Exploring the crypto swamp, Istanbul edition

Here, we see Ethereum nerds (wearing frog hats) in their natural habitat.

Merhaba from London. Lucy Harley-McKeown here—I’ve just arrived home from Istanbul, where thousands of blockchain developers and Ethereum devotees were marching around in frog bucket hats, sending streams of pictures of the local urban wildlife (cats) on Telegram groups, and discussing the building blocks of the future internet.

This was the latest installment of Ethereum’s Devconnect, where coders hash out the next generation of cryptographic tech and, it seems, try to explain the real life use cases and products behind it. While many of the ideas are still maddeningly confusing and abstract to people without computer science or mathematics PhDs—sorry, but what is ZK ECDSA other than a high-scoring Scrabble deck?—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had stumbled into some kind of sci-fi experiment meant to replace the whole edifice of Big Tech with something better. 

You could accuse the hat-clad Ethereum crowd of being unserious, but there was a sense of purpose among the attendees and in the talks that went beyond the usual sales-y narratives that pervade other crypto events.

Exploring the swamp: Zupass

In the spirit of the conference being something of a petri dish for new ideas, Devconnect ticketing took the mantle and ran with it.

At a conference with thousands of attendees, ticketing was done for some events via Zupass, an experimental product developed originally in Zuzalu. Attendees accessed tickets through a portal that looks like an online folder library, a thing which its creator, pseudonymously known as Gubsheep, says is in fact an example of a “fundamentally new” way to store and transport data online. 

The tech behind Zupass lets the holder store information in the form of a zero-knowledge proof. This allowed them, for example, to prove they were authorized to go to the conference without revealing any other information about themselves. The proof is turned into a QR code or other form that is easily scanned by other devices.  

Theoretically, Zupass will let you store “proof” of anything—you can convert any document you want, and redact any detail you don’t want to transmit. 

The platform also allowed attendees to access a Telegram group using ZK tech and play a game called FROGCRYPTO… This is where the hats come in. 

Here’s how it worked: Zupass could generate a cryptographically unique image of a frog every 15 minutes. People who collected 50 frogs could then find the frog booth at the conference and cash in their proofs for a green prize. While some people set alarms 15 minutes apart, and coders savvily spent their time writing scripts that could automate the process of clicking the “search the swamp” button—sadly, I never made it past 20 frogs (if you need proof… I have it).

As conference attendees gathered on the virtual lilypad, it became clear that this new portal isn’t just about a cool accessory. Today’s tech giants collect and hoard data like dragons. It’s to the point now that anything you do online is instantly hoovered up, aggregated, analyzed, and used to bolster an all-seeing, personalized digital dossier. The current mainstream infrastructure isn’t built for normal people to have any way to protect their own identity online, or to differentiate themselves from robots. 

This way of sending and storing data is about proving that you’re trustworthy, proving you’re not a bot, and doing so in a way that doesn’t reveal any more information other than the thing you’re trying to tell someone. In theory, this type of portal could be used to encode actual identity documents, information about health, your professional credentials… or it could simply be the basis for another amphibious romp. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to searching the swamp.

‘Paths to Foreverness:’ Autonomous Worlds

Meanwhile, in a galaxy two floors away (in a building that had the un-futuristic look and feel of a mall), gaming devs were gathered to plot the creation of several new universes. A gaggle of twenty-something dudes was buzzing with excitement over “autonomous worlds”—various games built on different versions of blockchain tech—that they insist are becoming realer by the day. 

In-between panel talks, people huddled around, play-testing retro-looking games with titles like This Cursed Machine, Network States, Primodium, and Loot Survivor. 

Notable among the attendees were two elder statesmen: Hilmar Veigar, CEO of CCP Games and one of the original minds behind the massively multiplayer game EVE Online, and David Amor, CEO of Playmint and former EA Games and PlayStation stalwart. 

On a panel alongside Rafael Morado from the on-chain game development firm Lattice and moderator Arthur Röing Baer of Moving Castles, the two laid out the size of the opportunity, and what it might take for a blockchain-based game to go mainstream. 

Amor said that making games that users can permissionlessly add to (an idea that goes hand in hand with blockchain development) could be the answer to the fact that there hasn’t been a “technical unlock”—a stepwise improvement in the technology powering games—in gaming development in about a decade. The last such evolution came through the move from console or PC to games based on mobile phones. Technical unlocks lead to the introduction of new markets for the gaming industry, with blockchain allowing you to do something “brand new.” 

Veigar, on the other hand, seems to have been captivated by the idea that building a game on a decentralized system will mean it can stick around longer than any company or centrally controlled, profit-seeking enterprise would. But hand-in-hand with this huge opportunity goes the fact that blockchains place “absurd constraints” on those trying to wrangle with them. 

Still, he said, this kind of development is a “credible path to foreverness,” adding: “The industry was spawned by people who became good at working within constraints.”

If gaming devs weren’t grappling with blockchain, though, there would just be another technical thing standing in the way of the next blockbuster gaming hit. “It’s fucking hard to make a game,” Veigar said—a point all the attendees could probably attest to.

The question remains: If or when that breakthrough game or trend does come along, will all the tinkering, grand narrativizing, and painstakingly crafted infrastructure have been worth it? Watch this space…

Card Carrying Cryptographers: Jubmoji

Snapping back to the present, a team of bright-faced engineers sent attendees of a session at ProgCrypto on a different kind of treasure hunt, with tech that’s supposed to be so easy to use you could “onboard your grandma.”* 

Jubmoji makes cards, the kind you use to tap into your office or gym, that bring together three technologies: NFC chips, a secure element chip (a microprocessor that can store sensitive data), and ZK proofs.

To demonstrate what the cards could actually do, the team designed Jubmoji.Quest, an interactive game where you can wield your cards to create “jubmojis” that generate privacy-preserving proofs. Jubmojis are digital signatures stored entirely on your device—in this case, tied to emojis. 

According to the blurb on Jubmoji’s website: 

Jubmojis are unique and verifiable signatures. "Jub" comes from the "Baby Jubjub Curve," the elliptic curve [a piece of tech designed to manage digital identity] found in 2019 by Barry WhiteHat, Marta Bellés, and Jordi Baylina. Our cards use this curve alongside zero-knowledge proofs to generate secure signatures, represented by emojis.

Here’s what that means for your grandma: Your data never leaves your possession unless you choose to share it. You can prove that you met someone, attended an event, or joined a trusted group with the tap of a chip. It’s a new way to port and encode interactions using cryptography, which doesn’t mean allowing the world to access your deepest darkest secrets, or any detail on a document—unless you specifically authorize it. 

Some attendees of Devconnect left with green bucket hats, others left with digital proof they’d been tapped by a Jub card. Pick your ZK fighter, I guess. 

*Results with your grandma may vary.

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