Ethereum Citizen: Embracing Self-Sovereign Digital Identity by Vid Kersic | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi welcome from my site as well uh I'm a researcher and founder of Luther labs and today I'm going to talk about how ethereum citizens are embracing self- Sovereign identity so who is a citizen based on the dictionary cities a person who is a member of a particular country or a person who lives in a particular town or city if we extend this definition to the 21st century we can just Aid the network state or any part of the digital Community but who is an ethereum citizen so ethereum citizen is a person who is participating in the ethereum ecosystem or using the ethereum technology to achieve its goals while promoting the ethereum's values so I just want to say there is really no hard definition uh similar to to ethereum Enlightenment but you can pretty much tell by feeling what I mean by that so what are the ethereum vales so from the technology perspective this is in decentralization security and scalability but from the user perspective this is self serty censorship resistance ownership permission less and privacy so where are we today so for financial assets uh we are pretty much there uh for smart contracts we are somewhat there so smart contracts can be permission deployed to the ethereum network but usually they can be they can be upgraded to through the governance process of decentralized community but most our contract has multi today so websites websites can be hosted in a decentralized way on a decentralized storage network but we are also somewhat there and for identity and data identity and data should be fully owned and controlled by the users and we are not there yet but things are getting better in the last years so as an ethereum citizen I want to control my identifier so no one can take my identity so here we have many options so basically identifiers are etherium addresses NS handles dids or semaphore identifiers in the zup pass but currently the most adopted thing we have are EAS so blockchain addresses with ens but this doesn't give us any privacy and for the data part we want to control our our data and share disclose it only to the people we want and when we want so that means that the data should be stored in our Wallets on our personal servers or on or encrypted or on the third parties but for that if we want to make it at work we need verifiable data so what is verifiable data this is like the famous triangle of trust in the self Sor identity community so we have data issuers we have users and we have verifiers so how the verifiable data works is that the issuers issues the data to the users and they uh sign over the data and when users disclose the data to the verifiers the verifier verifiers can verify the digital signal signature so they know the data came from the issuer um but here I also want to mention that the data issuer and the user can be the same person because some data can be self signed or self-issued if like the data is not that uh important or or maybe it is important but for example what is my favorite color this data can be signed by myself so what's the reality so Financial Assets in the decentralized applications are in our control but the data is usually stor in the centralized databases for example least of my f favorite nfts or tokens on trading deps this is usually stored on each platform uh in their centralized databases on every platform you have to connect your social accounts and prove that you're owning them and you have to repeat this on every platform and the kyc also you have to repeat that on each platform but it's not all that bad things have drastically improved in the last two years so for example just look at your tickets for the Devcon uh you can you store them in the Zupas so the tickets for the Defcon are one kind of the verifiable data and we also have other kinds for example forecaster and lens protocol posts uh dids and verifiable credentials are getting more used in the last years the proof carrying data is another type of the verifiable data and we also have zeret Solutions like Z TLS so how would the perfect W look like user would visit her favorite app the user needs to fill out some information for example social profiles or some other other data and this data would be signed by the user or some issuer and this data would be stored somewhere so when the user would visit another de uh the other dab would know that user already provided the social profile information and or any other data that these de needs and the dab would be able to fetch the data or or from the user or from some other third party provider where the user is storing his encrypted data and the the de could use this data uh without requiring the data to be created or filled out again so what are some of the challenges first challenge is user friendliness so data sharing in this uh way takes a long time proof generation time for zero knowledge proofs also takes a long time use developer experience so we don't have any unified sdks and tools for different solutions and we have many standards for the data and identity but we also don't have enough standards on the wallet site and how to actually use these standards in the applications so ethereum citizens will become self- sovereign when not only their assets but also their data and identities will be owned by them without any centralized point of failure and that's it from my side thank you thank you very much V so Q&A remember just raise your hand and I will TOS this to you are there some questions for a bit yep let's go hey quick question on uh your view of government data so because we all of our identities unfortunately are is tied to some sort of government credential how does that integrate into the schema that you presented for etherum Citizens um yeah so uh maybe I can talk about how the idea is currently in the Europe where I'm from so the the European uh government and governments are also pushing for the similar concept so you have issuers you have users you have verifi verifiers and you also have the data signatures basically the the whole system is the same only the issuers are the government entities which are issuing the data you're saying to integrate with the idas 2.0 wallets that's the plan um excuse me so the is the plan then to kind of integrate with idas 2.0 identity wallets that governments are providing I think that depends on appli for example if you have some decentralized applications you don't need for everything the government IDs but I think that the best approach is to like merge on the similar Technologies so basically if you are working on the wallet which works in the ethereum ecosystem it's not so much work to also support other like government use cases whatever are there any more questions don't be shy guys yep we have one don't Mish put it close to your your embedded volleyball um so the question is like what do you think holds us back is it just the governments and kyc providers being not flexible enough or like what's the real I think I think there are many challenges um so for example if you want to develop your application in a way that the users own the data I mean like the the user experience in web 3 is already not so great uh and if you want to do everything like I said it gets even worse so I think that we need more tools just like the standard technical things that we need to figure out first before we can give it to the user so they can use it more thanks yep we have one question will be the last question uh yeah thanks do you think there's going to is is there a somehow a bit of a race between governments uh rolling out citizen identification systems which are man and a version of decentralized um identity which you've you've outlined here what's your are you optimistic that The idealized decentralized self- Sovereign identity model will prevail in time or do you think they're at odds with the centralized sort of government issued idas I think that in the short term or midterm we will have both so basically like I don't see it that for example getting a passport or anything like that we will be able to do it in a decentral with decentralized uh identity I think that some kind of documents will always be tied to the government identities but inside the like ethereum ecosystem or there I don't think there is a need for the government ID I think we can go fully with decentralized identity yep so that's all thank you very much thank you