On today’s episode we welcome Bryce Patrick and Steve Dakh from the Ethereum Attestation Service. EAS is a new public good, open, permissionless, and token free. Is this the key unlock for decentralized identity through crypto? 
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 ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode:
 https://www.bankless.com/debrief-eas/ 
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 TIMESTAMPS
 
 0:00 Intro
 7:27 What is an Attestation?
 11:51 Attestations as a Primitive
 14:35 What Are The Good For?
 19:15 Defining Identity
 22:39 Primitive Before the App
 25:55 What is EAS?
 30:31 Attestation Form Factors
 36:51 Use Cases
 40:19 EAS Growth Goals
 42:17 Why Do We Need Attestations?
 46:10 Why Build This on Ethereum?
 52:46 Who is Using EAS and For What?
 1:00:04 Web2 vs Web3 Attestations
 1:05:17 Decentralized Reputation
 1:08:05 The App Layer on Top of EAS
 1:15:08 Privacy
 1:19:48 Comparing To Sign In With Ethereum
 1:21:22 How is it Funded?
 1:25:08 Soulbound Tokens
 1:30:00 Closing and Disclaimers
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 RESOURCES
 
 EAS
 https://twitter.com/eas_eth 
  https://attest.sh/ 
 
 Steve Dakh
 https://twitter.com/stevedakh 
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 Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
 https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Probably 99% of all the historical video content that we have right now and audio content, it's probably all legitimate, most likely not AI generated.

In the next few years, you can kind of see how that can start to flip.

1 of the things that we think about is like, right now, If you take some historical content, hash it, timestamp it on chain using an attestation, you can now prove, you know, a thousand years from now that this content existed before we had the AI capable to make a perfect replication of that.

So right now we can actually use attestations to almost save history and I think we should

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance This is how to get started how to get better and how to front-run the opportunity.

I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless.

The Ethereum attestation service, a new public good, a standard that's open, permissionless, and free.

We talked today about why this might be the key unlock for decentralized identity and non-financial use cases in crypto.

As we've said so often on Bankless, first we take back our money, then we take back our identity.

A few things to take away from this episode.

Number 1, why decentralized identity isn't a mystery, it's actually just a bunch of attestations.

That word, attestations, that's going to be the focus of today's episode.

Number 2, we talk about why Web2 and social networks like Twitter are actually just attestation silos.

Number 3, we talk about why financial use cases are going to absolutely explode over the next 10 years as soon as we unlock the power of attestations.

Number 4, we end with thoughts on WorldCoin, on privacy, on soulbound tokens, and a host of other items related to decentralized identity.

David, why was this episode significant to you?

The arc of crypto is just iteration and unlock after iteration and unlock.

And I think this identity primitive of the attestation is a big unlock.

I think a lot of projects, there's been a lot of teams and organizations out there that have gone straight for the identity golden goose, and they're skipping a step.

And that is what I think is the Ethereum attestation layer, the attestation service that we are going to talk about here on the episode.

I think without the building block of attestations, crypto is much more muted than it otherwise would be.

And in order to get to a much more expressive version of the crypto economic future, we need these attestations to unlock new doors, new opportunities, because they bring in basically everything that's not money and finance into the fold of crypto and allows us to build on top of those layers.

And so getting to that point where we have identity and not just identity, but everything that is related to attestations.

You're about to learn all about that in the show.

In order to get there, we need to first build out these building blocks that the Ethereum attestation service team is working on building today.

We have nothing to disclose for this episode, but of course, you can always check out Bankless Disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures.

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This is, we're going to refer to this by EAS in this episode.

And EAS is a free open source primitive that's deep in the Ethereum tech stack and has aspirations to unlock an entire world of use cases using 1 simple primitive, that of the digital attestation.

We've been long-time listeners, so to have the opportunity to come up, it's great.

We're excited to chat, help educate more about attestations and looking forward to the call.

I do think that this is going to be an educational episode for everybody, including David and myself, because Part of the reason we're having this conversation is, of course, the Bankless Nation knows that identity is very important to David and myself.

We often say, first we solve money, and then we solve identity.

We also heard on the back of Ethereum Waterloo from more than a few folks that you have to talk to the EAS team.

They're doing incredible things in the space.

This is a major unlock for on-chain attestation identity.

This looks like an open-source primitive.

It's tokenless, it's free, It's a public good.

So we're hoping by the end of this episode, we know enough about EAS to be dangerous and we sort of get the shape of where identity might be going, at least from a public goods perspective.

Can you tell us, it's in the name, Ethereum Attestation Service, what is an attestation and what on earth does that have to do with identity?

So basically, simply speaking, an attestation is simply an entity making a signed statement about something.

In the case of EAS, you're able to make an attestation about literally anything.

The reason why that's important might not be immediately obvious, but that's why we have this story that we like to tell.

So essentially, we've been really super interested in solving decentralized identity and reputation.

And we know that it's like a super hard problem to solve.

Identity is relative, your reputation is relative, and it's contextual.

So, for example, my reputation to Bryce is different than my reputation to David.

And it's a very complex kind of abstract concept that, you know, no 1 has really solved because I think people have been trying to solve it the wrong way, almost building 1 layer too high and not building upon a primitive to be able to describe such complex things.

We were looking at all the platforms that existed out there today.

And we saw that most of the platforms that are doing identity, they're almost all like glorified KYC companies.

They build these like a siloed platforms that you essentially as a company or developer have to adopt.

And then you're kind of locked into that platform.

So say for example, there's, you know, Polygon ID or Bright ID or any of these platforms that allow you to do some sort of KYC.

They essentially are attesting about you passing your KYC, but that attestation can only be used within that platform.

And so if some other platform wants to KYC you and you're like some, maybe a smart contract that wants to allow users only who are KYC to use it, you'd have to implement every single identity platform.

And that just makes no sense for decentralization.

And also none of it actually solves identity.

I might like Bryce's selection of music, but I might not like his food tastes, but I might still trust him anyway.

So we were thinking like, what actually is identity?

And we started to think really deep about this.

And we started to think, well, At some point we had no identity and then we did.

And so we were thinking, well, at what point was that?

I remember coming to this realization, like when I was born, my mom named me Steve, right?

You can say that she attested to my name, right?

And so I went to school and the teachers attested to my grades, right?

And the kids in the class could have attested to whether they like me or not.

The government attested to my passport and my driver's license.

University can attest to your diploma and your employer can attest to your employment or whether you're a good employer or not.

And so we kind of quickly realized that actually you could represent identity and reputation as an aggregate of attestations about someone.

And so if you really want to be able to solve this problem, what you really need to start with is a base layer where any entity can just attest about anything at all.

Yeah, and it's not that all the identity protocols are moving in the wrong direction.

It's just that because there hasn't been this primitive base layer, everyone's building their own solution towards it.

And they're just 1 aspect of an identity.

And so we realized if you actually want to be able to solve reputation, digital identity, we need to have a common language and a framework that everyone can communicate off of.

So we've been reaching out to a lot of the identity protocols and beyond with different use cases to really help try to bring everyone together.

When you guys say that attestations are primitive, really gets me excited, especially when you define the primitive so easily as just a statement that someone attests to something else.

And when a statement like this is so simple, you can get this instinct that the expression of this primitive can be massive.

And I think why these conversations around identity and these primitives can be so difficult is that a lot of the listeners, especially crypto newbies, newcomers into this crypto world, aren't used to thinking in these grand terms.

And trying to get people to understand this new form factor for identity is trying to also get them to understand these new monies that were created.

You almost have to like unlearn the paradigm of the dollar in order to understand, you know, Bitcoin and Ether.

And in the same model, you have to unlearn the fact that your government issues you your identity to really learn that actually your identity is an aggregate of all of your social relationships that are like piecemealed together throughout time.

So maybe we can actually just go back to this primitive with that shared kind of context and Maybe Bryce, you can start and Steve will go back to you.

How is it a primitive, like an EAS, actually the basement level foundation that is actually needed to make one's true identity?

Yeah, if we check ourselves out of like blockchain all together and we just think about how we interact with each other offline and in the real world.

There's a lot of interactions that we have together.

Imagine just like getting a loan for something.

You might go to Ryan and say, Hey, Ryan, I need to borrow $5, 000.

Well, a simple IOU might be justified from Ryan to give you a loan because he trusts you and all the interactions that you guys have had and the trust that you've built.

But if you, David, wanted to go get a loan from a bank, you might have to go to that bank and provide all these documentation and all these different proof points to actually show that you're a credible person.

And that's because you don't have that same rapport and there's other regulations that they're following.

But the idea is that all these entities are just making attestations about each other.

And the value of the attestation from you giving an IOU to Ryan is saying, you know, he's trusting that you're actually gonna follow through on that.

And so if we think about how attestations can work, it's really just like any interaction where you're trying to build trust and to make sure that the person on the receiving end, like has some sort of authenticity that you are kind of who you say you are, and like you have some reputation behind it, you can unlock so much just from that.

But we haven't had a way to do that online and on-chain.

Is this a conversation specifically at attestations?

They give us our identities or is there something grander here?

So at the stations can be used for a lot more than identity.

We talk about identity first because we like to explain how like you can take such a really complex idea and describe it with something so simple.

But attestations, because they're simply essentially signed statements of entities saying things about things, it can be for anything.

It could be used for certification, all sorts of things that aren't directly tied to identity can be used for ticketing and What's interesting is in real life in the real world.

We're testing all the time You know, we say things about other people we sign documents But there's never been like a digital way to do this in a structured Standardizable way before And so that's what the magic of like, you know, with EAS being able to create a schema describing what you're testing about, what you might want to attest about, and then being able to attest with that schema.

I think that's really the revolution that EAS has kind of brought.

Yeah, if we think of like a notary service, if you were to sign like a mortgage document or some sort of important document, typically you have to get it notarized in front of someone.

That notary is essentially attesting that you were the person that signed that document, But we don't have a way to actually have, you know, a way to attest in a more structured way on blockchains.

We do have digital signatures, which gives a lot of authenticity to who's signing.

And we also have the verified timestamp, but we haven't been able to actually structure that in a way that is composable and more interoperable for people.

Okay, so I'm trying to like put this together, make this make sense in my mind.

So a few things maybe have been talked about.

The first I just want to make concrete is this idea of an attestation.

It's somebody saying a thing about someone else or making some claim on-chain.

What this mechanically looks like is on-chain with, say, a MetaMask type of prompt, I'm signing something with my private key.

So I own rsa.eth, that's my ENS, and it corresponds to an actual Ethereum address and I can sign things on-chain.

Let's say I'm using my ledger for this hardware device or MetaMask, I have to click through and actually attest that something is true.

Yes, but it's structured in a particular way.

Using the EAS standard, but yes, every attestation is signed with a wallet, with a private key.

So you have the authenticity knowing that this attestation came from the entity that's claiming.

And so it's coming from the entity that owns those private keys, that has physical access to those private keys.

It can even be a smart contract that attests.

Perhaps the smart contract receives some sort of inputs that it validates, and then once it gets these proper inputs, it attests to the entity that they've passed some sort of thing.

And Ryan, so like with social media today, when you're posting something, you're essentially just attesting to the post, right?

And then if David likes your post, he's attesting that he likes your statement.

But we haven't had like a core building block to be able to do that.

And I think 1 thing that we realized is like on chain is really good for a lot of things.

But we also want to make sure that EAS was accessible off-chain.

So EAS is also an off-chain protocol for making digital signatures as well.

Okay, I want to get into EAS, but yeah, that's an interesting point.

I guess all a tweet is an attestation that my account, the person who holds my username and password and is two-factor authenticated into my Twitter account is saying this thing, right?

that establishes my online Twitter reputation, basically, and is the basis for my social graph.

But I want to go back to something, because for somebody who's thinking at the primitive layer, just signing something with a private key and saying, yep, I approve this message, basically, you're saying that that's essentially what identity is?

I think that's the part that is a little bit mind-blowing at first, And the part that's kind of like back to the basics of this is like, you know, what is money?

Well, it's a, you know, a social scoreboard, I guess.

And, you know, like we all agree something's money, therefore it becomes money, right?

That's what you have to unlock to actually understand money.

And to David's point, it's something similar involved in understanding identity.

So you're saying all my identity is, is attestations that my peers, the social context through which I'm in, like make about me.

So like the nation state will attest that America, hopefully they attest this, that I'm an American citizen and I have a social security number and they will attest that, right?

I mean, whatever, the government database somewhere.

So the government of Canada will like attest that I'm Canadian.

And you know, if like, if I'm a member of a church or something, then my church might attest that I'm a member here, or if I'm a member of some other community, or if I'm a friend of someone, then they might attest that I'm their friend.

It's just people attesting certain claims, and there's nothing more than that?

– So it's not the claim so much that is your identity, it's how the entity looking at those claims values those attestations.

So for example, if I show you an attestation from Vitalik claiming that he believes that I'm a good person or something and you know it was signed from him, you might find value in that.

Maybe someone who doesn't care about Vitalik might not value that.

If I was to want to take out a loan, I would probably show the entity who I want to take a loan from attestations that are relevant that prove that I actually pay back my loans and that I'm a real person and That I have enough attestations where I don't want my record to be smeared, you know And then that might be enough for that entity but for some other entity they might require something else And that's what makes it super decentralized, because instead of just having 1 entity saying, like, oh, this person's a human, trust us always, right?

There can be other entities that say you're human.

There can be friends that say that you're human.

And depending on who you are and who's attesting, you might value those attestations or not.

And so this is the only way that I can imagine solving the decentralized identity problem.

You can't presuppose what identity really is.

Maybe I have an attestation that I was part of the Mickey Mouse Club or something, you know And there's something like maybe that's valuable to somebody somewhere, but you know to most people probably wouldn't care

Yeah, there's been a number of attempts at identity ever Honestly, even ever since the Bitcoin talk forums Like the early people coming into this industry realized the relationship between private keys and identity.

You know, if you sign a message and you are known to be the bearer of these private keys, then everyone can trust that you are the issuer of that message.

Like even the primitive days of crypto, when we were in crypto stone ages, we still figure this out.

And then ever since then, where there has been like a smattering of attempts of like people in the application layer, trying to go after identity, right, like world coin, for example, comes to mind, which was recently going through the crypto meta.

But even before that, right Circles, it was another attempt, Bright ID, you guys listed them.

And like that 1 comic, that 1 XKCD comic comes to mind where like, there's 14 standards for identity.

We need to make another identity play that aggregates all of them, and then the next panel is like, new problem, now there's 15 different identity standards.

I think what you guys are saying is that all of those attempts at identity, you can't go straight for identity at the app layer, you need to build the base building block, the primitive down below, and then maybe the applications can blossom.

Can you guys talk a little bit more about why you need the primitive before you have the app?

As I mentioned before, all these identity solutions, they're all moving in the right direction.

And people will value like even with WorldCoin, right?

1 is like some people don't care to have their eyeballs scanned and then the other people do.

It really just depends on the applications of like, do they care about WorldCoin's attestation that that person's a verified human, and would they consider that as a part of their identity?

But if all these fragmented solutions like WorldCoin, BrightID, you know, etc, don't have a common layer where they can communicate, you can't have an aggregate view of who someone might be and to give like builders and users the choice of how they define like who's trustworthy or not.

And so while I think like all these are moving in the right direction, they also tend to either tokenize or like try to extract value at the protocol layer, which if you think about like trust and like identity, it's kind of like oil and water.

You can't really mix like finance and like trust and identity at the same layer because someone's going to come in with a bigger budget and try to direct the narrative of like what is identity.

And it's usually for it might be their gain, right?

But if we truly have a credibly neutral base layer where any entity can make these types of statements from that, WorldCoin and all these other protocols can actually become more composable and actually helps them.

1 of the things I want to add is, in response to your question is, with these companies, if you don't have a base primitive, you end up having to presuppose a lot about what identity is.

I think this was like 1 of the biggest fails of like Uport.

They built in all of these presuppositions about what identity is trying to use like DID standards.

But there's so much more than just what's in that standard.

You can attest about, you know, there's so many different types of interaction intentions entities can have and you can't just pre-program them all into a smart contract or an application.

I think that's where these platforms have failed because if you have to sign on to something like a Uport, then you have to just assume like Uport has everything that you'll ever need.

And if it doesn't, then you have to use another platform and then you just create more fragmentation.

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187 - The Ethereum Attestation Service