Notes from Devconnect Istanbul
November 2023 - Oliver JL Renwick - @mapachurro
For Technical Takeaways, scroll down. For color commentary, keep reading.
Last year at Marienbad; next year at Devcon
When I was going through my notebook this morning, on my Istanbul to Heathrow flight, out fell a sticker I got at Devcon VI, in Bogotá, advertising ETH Istanbul.
It’s a weird memory, because it seemed quite clear at the time: of course Next Year at Devcon would be Istanbul. It’s a huge web3 community, and crypto market in general. It’s one of the cultural capitals of the world; it has the infrastructure; and what better place to bring so many people together: The Crossroads Between East and West.
The time since then has been full of “Events, dear boy; events”.
Almost a year ago exactly to the start of Devconnect Istanbul, FTX definitively self-destructed, and finished the seesawing chaos that token prices had been going through since one long-ago Monday in May. And, in fact, the poster child for giving Millennials and neuro-atypicals a bad name was sentenced in what surely will not be the last case surrounding FTX close to that same anniversary.
So what’s the context going into Devconnect? I think the group chat collective wisdom is: “the vibes are fucked; and I’m aware that’s a privileged take”.
A punishing crypto winter is the worst of our worries. Turkey has since lived and died through horrific earthquakes; the war between Russia and Ukraine continues to exact its toll. The global macroeconomic situation could generously be described as uneven and full of surprises. I met an inspiring team at Devcon shipping Ethereum L2 anti-fake-news solutions to production for Verizon; at the time of writing, their GitHub repository has thirteen stars (mine included), and hasn’t merged changes since June. When I explained their technology and the apparent current state of the project to a room full of deep crypto OGs, someone chuckled, “Yeah, I think the bear market probably ate them.”
The vibes are, indeed, fucked.
Devconnect seemed like it wasn’t going to happen, for a while, as the steady beat of violence between Israelis and Palestinians exploded into something truly next level. People I care about, and who I think of as part of my conference support network and experience, couldn’t attend due to the reasonable risk to their life, being a Jew in Turkey.
And this is a privileged take; this is a backwards framing, talking about how enormous world events affected Devconnect.
Hear me out, though:
Point: It’s packet sniffing all the way down
I came here, not just to Istanbul, but to crypto and web3, to see if I could help Improve Things Somewhat.
When it was a bull market and the regulators were scrambling to catch up, I heard a lot of declarations that this technology will change the world: that we are going to enable greater autonomy at a personal and community level; that we were going to revolutionize transparency in business and government.
I heard that we were the raw material, and web2 was making us into a product: and that the whole machine had become so odious, that we were going to put our bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, that we were going to jam up the levers and make it stop.
Now autumn is fading into the winter of 2023. I’m visiting Turkey, the country with one of the largest national user bases of self-custodial crypto technology in the world. The country’s president, for the better part of twenty years, has been successfully implementing a modified version of the same playbook that Atatürk executed so adroitly a century before: changing the culture and norms of the society from the ground up.
The gleaming Istanbul airport, with exponentially more security checkpoints than water fountains, is bedecked with banners for BtcTurk, Turkish flags, and banners of Atatürk that would be big even by Soviet standards (you’ve heard of Turkish Airlines’ Chef on the Plane; now get ready for their Mosque in the Parking Lot).
A dear friend and long-time resident of Istanbul paid for our taxi to the airport before we could protest: as he put it,
“I paid the fare.
don’t worry.
I used magic Turkish powers.
called having a 21st century banking system.
ma fi muskeleh.”
Putting aside the ways that the Turkish alphabet has affected Wilson’s Arabic transliterations over the years, I’m coming out of Devconnect in a mode of pause and, perhaps, introspection.
If I’m the Turkish state (or any other), wherein I can:
-
Blanket the country in surveillance cameras and enforce some level of KYC on virtually every WiFi network available to the public (the “swipe your passport at a kiosk to get an access code” system at Istanbul Airport is truly stunning);
-
Implement a banking system that allows all the convenience, speed, and trust that crypto hasn’t quite managed to put together yet;
-
Influence things to such a degree that modern society approaches something like a balance between reactionary Islamism and neo-Futurism, between being ‘just as good as the rest of Europe’, while still somehow having street cred with fear-based Muslim worldviews,
...why in the world would I allow self-custodial crypto to just… exist?
One of the “guiding light” pieces in our technological space and ethos, Decentralize, Democratize, or Die, by Corey Doctorow, makes a powerful argument that decentralized and distributed technologies paired with robust cryptography are the only things enabling us to stretch out this period of relatively strong civil and personal rights in many societies around the world.
Without them, the consolidated forces of Profit Motive, Law, and Order have little that could stop them from turning every last little dirty anarchist co-op into a clean, well-lit security checkpoint.
My question for us is: Are we winning, son?
Does anyone physically present in Turkey have any reasonable basis to believe that they can do anything pseudonymously on web3, let alone anonymously?
In this context, with Doctorow's vision in mind: what shelter does web3 offer from the iron fist?
Counterpoint: This is how we win the adoption war
Doctorow is well-known, especially in crypto, for his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). One of the founders of that organization was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Bitcoin was born ostensibly as a reaction to the corruption and general malarky that was on full display in the financial meltdown of 2008. This "space" is one of counterculture and resistance: resistance to the Powers That Be, to the Man, to the Legacy Systems we're all locked into.
But that's not the narrative we're all hearing and repeating; for a while now, we've been talking about adoption. And increasingly, we've been acknowledging that we need to broaden our idea of what that adoption looks like: that we're going to need many ways for people to use this technology, to 'get into web3', in order to achieve the adoption we're looking for.
So when I see this in the Istanbul subway:
And those BtcTurk ads all over the airport, and an itinerant ad for USDT-based financial services on a screen in the Kapalıçarşı, I have to ask myself: Is this what adoption looks like?
If it were in my country, and my bank was advertising the ability to send money in multiple ways, using BTC, or ETH, or $SPANK, or fiat USD, using their custodial service, would I be bemoaning the death of freedom?
Or would I be slapping a WAGMI bumper sticker on my car and thinking about buying more ETH?
We've been telling people "we're working to integrate this technology with existing systems, in order to gain adoption".
What did we think would happen? That we would crypto-pill Aunt Norma as soon as she found out about the increased efficiencies of using a publicly-accessible, distributed ledger backend instead of an AWS MongoDB instance hosted in Columbus?
No: Adoption looks like this.
Adoption looks like existing regulatory, government, and business agencies folding the parts of our technology that are relevant to them into their existing processes and business models (...and regulations).
Does that mean the death of crypto-anarchism and pseudonymity?
No: It is, quite simply, necessary for our ecosystem to continue, and to build towards what we're trying to achieve. It is the cost of doing business.
Bottom line: I don't know if we're winning, but we sure are shipping some wild stuff: 🔥
If the vibes are fucked, none of the devs got the notification
In the last eleven months, I've heard experienced crypto people at many levels repeat the mantra of "It's a builder's market".
It strikes me as a platitude, but if it is, the developers who showed up at Devconnect apparently have been taking it... Literally.
The projects that have managed to stay operational have been shipping innovation, full stop.
The Ethereum Foundation, on their part, has been Moving Fast and Fixing Things.
So many EIPs have either been enshrined in the protocol or are on track to be folded in that the Mainnet of a year ago, still shaking off the the delerium tremens of the Merge, would be unrecognizable compared with something that almost resembles an organization seeking product-market fit and highly-requested user feature functionality.
Overall, I came out of Devconnect feeling like maybe, finally, I can start building the consumer-facing applications I have been envisioning since at least 2018.
Tech Takeaways
Across the events, conversations, hookahs and pocket hookahs, cats and cafes of Istanbul, there were clear topics that dominated.
Some were expected; others are things that I've literally only dreamed about, materializing less than twelve hours after telling my son, "No, that's not really possible. The other way around, yes. But no. Except--maybe."
EIP-4337
At some point, we'll have a good name for this; for now, let's call it by its EIP.
Hackathon idea: Create a product name acronym collision app.
EIP-4337 was the "obligatory topic" at every event that had speakers. And with good reason.
For the uninitiated or those on terminal information firehose burnout, EIP-4337 was implemented earlier this year, and essentially, allows smart contracts to create fully functional blockchain accounts, like the ones you create with a Secret Recovery Phrase. These accounts can then be used by humans, and can have additional functionality enabled by the contract that created them.
If that sounds abstract, that's because it is, intentionally. The idea was to create a fairly flexible and open standard through which developers could create lots of very relevant user experiences, including social recovery options: the ability to recover access to your account even if you drop your safe that contains the titanium plate on which you inscribed your 24-word SRP and your extra, secret, 25th word into the Marianas Trench. As one does.
Social Recovery and Onboarding the Next (??) Billion
Whoever came up with that line should get a prize in marketing. What first billion?
The utility and impact of this should be enormous. There are "web3-native" applications of it, for sure, but one of the most promising use cases for it, in terms of adoption and onboarding, is allowing users to link their Web2 and Web3 identities.
Web2 - Web3 User Funnels
For all those people out there who are interested in trying out web3, but are intimidated by SRP self-custody, the ability to create a web3 identity using their existing Apple, Google, or other identities could be a huge friction-reducer.
NextID was at ETHGlobal. Their product might be more appropriately categorized under "Decentralized IDs", but take a look at their website: it's a good illustration of the kinds of integrations that web2/web3 social recovery might look like.
Sponsored Transactions
Because, to be clear, they're not gasless.
Another big topic that's been brewing for a long time, and has come more fully into production through EIP-4337, is that of paying the gas for Someone Else's Transactions.
EIP-4337 enables this through a fairly complex set of smart contract functionality, including the figure of a "Paymaster", ie, a contract that pays gas for "user operations", which are the 4337-compliant version of transactions.
Integrated Wallets
The last concept here is the integrated wallet. These have actually been around for a while, and you might have encountered one. I first used one on EthicHub's platform, which is an excellent example of what Web3 UX could look like: it allows you to invest in their micro-loans platform using either fiat or crypto rails, with an EOA/SRP-based account, or you can have the dapp issue you a private key through the UI, which you can use immediately in the dapp.
Those accounts should be generated on the user's computer, not in the dapp, in order to avoid sending the key through the internet. But--you create an account using other authentication (email, etc.,) at the same time, and thus, if you lose that horribly long alphanumeric string, you can still recover it using your email.
Dark Horse: Delegation
There's a missing puzzle piece to all of this 4337-enabled functionality, which has been flying under the radar for lots of people, for the moment.
What if you could not only generate an account through a smart contract, but create accounts on behalf of other people, fund them or put NFTs in them, and send them the account? What if you could put conditions on it, say, "you can only use this during this period of time", or "you have to send a transaction of at least this amount"?
This functionality is known as delegatable capabilities, and is actively being developed.
Bottom line: stop complaining about Web3 UX, you have all the tools you need to fix it
At this point, with the tools that are being shipped, we have everything we need to make things work.
Integrate with the platform or identity you want to; use the payment rails you want; issue a crypto-based credit card with Rain (with whom I had a lovely chat in Istanbul, for sure), or have PayPal handle payments. Build delegatable functionality to grant your users EIP-4337-compliant accounts to control the kind of trouble they can get into, or cause. Use EIP-6963 to make sure your users can choose which wallet they want, instead of switching to a different browser profile.
And for the love of everything that's good, please use the MetaMask SDK, especially on mobile. We do not need to have broken deeplinks anymore, the thing just works.
We may be in a bear market, but when it comes to enabling UX... We've arrived.
My zk is more zero than your zk, and I can prove it
The Zero-Knowledge contingent was out in force at Devconnect.
L2 Days, a two-day event right next to Devconnect, was a big part of that. There were the faces you would expect to see, there: Scroll (who were handing out quick-dry hats which absolutely saved me in the late-autumn deluges of Istanbul), Linea, the friendly co-hosting team of L2Beat, Celo and Ankr. I saw an Aztec team walking around at one point, though I'm not sure I found their booth.
Aside from the networks themselves, I found much more interesting the ecosystem of services and tooling that support these networks, and use cases on them.
Aleo
I found a few representatives of Aleo--technically, representatives of the Leo Wallet team--in a sweaty basement of the ITU, towards the end of Not Devcon.
We had a really good conversation; their pitch could respectfully be described as "Yes, we're launching an alt L1 in 2023, because ZK is finally mature enough to fix all the personal privacy issues baked into Ethereum."
And their pitch was solid; there are significant caveats to personal privacy when you're talking about the pseudonymous nature of Ethereum.
I talked them through the alternate script of "I think your network solves for a lot of problems, and I think it could be an effective 'off-chain' technology provider for dapps that need that functionality", and it all seemed to make sense.
A practical example: What if we could put criminal history data on-chain?
It's immutable; you can't erase it; but you can, through using a combination of 4337-type functionality and delegation, associate private keys with legacy government-based identities.
Those private keys, controlled by the corresponding individuals, and capable of being restored through some brick-and-mortar identity verification process, would allow the individual to granularly reveal details of their criminal history.
In fact, using ZK, it would be possible to generate a certificate stating a lack of criminal history, (broadly used in immigration and visa processing), much faster than the processes used today; or a lack of felony record, another nuance that becomes very important in a wide range of circumstances.
There are other cases that would be very useful, as well: in many US states, having three Driving While Intoxicated charges on your record within ten years triggers additional penalties. The question of tracking this down and figuring it out is onerous and error-proone.
The combination of public blockchain technology, with private keys held by citizens, on its face seems like the right combination of efficiency creation and privacy protection.
And, to the point, we could do that with Aleo; again, on its face.
Tooling, Services, Engagement
L2Beat
The L2Beat team were the co-hosts of L2Days, along with Scroll. If you didn't know what you were looking at, it would be easy to glaze over their default landing page as "oh, it's another index".
But there's a lot going on under the hood; clicking into it a network, you get a detailled breakdown:
For those of us who work full-time in this space, it’s easy to forget that L2s are, in fact, still quite new, and that there are aspects of their design and operation that may not be fully baked yet. I think L2Beat’s take on this, making the information accessible and more comprehensible than sifting through copy on network decentralization roadmaps, is a huge help.
Oh, and Kaia, of the L2Beat team--you might have seen her walking around with a luxurious sweater and awesome glasses, solving problems--Thank you!
LimeChain
In addition to their just really aesthetically pleasing Ethereum-based logo, LimeChain struck me as something we need more of in the web3 space: Development teams for hire.
Yes, hacking together your own protocol, your own product, those things are important and we should encourage innovation.
But you know what else matters? Shipping a finished product. And you know what's hard? Getting the engineering skills, and enough of them, to do that on time.
LimeChain does more than just engineering consultation work; for my part, I was heartened to see a team showing up, looking professional, and running on a business model of Building Blockchain Apps.
POAP: "We Wrote A Whole Pamphlet About Our Product And Intentionally Never Defined POAP In It."
They're shiny and explain things almost without mentioning blockchain.
One standout presence at L2Days (and the entire week) was, arguably, the most prominent and OG L2 dapp: POAP.
Every stand at the event had a POAP you could mint; there was a first-of-its-kind POAP station near the entrance, with a wild capsule machine full of really amazing stickers, pins, and limited-run patches.
POAP has done more than most in “abstracting away” the technical backend of its product, and the experience of its product. They had these pamphlets floating around -- they were also part of the swag pack at ETHGlobal Istanbul -- that explained POAPs in a very consumer-friendly way.
In fact, they never even define POAP in the pamphlet.
I mulled that one over; on balance, I think this is a strong move in favor of comprehensibility and adoption. They focus, in the pamphlet, of explaining what POAPs are on the experiential and meaning level, not how they work.
I think this is good web3 product writing: focus on the experience, not the backend.
Inverter Protocol
The Inverter team was among the "impact booths" at L2Days, an area I always make a beeline for when I find out it's at a conference.
And the team had an innovative way of presenting what they're building; they had a whitepaper, love it, but they did not shill you with a 15-second jargon-filled elevator pitch.
Rather, they had a stack of laminated cards (and those were filled with jargon, and helpful infographics) that they laid out in front of you, explaining how their system of boilerplate smart contracts and toolkits would allow DAOs and businesses in web3 to modularly build workflows.
"I'm going to say something," I said after a few minutes of absorbing this, "And I mean it as a positive thing: This feels like you guys are building Confluence and Jira for web3."
"Absolutely," the representative responded, "that was part of our inspiration."
Oh, you say, DAO tooling, hasn't that been done?
I would encourage you to try out some of the big DAO tooling projects (look for things that end in -verse), and ask yourself whether they have everything you would need to manage a DAO-run project.
Does it have built-in smart contract boilerplate? Does it integrate with multisigs, of the type you use? Does it have documentation support, voting, community management? Does it have project management tooling?
**Frankly, compared with the Web2 solutions like Confluence, which may end up killing you through opinionated design decisions, but 9 times out of 10, just work, and at scale... **
…we have Not Arrived Yet for DAO tooling.
I'm very interested to see where Inverter ends up.
cookbook.dev
I managed to miss the cookbook.dev team in person, as I was forced to cut my visit to the Remix-hosted hookah hack event (!!!!) short, but aside from their gold-tier swag T-shirts, their product is what deserves a mention.
Their name is, surprisingly for the crypto space, descriptive and accurate:
The cookbook.dev team has scraped all the resources out there that have been made to build on, for example, Linea, or Arbitrum, or… Aave, or Binance, or Polygon, or Ethereum or--
…and then they’ve assembled them into recipes, which developers can use to make what they want.
Hat. Tip. Chef’s. Kiss.
The power of the Lens Protocol, and Nader Dabit's ability to make a founder go "wait, what?" onstage
Aave, and Lens, as always had a prominent presence across Devconnect events. RAAVE, generally the highest-demand party at big crypto conferences, was very conveniently located, just across the road from Devconnect, at what I think could be described as a cozy venue.
We had managed to forget a number of important things in the last-minute packing frenzy, but damn it, I made sure to get lizzybeth.eth's ghost dress made, so at least she looked on point:
The vibes were decidedly not fucked, although they were definitely heavily doused with cigarette smoke:
I saw Nader on the floor, absolutely in his lane and flourishing, and then I moderated a panel the next day, on web3 social media, on which he was a panelist.
Nader is a great advocate for his platform, and in his answer to my first question, managed to make the next speaker draw a blank and say essentially, "Well, I guess maybe I need to re-architect and make sure I integrate with Lens."
When we talk about L2s, and the power to bring people into crypto who aren't already here, there is a lot of potential in social media. That was the question Nader was addressing, and his answer was essentially:
We don't know what the innovative social media use case will be that could bring in millions of users.
But what we have, with Lens, is a robust set of tools and developer-enabling resources that gives builders everything they need to make that use case, and a framework that ensures that the resulting social connections between users, and intellectual property made by the app's users, stays with them, and not with the platform.
The Dark Horse of Zupass
If you signed up for Devconnect, you would have gotten a login to a thing called Zupass. This was the website/interface that held your ticket. It looked very plain, just sort of... Green. Simple.
But it was far from that; under the hood, it was full of ZK technology and the most attention-grabbing activity at Devconnect.
For a full explanation, see the section below on getting weird.
Do you think there's something we should change about our infrastructure?
And if so, why is it bombing AWS from space?
If there was one thing that made me say, "I've spent fifteen years working in linguistics in the public sector, I really need to hard pivot into crypto," it was the potential power of IPFS and Filecoin.
Why? Well, remember that time in fall of 2021 when Facebook's servers went down and the entire internet broke? You couldn't even send WhatsApp messages?
Centralized Points of Failure Running on Siloed, For-Profit Corporate Infrastructure.
We embraced the anarchical vision of the Internet, only to default to a funding model that relies on corporate greed.
Filecoin Lives
The way Filecoin was pitched to me by a small IPFS team in February 2018 was: "So, you'll be able to rent out extra space on your laptop, and you won't be able to see what's on it, but you'll be helping the Internet be more resilient and resistant to failure."
Well, it turned out that to be a storage provider you'll need not so much a laptop, as a multi-processor server with at least 256GB of RAM, and a really solid RAID-based storage setup.
And then the protocol hit a hiccup: they had all the storage they could need, and they had a good tokenomics model for paying for it, but... The latency was really high. This was not on-demand video level retrieval.
Once again, the ecosystem was going to have to default to AWS all the way down.
…Enter the Saturn Network.
The Saturn CDN Network
A CDN is a Content Delivery Network. This is a part of the Internet that you might not know about unless you've messed around with deploying websites.
Basically, it's a system whereby website data gets cached in high-availability servers, often all around the world, ensuring that your website can be retrieved quickly, rather than having to load the whole thing from long-term, high-latency storage on another continent.
This was the missing piece for Filecoin and IPFS, and it's here.
OK, cool DevOps, bro. What can I do with it? You can host your website or app on it, instead of on some legacy Web2 mildly scuzzy hosting service. Your data is on IPFS, Saturn gets it live and available, and we've got something approaching a full web3 stack.
Full web3 stack? Really? Yes, and no: We've got the big parts of the infrastructure. But for some high-value and high-use use cases, we need some middleware.
Luckily, there are big brains doing just that:
LivePeer: Verifiable Video and divesting from YouTube
In my professional life, the fact that I work at a web3 tech company, and have to put our tutorials, community calls, and whatever video we make on YouTube is highly frustrating. In order to embed a video in our docs on self-custodial technology, we need to... Sign in with Gmail?
…Enter Livepeer.
Livepeer has been providing a network and functionality for video streaming for a while. I went to a really informative deep-dive session where we talked about a set of tools they're building to create verifiable video: the end goal being the ability to know whether a video you're seeing is "authentic": created by the person who posted it, or modified by someone; is it a fake? Etc.
On one level, this is addressed using robust attestation systems and social networks of trust. But if we want to truly know whether a video is real, we'll have to go all the way down to the hardware level--using chips embedded in the cameras taking the videos to begin with.
Which brings us back to our on-chain NFCs from the top:
"We've spent the last six months making it work well. Now we're going to start to get weird."
If you don't have a website an NFC project, you don't exist
The ONCHAIN NFC sticker I mentioned previously has more to it than just a punch line.
The arx team is going all the way down to the chip, here: the NFC chip itself is registered as the minter of the NFTs.
So, is the NFC in the NFT? No--but the NFC is on-chain, as in, registered with the Ethereum Reality Service.
This is a corollary of how we were thinking about verifiability all-the-way-down in the LivePeer session. In order to know if the video is "authentic", it has to be somehow verified, signed, or linked to the camera that produced the video itself.
In this instance, you need to be able to verify that the request to create an NFT came from a duly-authorized NFC chip.
Is this useful? Probably!
If we're talking about instances of minting high-value or high-security NFTs (think concert tickets, or potentially, POAPs which subsequently grant you physical access to an event), knowing that the NFT was minted by something with the requisite level of authority would be very important.
But my choice for NFC project of the week absolutely goes to the blood, sweat, and prototyping tears that went into these amaaaazing NFC-bearing nails:
How do you get them?!? Well, they were granted to the select attendees of the SheFi Summit on Sunday.
Any crypto event I go to from now on out, that doesn’t start with a cyborg manicure, just… Will feel a little underwhelming.
Cartesi, inexplicably deploying full RISC-V Linux environments to Mainnet
And apparently setting up an app that's got a bunch of Cartesi tokens in it, about $9000 worth on Sunday of Devconnect, and growing all the time, as a challenge to see if anyone can hack it.
You might not have heard of Cartesi; I met them at ETH Denver 2023, and their whitepaper melted my brain.
If I can sum it up, and I'm not sure I can: you can have a full Linux environment, running an app/dapp, which... rolls up to mainnet using an Optimistic rollup.
Another way of putting it: Linux Virtual Machine to Ethereum Virtual Machine rollups. Let's Get Weird, indeed.
~fR0GcRyPt0~
And so we come to the Thing that No One Expected at Devconnect: NFT frogs that aren't NFTs, built on zk technology hacked together at crypto's Burning Man replacement.
That Zupass ticketing interface I mentioned earlier? Well. Once you got to Devconnect, something else appeared on the website; fR0GcRyPt0:
The experience is a combination between a text-based adventure game, Pokemon, and the blockchain-native FOMO-like anxiety of Dark Forest. Essentially, you have access to the SWAMP, and you can search every fifteen minutes for frogs:
but wait, there's more
Because of course there is. If you join the Telegram--or were lucky enough to find a special QR code on a card lying around Devconnect--you could access more realms, and find more frogs, including (of course) rare, legendary, and mythical frogs.
And you unleash this weird little side quest at a crypto conference? Oh, it's on.
The fR0GcRyPt0 experience, between Zupass, IRL interactions, and its corresponding Telegram group, rapidly leads to this:
PCDs and the Weird Shit That Got Built at Zuzalu
These frogs, though on their face look like some rudimentary NFT interface, are not ERC-721 or -1155-based tokens. They're something much newer, and much weirder: They are made from PCD, or Proof-Carrying Data.
From what I've been able to tell from the fR0GcRyPt0 interface, and the bit of their docs I've read, these little snippets of data are ZK proofs which, when authenticated using your Zupass password, can be loaded as frogs that belong to you.
FAQs
Can they be exported? They can, absolutely.
Can I load them into MetaMask and trade them on Opensea? No.
Is that the way we're heading? As of the time of writing, I saw a cryptic mention of "the market beckoning" in Frogcrypto this morning.
Based on the associated tools that this team put together--including a zk-based community voting system used at Zuzalu--I would say there's a high likelihood of that.
On a personal note, I have to send a big thank-you to the fR0GcRyPt0 team, for building something awesome, and something that my 11-year-old son could absolutely latch onto when the technical gobbledygook got too boring, and for helping us make sure he got a Froge Hat.
At one point, he had my phone and my wife's phone open, had a 15-minute timer on loop on my watch, and was catching frogs, on the Telegram on both phones, sharing clues and connecting with people to solve riddles.
For more information on why, maybe, we haven’t seen a Dark Forest round in a while, check out https://pcd.team.
Don't worry, web3 wallet teams are still absolutely anarchist co-ops
I finished out my Devconnect week at Wallet UnCon, where lizzybeth.eth and I gave a well-attended session titled "Why Should I Use Your Wallet?". We took some home-grown market research--talking to our neighbors about what a wallet is ("the thing in my pocket"), what web3 is, and why they see absolutely no reason to use it.
Wallet UnCon itself was a wild ride; bumblefudge, the content organizer, got up on stage and had us all jump into a HackMD document, where we voted on sessions we wanted to attend, using Xs. As in, the letters.
Literally, we were a room full of wallet builders and fringe professionals like myself, collectively creating the conference's agenda by live-editing a Markdown document.
I had to ask for help (had to log in with google, lmao), and the man who graciously came to my aid was @LefterisJP. How embarrassing, a technical writer not knowing how to navigate HackMD. Thank you, Lefteris, for your willingness to help out!
Bumblefudge encouraged us to work together, knowing that not everyone in the room might be comfortable with Markdown syntax; "I wouldn't want to throw you into the deep end at your first anarchist co-op," he quipped.
I had another session planned, that was highly up-voted; I was going to present on documenting self-custodial technology, and how we continue to work on documenting the MetaMask Vault Recovery tool.
Unfortunately, there was a mixup at some point in that live-edited Markdown document, and I mistakenly thought my session was half an hour later than it was scheduled for: I showed up to an empty room. I guess that’s how it goes in the deep end of an anarchist co-op.
That's OK, though: Now I have the know-how, and the tools, to give my talk in a video livestream, using Livepeer, and save it to IPFS, and upload it to Education DAO, so it will be available whenever, wherever, forever.