Bryce Patrick and Steve Dakh from the Ethereum Attestation Service discuss the potential of attestation for decentralized identity and crypto. They explore the importance of attestations as a primitive and its role in defining identity. They explain the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) as a token-free, permissionless public good. They also discuss use cases, growth goals, and the significance of attestations in Web3. The chapter covers privacy, decentralized reputation, and the funding of EAS. They compare EAS with other identity solutions and highlight the limitations of soulbound tokens.
Read more
AI Summary
Highlights
AI Chapters
Episode notes
auto_awesome
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
Attestations on the Ethereum blockchain can verify the authenticity of digital content and prevent misinformation.
EAS offers a permissionless and standardized framework for creating and managing attestations, enabling different industries to adopt a common language.
EAS leverages the Ethereum blockchain and EVM for secure and widely adopted attestations.
EAS has the potential to transform industries beyond identity, facilitating trustworthy supply chain tracking, voting systems, and more.
Deep dives
The Importance of Attestations in the Digital Age
Attestations serve as a means to verify the authenticity and trustworthiness of digital content, especially in the face of increasing AI-generated content. By using digital signatures and timestamping on the Ethereum blockchain, attestations can preserve the historical accuracy of media and prevent the spread of misinformation. The ability to attest to the authenticity of digital content is crucial in maintaining trust and transparency in online interactions, particularly as technologies like AI pose new challenges to verifiability. Attestations also have broad applications beyond identity, including supply chain, voting, certification, and more. The Ethereum attestation service (EAS) provides a standardized schema and ledger for making and verifying attestations, both on-chain and off-chain, making it accessible and versatile for a wide range of use cases.
Advantages of EAS as a Base Layer Infrastructure
EAS offers a permissionless and standardized framework for creating and managing attestations, allowing the ecosystem to evolve organically around its base layer. With the flexibility to create and propose schemas for various types of attestations, EAS enables different industries and communities to adopt a common language and communicate effectively. The absence of a native token or centralized control in EAS ensures a neutral and open playing field, where any entity can attest to any subject, avoiding fragmentation and allowing for interoperability. EAS strives to provide the infrastructure that supports trust-creating mechanisms in an increasingly decentralized and AI-driven digital world. By offering a universal base layer for documenting and verifying attestations, EAS aims to improve the trustworthiness and authenticity of online interactions across diverse applications and industries.
The Role of Ethereum in EAS
EAS leverages the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and the Ethereum blockchain as its underlying infrastructure to provide a secure and widely adopted platform. While off-chain attestations do not necessarily require on-chain storage, the presence of the schema registry on the Ethereum blockchain ensures transparent and accessible schema metadata for all attestations. Additionally, the use of Ethereum's EIP-712 standard for signing off-chain attestations enables their verification by on-chain smart contracts, adding an extra layer of security and interoperability. The choice to build on Ethereum stems from its prominence as the leading blockchain platform with a vast developer community, making it the ideal foundation for EAS to serve as a global attestation infrastructure.
Future Potential and Impact of EAS
As a versatile and open infrastructure, EAS has the potential to transform various industries and facilitate trustworthy online interactions. Its applications extend beyond identity, enabling reliable supply chain tracking, voting systems, certification processes, and more. By fostering a reputation network and enhancing trust mechanisms, EAS aims to mitigate fraud, scams, and misinformation prevalent in the digital space. Preserving historical accuracy through attestations can combat AI-generated content manipulation and preserve the verifiability of media for future generations. With EAS as a standardized and accessible attestation framework, the vision is to create a more trustworthy and transparent online environment, benefitting individuals, communities, businesses, and society as a whole.
The Power of Attestation as a Global Decentralized Identity System
Attestation systems, like Ethereum, provide a decentralized and permissionless way to attest to various aspects of identity and information. This global decentralized identity system is seen as an undeniably positive development, even beyond financial use cases. The ability to attest to diplomas, KYC verification, and other non-financial use cases is seen as a crucial step in the evolution of Ethereum.
EAS as a Standard for Attestations and its Integration with Optimism
EAS, or Ethereum Attestation Service, is a powerful and versatile infrastructure for creating and verifying attestations on the Ethereum network. EAS has been adopted by Optimism as the core infrastructure for attestation-related applications. This integration ensures interoperability and creates a pathway for non-crypto institutions to start utilizing Ethereum-based attestation systems. Other identity protocols are also embracing EAS, as it provides a simple and accessible way to implement attestations without the need for a specialized developer skillset.
The Emergence of Trust Networks and the Importance of Attestation Aggregators
The use of attestations on Ethereum enables the creation of decentralized trust networks. These trust networks can be visualized and navigated, allowing users to build decentralized reputation systems. The aggregation of attestations and the ability to derive scores and metrics from them become vital in building a true decentralized reputation system. The application layer plays a crucial role in providing lenses for viewing and analyzing the wide array of attestations, with the potential for numerous applications to emerge in this space.
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? ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-eas/ ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ 📣 AAVE V3 is Here! http://app.aave.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:
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
