Green Pill Podcast - Season 3 - EP. 2 - Ethereum Attestation Service w/ Steve Dakh

Ethereum Attestation Service w/ Steve Dakh

February 7, 2024

Check the full episode on Youtube:

SUMMARY

Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) has the potential to revolutionize decentralized reputation and trust, creating a web of trust with multiple scores and allowing for more personalized and diverse approaches to establishing trust.

• 00:00 🔗 Ethereum Attestation Service is a potential common standard for tracking impact and creating a web of trust for impactful projects, but adoption has not met expectations.

  • Season 3 of the Green Pill Network podcast focuses on measuring impact and building cryptoeconomic systems to support impactful builders, with episodes available onchain for collection to support public goods.

  • Steve Dakh discusses the potential of the Ethereum Attestation Service as a common standard for tracking impact and creating a web of trust for impactful projects.

  • Ethereum Attestation Service is an open source public good that allows any entity to attest about anything on or offchain, without the use of tokens, and is a new primitive for evm blockchains.

  • The speaker has been involved in the blockchain space since 2011, and despite early excitement about solving decentralized identity, reputation, real estate, and voting with Ethereum, adoption has not met expectations.

• 04:23 🔗 The speaker developed an Ethereum Attestation Service to provide a base layer for entities to attest about anything, which can then be aggregated to form an identity, and the service was successfully relaunched with a new team member in 2020.

  • The speaker developed an attestation platform, faced competition, put the project on hold for three years, and then decided to revisit and build it out in December 2020.

  • Decentralized identity and reputation are complex and relative, but can be solved by combining different aspects of a person's life, starting with the attestation of their name.

  • Attestations can represent identity and reputation, and the Ethereum Attestation Service provides a base layer for entities to attest about anything, which can then be aggregated to form an identity.

  • Attestations are like Lego blocks that can be used to show positive information about oneself, and the Ethereum Attestation Service was developed in 2020 but was overshadowed by other developments at the time.

  • The team at Ethereum Attestation Service has grown and improved with the addition of a new member, leading to a successful relaunch of the service.

• 09:44 🔗 Ethereum Attestation Service allows for the creation of a generalizable primitive for attestations on Ethereum, with a schema registry and customizable rules for user attestations.

  • The speaker discusses the development of a generalizable primitive for attestations on Ethereum, highlighting the potential for interoperability between different applications.

  • The EAS was designed to be generalizable and impactful by presupposing as little as possible, resulting in a simple system with two base smart contracts.

  • The schema registry allows entities to register different types of attestations, each with its own unique identifier and data structure, and anyone can create a schema.

  • Ethereum Attestation Service allows for the creation of detailed schemas with optional smart contract resolvers for running through the smart contract.

  • Ethereum Attestation Service allows for customizable rules for user attestations, with the ability to generate NFTs or tokens, and the option for attestations to reference other attestations for increased composability.

• 14:38 🔗 Ethereum Attestation Service allows for offchain, gasless, and revocable attestations, enabling non-ETH holders to participate in blockchain technology and providing decentralized reputation and trust.

  • The speaker discusses the concept of Ethereum attestations, which can be revoked, expired, and used to maintain a record of past positions or status.

  • Ethereum Attestation Service allows for offchain, gasless, timestamped, and revocable attestations, making it easy for non-ETH holders to participate in blockchain technology, with a front-end website for easy review and verification.

  • Using the Ethereum Attestation Service allows for a trade-off between generalizability and constraining variables, providing a protocol for attestations with different schemas while still maintaining the benefit of the service's generalizability.

  • The speaker discusses the use of attestations in supply chain verification and the potential for composability across multiple attestations.

  • The speaker discusses a social network app where every post, like, and comment is an attestation referencing each other, allowing for continuous referencing and the potential for building interesting UI features.

  • The Ethereum Attestation Service allows for multiple entities to attest to the impact of a certain entity, leading to decentralized reputation and trust, and the ability to analyze and build on attestation data.

• 21:14 🔍 Ethereum attestation service allows for the aggregation of data and creation of custom user interfaces, using a web of trust to derive relative scores and metrics for impact tracking and attestations.

  • The speaker discusses the importance of open sourcing their indexer and codes to allow for easy aggregation of data and building of custom user interfaces.

  • Season 3 of Green Pill focuses on impact tracking and attestations using Ethereum to track the impact of public goods.

  • Web of trust is a powerful data structure that can be used to flow trust through a network and separate fake attestations from plausible ones, which will be important for Ethereum attestations.

  • EAS attestations provide real context and allow for relative scoring, unlike the limited web of trust based on PGP.

  • Aggregating attestations from various platforms can derive relative scores and metrics to determine trust and connections, with the potential for negative trust based on connections and the emergence of a web of trust and distrust.

  • Ethereum attestation service allows for multiple impact ranks to be created, providing a more nuanced and multidimensional approach to scoring and web of trust.

• 27:48 🔗 Trust is important in business deals, and a decentralized web of trust with relative scores will be the future, allowing for reputation-based systems for loan agreements in DeFi and the real world.

  • You can attest to people you trust offchain, and by doing so, you can derive a relative score to make decisions based on trust.

  • Decentralized web of trust with relative scores will be the future, where individuals will trust the people they like and businesses will trust entities that derive their own scores.

  • Trust is important in business deals, and attestation is a common concept that can be digitally verified and easily attested with, but it's difficult to understand the formula used in traditional systems like an eoa.

  • In a decentralized system, anyone can monitor and audit data to ensure fairness and credibility, and becoming a reputable entity in this space requires prioritizing neutrality and transparency over proprietary algorithms.

  • Under collateralized loans in DeFi and the real world can be facilitated through attestations from trusted individuals, allowing for the creation of a reputation-based system for loan agreements.

• 32:27 🔑 Digital signatures and Ethereum Attestation Service make it easy for companies and individuals to create attestations on chain, leading to potential for a new web 3 social media platform.

  • The world operates on a series of attestations, such as birth certificates and marriage certificates, and it's hard to imagine a world where those are replaced with attestations, but at the same time, everything is just a series of attestations made arbitrarily by different entities.

  • Digital signatures are becoming more common for attestations, with the increase in people having private key pairs due to the entrance into the crypto market.

  • Steve and Carl discussed the ease of creating attestations on chain and how it could lead to a new web 3 social media platform.

  • Using Ethereum for attestations makes it easy to decentralize and utilize the platform for average companies and individuals.

  • Companies want to attest without hiring developers to build their own mechanisms, and the Ethereum Attestation Service allows for private offchain attestations using zero knowledge proof data.

• 37:17 🔒 The Ethereum Attestation Service allows for secure sharing and selective revealing of data, aiming to improve the value of attestations and create a web of trust for positive change in the crypto space.

  • The Ethereum Attestation Service allows for secure sharing and selective revealing of data, with the potential for more efficient zero knowledge proofs in the future.

  • The impact of Ethereum Attestation Service on adoption and the broader digital public goods can be measured by observing who adopts it, the entities attesting, and the usefulness of the data being attested.

  • EAS is a public good, tokenless, and permissionless, aiming to eliminate fragmentation and bring companies together to improve the value of their attestations.

  • EAS enables more impact of public goods and gets funded by retroactive public goods funding, creating a web of trust and scores denoting wallet resistance and impact.

  • Builders have an opportunity to connect different money Legos to create impact and profit, with a call to action to stitch things together and use ethereum attestation service to track impact.

  • Collect episodes on pods.medgreenpill, make an offering to algorithmic overlords, subscribe, rate, review, like, and share to build the green pill movement and network society using crypto for positive change.

INSIGHTS

Decentralized Identity and Reputation

• 💭 Solving decentralized identity and reputation is complex, as identity is relative and contextual, combining different aspects of a person's life.

• 💡 The key to designing EAS was to presuppose as little as possible in order to make it as simple and impactful as possible.

• 💡 The concept of decentralized reputation and trust through attestation can revolutionize how we evaluate and connect with others in the future.

• 🌍 Season 3 of Green Pill is focused on impact tracking and attestations, aiming to shift towards a system where data shows which public goods are actually making a difference.

• 💡 Under-collateralized loans in DeFi could be made possible through Ethereum Attestation Service, creating a new level of trust and reputation in the space.

• 🌐 The potential for builders to create connections between Ethereum Attestation Service, Gitcoin grants, and other public goods funding platforms presents an exciting opportunity for innovation and collaboration in the crypto space.

• 💡 "There's an opportunity for Builders to connect different money Legos in ways that create impact and funding for public goods."

Web of Trust and Trust Relationships

• 🌐 The composability of attestations in the Ethereum Attestation Service allows for powerful and flexible referencing of other attestations, creating a network of interconnected trust and verification.

• 💡 Web of trust is an important primitive for separating fake attestations from plausible ones, impacting attestations on Ethereum.

• 🌐 The aggregation and relative scoring on the web of trust is more valuable than a global score, allowing for more nuanced and specific trust relationships.

• 🌐 The concept of a web of trust with multiple scores could be a profound step forward in the future of web of trust.

• 🔒 By attesting offchain to people you trust, you can derive a relative score for anyone in the network, allowing you to make decisions based on that score.

• 🌐 A decentralized web of trust will calculate relative scores, allowing for a more personalized and diverse approach to establishing trust.