Richard

In this panel, members of Cursive, ZK Email, ZKP2P, and TACEO will describe their experience building and enabling consumer applications using programmable cryptography. They will discuss how advances in ZK, MPC, and FHE enable new types of applications to be built, how to get started building cryptographic apps, tradeoffs in tooling, and the challenges and potential pitfalls while using these tools. Finally, they'll share some future ideas for cryptography-centric apps they're excited about!

Stage 6

Steward at ZK Email: https://prove.email. 

Also co-creator of ERC 7524 (PLUME Signatures) and co-creator of image provenance proofs at https://proteus.photos.

Aayush Gupta

Aisling holds degrees in math, economics, and computer science, and obtained her PhD from the ENS in Paris in 2019. She has spent the past years working extensively on threshold cryptography and confidential computing, in both trad-fi and web3. Beyond this, she also worked on scientific and technical direction, strategy, and the legal aspects of building and using privacy enhancing technologies.

Aisling Connolly

Hello! I'm Andrew. I work at Cursive, a team building cryptography-powered apps for human connection. I'm interested in exploring the new forms of communication and interaction unlocked by advanced cryptography.

Andrew Lu

Ying Tong

Building Consumer Apps with ZK, MPC, and FHE

Blockchains have enabled trustless and fast transaction settlement (i.e. stablecoins, DeFi). However, these existing use cases exist in parallel and are siloed off from the real world. With the maturation of ZK, MPC and other programmable crypto techniques, we are now able to connect data on the internet to blockchains in a trust minimized way for use in smart contracts. This talk will explore the massive design space unlocked for apps (i.e. trust minimized P2P marketplaces)

Trust-minimized P2P marketplaces on Ethereum

 Awesome. Hey, guys. I'm Richard. Today I'll be talking about trust-minimized P2P marketplaces on Ethereum. Go over the why, how, and some thoughts of looking ahead. So why are we here? Um, if we look at web 2 today, uh, data currently exists in these centralized data silos, whether it's fiat currency in your bank account, uh, your social graph, concert tickets, domains, et cetera. Um, these lead to high switching costs for users. For example, you can't bring your followers from Facebook to Twitter. And these also are very extractive to these users. For example, Ticketmaster charges, like, monopolistic prices because they own both the secondary and primary exchanges. And lastly, there's, like, closed APIs, which make it very difficult to interoperate between payment APIs, for example. Additionally, if you look at Web3 in our permissionless database, the problem is that it's really detached from the real world. If you look at your social graph, stable coins, like these DeFi instruments, and even ETH, all of it runs in a parallel system. In fact, most of DeFi today is self-referential. And so the solution here is to bring the real world to Ethereum. And the question is how? We can break through these kind of wall gardens using cryptography and also maybe TEs. So we can use ZK and MPC, these new technologies, to allow us to permissionlessly export data from these centralized data silos. Techniques such as ZK email and TLS notary, which also can help us redact any kind of private sensitive information prior to exporting. Check out some of the other talks on ZK email or TLS notary today if you want to learn more deeply. But yeah, now with these tools, we can kind of compose any kind of Web2 action with Web3 action, such as proving a fiat transfer using zk email to swap for some stable coins on chain or proving ticket transfer using TLS notary to swap for stable coins or swap domains for ETH, et cetera, or even put a social graph inside a TEE to do some DeFi stuff with. An example of this flow that is in production today is ZKP2P, the project I work on. The problem that it fixes some of the issues I mentioned earlier, such as the high fees. The construction for this is pretty simple, actually. A seller comes in, escrows some funds in a smart contract and provides a payment ID. A seller comes in, escrows some funds in a smart contract and provides a payment ID. A buyer comes in, pays the seller, and uses that proof to unlock the escrow contract. It kind of replaces Binance or any kind of centralized exchange with a smart contract, and replaces the manual process of unlocking the escrow with instant unlock upon satisfying a predicate. This construction extends beyond fiat. Simply replace the off-chain payment with a digital asset transfer and a proof of payment with a proof of asset transfer. Now you can kind of do P2P trading tickets, trading domains, trade social media handles, CSGO skins, gift cards and much more. You can even further extend this construction if you, if you trust TEs as a credit poll third party. You can kind of encumber a Web2 account, put it inside a TEE and act that, act as an escrow for the Web2 asset. And both seller and buyer send requests through the TEE. Uh, once the TEE owns both funds and the Web2 asset say tickets, uh, then they can proceed to unlock funds to both parties. Uh, yeah, now you kind of can see the Web2 account is fully programmable. You can do some weird stuff like make the TEE run an AMM pricing model for exam, for example. Yeah, in conclusion, design space is huge. To do trust-minimized marketplaces, the tech here is ready. Dev tooling will continue to only get better. And instead of only bringing Ethereum to the real world, I think it's time to bring some of the real world onto Ethereum. Uh, thank you, and that's it. Thank you Richard. Do we have any questions? Shy crowd today, come on guys. I don't even know if you have the ability to go back in slides. Sorry, is this better? Yeah, if you can't go back, that's okay. I was just gonna ask something about it, but it doesn't matter. I don't think we can. Maybe you can just going to ask something about it, but it doesn't matter. I don't think we can. Maybe you can just talk to it. Okay. Any particular use cases you're most excited about, like in terms of future of peer-to-peer marketplaces? I think there's just a lot of ideas out there. You can put almost any Internet data on-chain and use it. Trade any kind of Web2 asset or even data and anything that you think has value on an internet, you can kind of bring into on-chain to do cool stuff with. Yeah, love to see it. I mean, just like you said, Ticketmaster, I think a prime example of just like marketplaces that are absolutely using monopolistic pricing to just gouge consumers in what is becoming, yeah, a very much frictionless process to do straight Peter Peer. I guess a question, have you seen any regulatory issues? How are you thinking about navigating that? Yeah, I think there haven't been so far. I think P2P is a legally, I guess, gray area kind of thing. You are allowed to transact with your peer. For example, Facebook Marketplace is a huge P2P marketplace. And we're just basically enabling the coordination of that to be easier through on-chain means on Ethereum. Totally. All right. Thank you, Richard. Appreciate it. Give it up.

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