulbound tokens. And how does the idea of soulbound tokens fit into what you guys are doing? Is it related or is it completely different and orthogonal? Yeah. So I remember actually, Battalick, I think it was in 2020, announced like Soulbound tokens. at ETCC. And, you know, I think it was like the wrong solution, right?

Because, you know, NFTs became really popular. Everybody built, like, into their wallace, the ability to view NFTs, EtherScan adopted it, right? And so when people think of, like, what tools can I use to solve, like, identity or reputation? They're like, all, right, how can we use NFTs for this? Because, like, you know, when all you have is a hammer, you know, everything looks like a nail. And so, like, the NFT, the NFT, the,

is the only tool that anyone ever had. But NFTs aren't good for this. So if I want to be able to test that I trust Bryce, for example, right, what do I do? Do I deploy a whole new smart contract that inherits the sole bound token interface? Where do I store that he's a friend or not? Like, and how do we know that this particular NFT is a friend type of NFT? Do we have to register in a completely different smart contract? And every new sole bound token can be part of a completely different smart contract.

So like if I want to see what are the identities that Bryce's address have received, like there's no way to pull this, you know, and everybody can be designing like a completely different smart contract with a completely different interface, different functions that don't work with each other. And there's no way to know easily. And so EAS, like attestations are a whole new primitive for being able to describe any kind of, you know, intent, whereas NFTs are still useful when you have some sort of an asset that you want to move around. But when you want to be able to just say something about something, an attestation makes a lot more sense. So you guys are bearish on soul-bound tokens as kind of a concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will join you on that bearishness.

I would say, like, you know, there's no such thing as a soul-bound token because I can just sell you my private key, and now it's not soul-bound to me anymore. You can always sell your soul, I guess. You can sell your soul. Yeah, I think a lot of devs were just building with SBTs because they're, like, the existing solution. But if you talk to a lot of engineers in the space today, they just see it as, like, it's just a little too clunky. Like, if you do have something a little bit more elegant, But it's not that they were wrong. And to begin, it's just what was available. Okay.

Well, I feel like we very much haven't reached into kind of the age of attestations or the age of identity across crypto. I mean, the first 10 years of this whole crypto project since you've been here, Steve, has all been about the kind of the property rights layer and sort of the money layer and the assets layer. Do you think we're entering the age of attestations as a service? And what makes you optimistic about that, if so? You know, what's amazing now is like we do. tell the story about EAS to developers, like seasoned CTOs who don't even know who I am or that I've been in the space, you know, they hear about the idea and they're like, their eyes open really wide

because they get it. No one's really thought about identity this way. We don't know anyone else that's thinking about it this way. And I think it's a really simple solution to a complex problem and it's super easy to use. We have a website. We have the smart contracts, but we also have EAS scan, which is like the ether scan of attestations. You can browse through all schemas, attestations. You can make attestations on them. We also have like everything indexed like in GraphQL endpoints. So it's super easy for anybody to be able to pull out of stations and display them in their UI. We built a ton of tools and you know, EAS is useful for so many things that like I think it's like the if you build it, they will come kind of thing. That's how I feel about it.

The narrative is definitely shifting towards non-financial use cases. And I think that we're helping solve a lot of the edge cases to get builders building faster. And so it's exciting to see, like, just through the hackathons, how many people have actually, like, explored use cases we haven't even thought of. And so I think it's going to be really fun to watch. Well, that's great, guys. I think we'll end it there. Really exciting project. And thanks for giving us a tour into why attestations are so important for crypto.

We appreciate your time. Ryan, David, pleasure. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks, bankless community, too. Thank you. A lot of fun, seeing it grow over the years. See, yeah.

Bankless Nation, some action items for you today. We'll include a link to the EAS website with the docs in the show notes. Also, view our episode, David mentioned it, signing with Ethereum, unrelated, but also related in some ways. Spiritually related. This, of course, is a public good, open source, permissionless, tokenless, and also free. So what could be better than that? Got to end with this, though, bankless nation, some risk and disclaimers. Crypto is risky.

You've got to be very careful what you attest to. You could definitely lose what you'd be. put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.