- The Ethereum Attestation Service is a new public good that aims to provide a decentralized identity solution using attestations.
- Attestations are signed statements made by entities about something, and they can be used to prove the existence of historical content and save it from being replicated by AI in the future.
- Decentralized identity is currently being approached by building siloed platforms that only work within their own ecosystems, but the Ethereum Attestation Service aims to provide a free and open-source solution that can be used across different platforms.
- By using attestations, the power of decentralized identity can be unlocked, allowing for a more expressive and inclusive crypto economic future.
- The Ethereum Attestation Service team is working on building the necessary building blocks to achieve this vision.
- The episode discusses the importance of attestations, their potential applications, and their role in unlocking new opportunities in the crypto space.

- The video discusses the concept of identity and how it is formed through attestations.
- Attentions are statements made by entities about other entities and can be used to build trust and reputation.
- The lack of a common language and framework for attestations has led to the development of various identity protocols.
- Attentions can be used for more than just identity, such as supply chain, voting, and certification.
- EAS (Eth2.0 Attestation Standard) aims to create a structured and standardized way to make attestations on-chain and off-chain.
- Identity is essentially a collection of attestations made by peers and institutions.
- The video highlights the similarities between understanding identity and understanding money as social constructs.

- Identity is not just about people attesting certain claims, but also about how those claims are valued by different entities.
- Different entities may value attestations differently based on their own preferences and criteria.
- Decentralized identity solutions aim to address this by allowing multiple entities to attest to someone's identity.
- Previous attempts at identity solutions have often lacked a common layer for communication and have failed to address the diverse nature of identity.
- EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) provides a base primitive for decentralized identity by offering a schema registry and an attestation ledger.
- Schemas define the structure of attestations and can have associated smart contracts for additional functionality.
- EAS supports both on-chain and off-chain attestations, with off-chain attestations being portable and gasless.
- Off-chain attestations can be passed between peers, stored privately, or verified on a server.

- Attestations can be made without cost and can be verified and timestamped on-chain.
- Attestations can be self-attested or attest to the authenticity of something else.
- Different attestations have different form factors, similar to birth records, diplomas, or credit scores.
- The EAS system allows for various standards and form factors for attestations to be proposed and adopted.
- Smart contract logic can be incorporated into attestations, opening up new possibilities.
- Off-chain components are important as not all attestations need to be on-chain transactions.
- The EAS system allows for permissionless schemas and standards to be proposed and adopted.
- The flexibility of attestations can be overwhelming, but finding one use case can still be valuable.
- Hackathons have shown a wide variety of applications for attestations, such as in medical, cross-chain, and open-source software fields.
- Interoperability and standardization are key for the value of attestations.
- The team behind EAS does not have a token or venture funding.

- The team discussed the benefits of not having venture funding or incentives that other startups may have in the space.
- They aim to build a standard and primitive infrastructure for anyone to use, without wanting to own anything.
- The goal is for various platforms and institutions to use their technology for attestations, creating a more trustful online experience.
- They believe digital signatures and attestations are necessary in the digital age to combat fraud, misinformation, and AI-generated content.
- Ethereum plays a role in providing the infrastructure for digital signatures and attestations, and the team chose it because of its popularity among developers.
- The team believes that Ethereum has bootstrapped a global decentralized attestation operating system, which is valuable for the world regardless of financial interests.

- The speaker reflects on the value of a global decentralized attestation operating system computer, suggesting it is beneficial for the world even without a focus on finance.
- They discuss the need to decentralize non-financial aspects of life, such as information and identity.
- The EAS (Ethereum Attestation System) is highlighted as a solution to decentralizing attestation and solving hard problems.
- Optimism, a project focused on attestation, has adopted EAS as its core infrastructure, leading to more widespread adoption.
- Use cases for EAS include attesting to roles in a DAO, domain registries, quadratic voting, and Gitcoin passport stamps.
- Compliance with the ERC standard allows for interoperability and eliminates the need for implementing multiple protocols.
- The EAS schema allows for trust in specific attestations from different addresses.

- Arbitrum is a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions that is accelerating the Web3 landscape.
- Projects in the DeFi and NFT ecosystems have already deployed on Arbitrum 1.
- Arbitrum Nova is becoming a Web 3.0 gaming hub and social dApps like Reddit are using Arbitrum.
- Arbitrum Orbit allows users to build their own layer 3 using Arbitrum's secure scaling technology.
- It offers faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees compared to Ethereum.
- Attestations are being discussed in the context of web 2.0 profiles and social reputation.
- The idea of building a decentralized reputation system based on attestations is explored.
- The need for an application layer to manage and view attestations is highlighted.

The Ethereum Attestation Service aims to provide a decentralized identity solution using attestations. It promotes a free and open-source solution that can be used across different platforms. Attentions are signed statements that can be used to prove historical content and build trust. The Ethereum Attestation Service team is working on building the necessary infrastructure for decentralized identity. It allows for on-chain and off-chain attestations, with off-chain attestations being portable and gasless. The system supports various standards and form factors for attestations, and smart contract logic can be incorporated. The team aims to create a global decentralized attestation operating system for a more trustful online experience. The EAS has been adopted by Optimism and has use cases in DAO roles, domain registries, quadratic voting, and more. Compliance with the ERC standard allows for interoperability. The EAS schema allows for trust in specific attestations. The Arbitrum suite offers secure Ethereum scaling solutions with faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees. The concept of building a decentralized reputation system based on attestations is explored, and the need for an application layer to manage and view attestations is highlighted.

- The future of identity applications will likely involve multiple providers offering different lenses for viewing attestation data.
- Aggregating and making sense of attestation data will be important, as well as open-source tools for users to run and derive scores themselves.
- Entities like Equifax could start aggregating attestation data and providing different views about entities.
- Attestations are currently siloed in Web 2, but in Web 3, there could be multiple front-end UIs for viewing attestations, making it less of a siloed network.
- Privacy is considered in attestation systems, with the focus on not putting private data on the blockchain and using off-chain attestations or zero-knowledge proofs.
- Tools are being built to attest to private data while preserving privacy, but there is currently no generalized solution for zero-knowledge proofs.

- EAS is a tool being built that helps developers solve problems related to attestations and identity.
- EAS allows for the creation of schemas and attesting with encoded data.
- There is overlap between EAS and Sign In With Ethereum, but they have different purposes and functionalities.
- EAS has been bootstrapped and received grants for funding.
- The goal is to become a standard and build non-siloed applications.
- EAS is not supportive of soulbound tokens as a concept for identity and reputation.
- The age of attestations as a service is seen as the next phase in crypto development.

- The speaker believes that attestations are a simple solution to a complex problem and are easy for developers to use.
- They have a website and EAS scan, which is similar to Ether scan, where users can browse and make attestations.
- They have built tools and believe that EAS is useful for many things, and are excited to see the non-financial use cases that people come up with.
- The speaker believes that attestations help solve edge cases and speed up development in the crypto space.
- The Bankless community is thanked and the episode ends with disclaimers about the risks of crypto.

- The future of identity applications will involve multiple providers offering different lenses for viewing attestation data.
- Aggregating and making sense of attestation data will be important, as well as open-source tools for users to run and derive scores themselves.
- Entities like Equifax could start aggregating attestation data and providing different views about entities.
- Attestations are currently siloed in Web 2, but in Web 3, there could be multiple front-end UIs for viewing attestations, making it less of a siloed network.
- Privacy is considered in attestation systems, with a focus on not putting private data on the blockchain and using off-chain attestations or zero-knowledge proofs.
- EAS is a tool being built to help developers solve problems related to attestations and identity.
- EAS allows for the creation of schemas and attesting with encoded data.
- EAS has received grants for funding and aims to become a standard for non-siloed applications.
- The speaker believes that attestations are a simple solution to a complex problem and are easy for developers to use.
- The Bankless community is thanked and disclaimers about the risks of crypto are mentioned.

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
-----
RESOURCES

EAS
https://twitter.com/eas_eth
https://attest.sh/

Steve Dakh
https://twitter.com/stevedakh
-----
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 just, 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 Web 2 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 will become much more, 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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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 is great.

We're excited to chat, help educate more about attestations, and yeah, 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.

That's kind of like where cryptos is destined to go.

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.

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 the identity?

Alright, 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.

And that might not be, 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 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.

So we started to think about identity, and we're 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 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 testing 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, you know, like Bryce's, you know, selection and 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?

And so I remember coming to this realization, when I was born, my mom named me Steve.

You could say that she attested to my name.

And so I went to school and the teachers attested to my grades.

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

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

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 could just attest about anything at all.

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, it 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 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.

And how is it a primitive, like 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 altogether, 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

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 in the trust.

But if you, David, wanted to go get a loan from a bank, you might have to go to that bank and provide all this 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, he's trusting that you're actually gonna follow through on that.

And so if we 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.

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

Is this a conversation specifically attestations?

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

So, attestations 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.

There's, you know, if you start, 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 like kind of brought.

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 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.

So I'm trying to like put, put this together, make this make sense in my own 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 a MetaMask type of prompt, I'm signing something with my private key.

I own rsa.eth, that's my ENS and it corresponds to an actual Ethereum address.

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.

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, if David likes your posts, 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 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.

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

I guess all a tweet is 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?

And 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, what is money?

We all agree something's money, therefore it becomes money.

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

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

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

So like the nation state will attest that, you know, 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.

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 claims so much that is your identity.

It's how the entity looking at those claims values those attestations.

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'm actually, I actually pay back my loans, and that I'm a real person.

And that I, you know, I have enough attestations where I don't want my record to be smeared.

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 like, 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, you know, 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 that's, that's why I like, this is the only way that I can imagine solving the decentralized identity problem.

You can't Presuppose, you know what identity really is it can be it can be made up of a lot of things Maybe I have an attestation that I was part of the Mickey Mouse Club or something.

Maybe that's valuable to somebody somewhere, but 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.

The early people coming into this industry realized the relationship between private keys and identity.

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.

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

And then ever since then, there have been a smattering of attempts of people in the application layer trying to go after identity.

WorldCoin, 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?

See all Bankless transcripts on Youtube

Ethereum Attestation Service: Unlocking Decentralized Identity