"Standards in Decentralisation Now" - Panel // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

All right. Hey everybody. Uh, I am dubbed recursion. Let me know if it's a little too loud, but also let me know if y'all can hear me in the back. Okay, cool.

So, our discussion panel is around standards. We've got three people up here, including myself, that are working on dashboards. So, what I first want to do is introduce what each of us are doing. So, uh to uh get you set up on understanding what exactly it is we do, um I will let first we've got Poly Mutex up here from Wallet Beat.

Hey, Poly Mutex here.

And we have Hubie from L2B. Hey, I'm Hubert and I'm from L2B. If you don't know what we are building, it basically lubit.com. So like a website where we evaluate every single L2 and uh myself I'm dubbed recursion and uh I'm I help uh I'm the project lead on the web 3 privacy explorer.

So actually real quick, let me just get a show of hands. If you can hear me, raise your hand. I see you. Okay, nice. Okay, so nice.

Um so yeah so if uh either of you would like to just uh jump in and just explain what wallet two beat wallet beat is L2 beat is and I'll explain private explorer.

Well so I think L2B is the OG of the uh something beat naming. So you can guess what bit does just based on the name which is a very intentional naming choice. Uh it is inspired from one of the blog posts from Vitalic uh from I think last year titled what I would like to see in the wallet and uh in which there was many things that basically almost no wallet gets right. Seems like something needed to be done in the wallet space and so I decided to start looking. Fluid key had actually already started a project called wallet beat which I then try to overhaul in line with the principle of that blog post and from there I've been working on it with other people as well.

uh to get it into shape. It's not fully ready yet, but uh that that's where we're at.

Okay. Yeah. And for us like four years ago or five years ago when the L2centric road map uh for Ethereum was announced, we kind of knew that okay, this will be a next big thing. But Ethereum didn't want to have a single L2, right? They kind of created this new open market for everybody to kind of uh try to build their own.

So of course you know everybody started uh building their own stuff and every single stack differs from each other. So there was no place for any companies like for example maker back in the day. So now now sky uh to actually decide which L2s they should expand to right so yeah so that's how L2 basically started there was I think there was like a grant for it and the L2 bid was created uh to kind of evaluate all of those chains. So when you are a company right or like a user and you have optimism or arbitrum to choose from you can check out all the details about it and then kind of decide which one is better for you. And over the years like I would say that we became kind of like a standard for uh for trying to um trying to basically create those standards from for a industry by itself.

And we we have a lot of funds like wallet bit uh right here that is uh kind of incorporating some of the stuff that that we created because it's all open source. It's all free to use. Uh the only thing uh that is incorporated by us is our logo I believe and other than that you can just take everything you can create your own version of L2B today and you can basically modify it for your own needs. So so yeah that's that's where we are today. Thank you.

Uh, privacy explorer, the web3 privacy explorer. I mean, you guys are here for a web3 privacy event. So, this is also something that we work on. So, what it is is just a dashboard of all these different projects, privacy projects across uh many different ecosystems. And we've got a our largest is uh from the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum space.

So what our idea is is to get all the privacy projects. We've got 750 just over 750 projects listed. And the whole idea is helpful for anybody that is looking to understand these privacy tools, privacy protocols, uh privacy preserving uh crypto a aspects or software that they can understand. And the idea is for anybody to go and research, you know, with a different kind of uh skill level. Uh you could be a expert uh at this or you could be a complete noob that is just learning about this and finding your specific pieces of uh software that you're looking for that would help benefit your whatever your position is, whatever your like risk profile is.

So with that, it's community focused. As you can see from this event, it's very community focused. You know, we did not charge for this. We put everything together. we have a bunch of free things for you.

And so the whole idea is for the e uh for the privacy uh explorer is to also have that collaborative ecosystem. It is open for anybody to contribute. So it's very simple. Uh you go and find a project and you can or add a project and it makes a pull request and we review and if it is an actual private privacy project it will get added to the dashboard. So that is uh a high level of all three of our things.

So we can get started into questions. Um so what design philosophy uh or guiding principles are behind the scoring methodology for either of uh any of us? Uh but first we can let's start with polymutex. Let's start with the end and then we'll walk it in.

Sure. Uh design philosophy. So as I mentioned earlier a large part of the information was around Vitalik's blog post for um what I would like to see in a wallet. But we tried to formalize this a little bit. Uh so at high level I think there's like five big Ethereum values that I think are trying to categorize what we would like to see in a wallet.

Privacy is obviously one of them and you know it's the theme of this event. Other ones would be security self- sovereignty um transparency in terms of like is the wallet code open source? Can you see what it's doing? And then we have a third bucket which is a little bit more malleable called like ecosystem alignment which is for things that are more like temporally relevant. For example, uh I would say like last year there would have been the theme of trying to have L2 UX integration, you know, crosschain swaps and bridges that are a bit more transparent.

Uh and so we try to like see where the bar should be in each of these and uh you know that there's a lot to do. Um I would also say the goal is more to have to arrive at a certain outcome rather than enforce certain standards. So specifically, for example, um it's more about do wallets provide, for example, private token transfers rather than specifically which technology they use for private token transfers because there's many of them as this event is a is uh representative of. But um we're not here to pick winners about which one should work. We only care that users have an easy way to do private token transfers regardless of how that is.

And right now the state of alllet is like 90% of them basically don't. and the ones that do call themselves privacy wallets, but that's not where we should be. We should have wallet privacy, not privacy wallets. And uh so that's that's roughly the um the idea. Now, I also want to make the point that like standards by themselves don't necessarily guarantee those properties.

So I think one of the most prominent standards for onchain privacy would be for example stealth addresses. It is standardized in NRC but um whenever a wallet implements it does not necessarily mean that its users have privacy. To illustrate uh one of the most prominent implementations of uh stealth addresses today which is fluid key like I don't mean to say anything bad about fluid key. think their existence is not good for the privacy space. But it is still the case that like if you use them, they will know all of the addresses that you have and that they know they belong to the same user because that's the design that uh they've gone for and like when you ask what is my private spendable balance.

The only way they can do that is they look at all the addresses that they know belong to you and they add them up and so they need to know all of those address for for doing that computation. So standards by themselves don't enforce privacy. We need to enforce the outcome that users have privacy. In this particular case, it would be enforcing the outcome that no single party other than yourself can determine all of the addresses that belong to you.

Okay. So for us, I think it's pretty easy and straightforward. So basically we uh believe that Ethereum is this tool to ensure true cipher funk future and we are looking from the from the perspective of Ethereum at everything that is happening outside of it. So for example L2us and based on that we basically try to evaluate um evaluate them and again we also don't want to pick any winners. We just want to give everybody the same right to have access to all of these data to evaluate those those solutions by by themselves and we are doing that also with having normal people in mind let's say so we don't want it to be like you know super technical or whatever right so we don't want to require you to understand solidity or anything to to decide which one you should use right but we rather try to incorporate all of these hard technical details into something very easy uh for everybody.

So we have two main frameworks right now. So first one is stages. So basically you have stage zero, stage one and stage two. And that way you can evaluate the decentralization and maturity of of those rollups. So for example, arbitrum and optimism are stage one right now.

So there are scenarios where you can for example withdraw your money from them uh without trusting the companies that operate those those chains. And the second one is um risk rosette. So basically this is like a pizza pie uh that also have with five slices uh that basically shows you five different ways how you can lose your money or access to anything on this chain uh from the perspective of Ethereum, right? And and then we assign the again we assign the cool colors red, yellow or or green. And yeah, you can just open the website and in like five five seconds you can basically see everything and decide which one is is the best for you.

And we do that mostly because we believe again Ethereum is the best one, the best solutions solution out there. So that way you can actually know that you know if something goes wrong you can you you you are you are not left alone. You can still interact with those chains with those apps from from Ethereum itself right. So for example you do a transaction on Ethereum and we we you withdraw from from arbitum or from any other chain. So that's the that's the whole philosophy uh behind our our frameworks.

Thank you for that. So question is what is the design philosophy or guiding principles? So guiding principles for the explorer is to be to be free uh for everyone forever. So we want this to be openly collaborative. And so along with that the whole idea is as you can see once again I'll reiterate this community building that we have here.

It's extremely important because the the way that the projects can be added to is anybody from the community can go and submit projects. They can go and make pull requests to edits of the projects. So that is the guiding philosophy and of course the scoring or the standards really come into play as we're really getting into the minutiae of how exactly we're going to rate these uh projects. But uh we're actually running low on time. So I'm going to go and we've we've touched on a few of the topics.

So I will ask the final question is discuss roadmap is always exciting. What are you trying to achieve or what are you pushing toward to make more open and collaborative? First we'll start with Hubert and throw it the other way.

Yeah. So for us right now we try to expand from the from only L2s to other parts of the stack. So we have ZK catalog. So if you don't know um a lot of projects are claiming that they are fully ZK right all your data is backed by ZK but nobody is actually verifying if that's true. So for us you can basically go to other other page on our website and check if for example I don't know there is like some you know some privacy protocol and we are checking the ZK circuits and that way you you you are sure that at least one other party checked if what they claim is true h and they are just not using zk as a marketing tool to fool you all and the other part that will be revealed soon is the new interop standard so what we'll be doing we are going through every single interop project like layer zero, wormhole and so on.

And we also create a new framework for them and you will be able to u to decide which ones you should use because in the future we believe that all the chains will be connected to Ethereum because Ethereum is the most decentralized right you have a very low chances of being sensor uh there like fully sensor. So, so yes, so we you you will be able to basically check the chain levels risks for you, the interrupt level risk for you and ZK risks for you on a in a single place. And we hope to basically export this data to wallets to like some other some other apps and and protocols to to use it and show to show to people as well.

Uh road map. Yeah. Um well, so wallet bit still hasn't technically launched. That's why the domain is still beta.wallet.

Uh so you know immediate road map launch that means finalizing the set of attributes. Uh the stage system is on the way. So defining what the stages should look like that's also very forny because there's software wallets hardware wallets they have different constraints. It's embedded wallets like privy which are also quite difficult. Uh we're uh funded by a grant from the f right now.

Thank you very much to the uh but looking for more contributors. You know it's basically me and a few others. Some from the f there that's probably in the audience right now. um Patrick Collins as well that has done on and off contributions. Um we need a designer, logo, artist, etc.

So, you know, reach out to me if you'd like. Um also on the uh L2 beat integration, you know, should we have attributes that are about which L2s are integrative wallets and if so, how do we do the selection mechanism? That's I think somewhere where we can collaborate there. Uh yeah, we're all open source, MIT uh licensed, everything in the open. So come talk.

All right. And uh for the exp for the web 3 privacy explorer, I've got just a little the new version is live, so come check it out. We just had an overhaul. It looks uh we we worked hard on it. Just uh so check it out.

So once again, you can find it at web3 uh explorer explorer.web3privacy.info. You can see the fresh new site. We've got an open- source enhanced API with filters and pageionation as our directory continues to grow.

Like I said, we just broke 750 uh projects. Roadmap, a few things that we want to try and do. We want to make it easier for people to utilize. So, uh the idea is if you've seen uh if you've been to Aztec's website, they've got a great local AI that you can ask questions about the Aztec protocol. So, we love that idea.

So, we'd love to have uh a local AI system that you can more or less interact with, ask questions. If you're looking for a specific, let's say a private currency versus a private rollup, uh you can ask these questions and you'll get recommendations. So that's on the road map uh community ratings and feedback because in the end it's helpful for us to know the projects that are on there if people are saying, "Hey, look, this seems like it's a scam or this seems like um what they're saying they're misrepresenting or if you say, you know what, hey, you're missing this information." It's good to have community feedback and then also a reputation uh system for community members. So, it's helpful to know that, you know, once again, if this person, if this random profile comes up and is uh talking not nice things and they just the date of the account is just is newly aged and they're uh speaking badly about a certain protocol, it makes it easier for us to sort of realize, okay, you know, let's take that with a grain of salt.

Let's understand what they're trying to say. So, it's exciting. Uh if you guys have any questions, please come talk to any of us. Uh once again I appreciate uh Hubert and Polymutex. Uh and once again thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.