Vision, outcomes & call to action from the Cypherpunk Retreat | Will Scott (October 2025)

As way of introduction, I've been around the protocol labs ecosystem for the last five or so years um and have been focused on uh privacy research from that side. A couple weeks ago um between Protocol Labs and Web3 Privacy Now, we pulled a bunch of people to Berlin um for for this event called Cippy Punk Retreat. Um and the the basic uh premise here is that we live in an exciting time where data analytics capabilities are accelerating very quickly and we need to look at what privacy technologies can also be accelerating at the same time so that we don't end up in a world where that falls behind. Um and and sort of the the thought here is there's a bunch of things that live somewhere in academia. We have a bunch of primitives.

have the capabilities to do things pretty well, but the reality is that a lot of how we see apps and systems and the web and the world around us doesn't use those yet. And so what are the missing pieces to be getting things from [clears throat] understanding how to do them into practice faster? Um so within that overarching thing uh the the basic conversations um I guess had had three prongs that things ended up categorized under. One was secure communications. So how do you have a private conversation with someone else uh or send messages and so forth?

And so there's there's a wide range that you would put within that, but generally we we have again a pipeline that you can think of from things that are not used very much but do a pretty good job with things like metadata privacy up to okay, how do we at least get end to end encryption more prevalent in the WhatsApps and the Facebook messengers and the things that the bulk of the world is using, right? So, so you've got um a a pipeline there where you've got things that are well along uh adoption for at least some level of encryption and then you've got more and more things you would want to do in unlinking and and increasing privacy. Uh a second one is decentralized identity. So thinking about how do we continue to own our identity of who we are uh and and what is the the space there where we think about identity beyond simply um communication. You've got an address but uh that address something that you control.

How do you properly blind it? How do you have interoperability where you your concept of an identity can when you need to be proved in different ways? How do you do things like serial knowledge proving of age and and so forth? Um and is that something that ends up rolling up to state provided ids or are there other techniques that you can also have and how do you not close doors before you need to? So how do you have ways to extend uh and support interop in that context?

Uh and the third one is around uh trusted computing uh or um yeah this this concept of attestation or an integrity of the computing that we're doing right now. A lot of what's practical there ends up looking like um trusted hardware where you're getting a vendor attestation or a signature over computation that this is a memory image that's running or so forth. But you've got a set of um interfaces there that uh largely can extend to things like homorphic encryption or other cryptographic techniques where what you end up trusting is math rather than uh a hardware vendor like Nvidia. So there there's at least a bright potential future uh if not a bright uh current uh time. Um but but but increasing costs of attack and increasing uh integrity in that case ends up being useful.

So that was the premise. Um, we had a bunch of interesting things come out of it. I'll mention a couple and then we've got a couple more talks after me that will go further into this. Um, there was a bunch of conversation around how you make uh anonymous publishing easier. Um, is there some system beyond just tour that has sort of a publishing web server plus tour onion service plus orchestration?

How do you end up getting content more easily out there? Um there's a good conversation around how do you make private L2 stable coins that's continuing to develop. Um so what what does it look like to have um private environments where people can do that sort of financial transactions more available and easy? Um and then we had a few that we've um provided some funding to. Um so um the three so far that have come out of that uh one is uh germ which is in the blue sky app proto environment is working on a decentralized MLS uh setup.

So how do you get um in a peer-to-p peer environment of messaging um anonymous uh MLS things without having a centralized server. Um a second one um Black Sky also coming out of an app proto like things is looking at integrating cashew which is a Chia cash descendant uh but but a cryptocurrency thing for how do you do payments in that environment. Um and then we have a project that is working on um a tested TLS. So if you've got a uh certified or a tested uh environment uh a computing environment and you can you have uh a standard TLS connection on the network um end up with the server um being able for the remote client to verify that it is talking to that attested environment. So, can you make that process of talking to an attested um remote environment work within the standard TLS uh protocols?

So, we've got a bunch of fun things coming out of it. Um I think this is starting to hopefully build some momentum as we move towards Buenoseris next month. Um there's definitely a bunch of exciting privacy and things coming up in that context as well. Um but thank you all for your interest in attending and I will hand it on to Kade for the next talk.

[applause]