Now that we have the uh the Practical stuff out of the way uh let's actually move on to our uh presenters so uh we as as usual it's becoming a bit of a tradition here on these master classes we have a warm-up question for ad and Alexia so uh Clos what do you have for them so Alexia ad I want to ask you how did you end up in the web 3 world and why did you join a privacy project hey guys start oh thank you hey s um it's a pleasure to be here um so how did I join the Privacy ecosystem and the web through ecosystem so this started in 2016 it's a bit of a cliche story um but at the time I was a student at a business school and I was looking into investing the little bit of money that I had um and I had a Trader friend who told me to look into an emerging Tech called the blockchain uh through my research I stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper uh I love the rational uh and the philosophy and I decided to join the industry this officially happened in 2017 when I started working for a set like SSI protocol selfing identity uh protocol so everything that has to do with the idea of decentralized identity um and while I was working there I became increasingly more interested in the Notions of uh trust uh Power and privacy um and I started working uh on a privacy oriented project with a friend who's a cryptographer um which was called Enigma uh which we managed later on to get incubated at Modzilla but we had issues monetizing it uh you know which is something that we're solving a n um and so because of these issues I rejoined uh a full-time job at Tes which some of you may know which is an L1 um stayed there a few years later on join a def a defi protocol as a head of growth um but throughout time and throughout the years uh I wanted to take a deeper dive into the text side of things and to the pr like privacy side of things as well uh which were topics that I was fascinated with um and I had been following them for a while uh and here I am now as deah so you know it's like the dream come true uh it's been a while right so far but I'm super happy uh because I love the team and I love the cause so that's me I there I think it's your turn okay yeah next up yeah thanks uh thanks for having me studo and clemon and also great intro Alexia um I've got a lot to live up to but my story started in 2017 as well funny enough um by that time I had spent a number of years in management consulting for my sins um and I had been looking into web 3 as well and I was pretty sure that it was going to change the worldwide web as we knew it um and then I joined the VC firm to invest in in web three companies um I figured this was the best way for me to get my foot in and to to have access to a breadth of projects doing a lot of interesting things fast forward to today as head of business de developments for Nim um I believe that privacy is very important because it's um it's actually a right I see it as a right for everyone rather than a privilege it's important for everyone to be able to have control of their data and to say where they share it and when they share it so that's my story thanks for sharing and I guess without further Ado we should probably just hand over the stage to you guys and uh allow you to take it away okay so slid I can't see the slides I don't know if they're up should they be up oh okay nice now they're up no they are okay nice so in today's presentation we're basically going to talk about three things web three privacy and Nim or Nim privacy web three in with however order you want to take that um and during the time that we have together um what we'd like to do is try to make people well try to make you understand why privacy is increasingly becoming a necessity um not only in the digital and web 3 realm but as well as uh you know how it translate into the physical one and to do this uh so next slide please to uh so to do this I'd like to start off uh with a quote from one of the books that I find uh to have uh invaluable impact uh on the matter so I'd leave a few seconds to everyone uh to read it uh because it's quite a mindful so actually let me know when you're done uh reading it that'd be uh great oh no suda not the next slide no go on to the previous slide okay thank you um so basically so I'll read the quote for those of you who are on the phone or whatever uh so it reads us personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of Behavior information processing is developing therefore into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct um and so the question that I wanted to ask the audience or S uh or youo um was to know whether you knew where this code came from but now we do know because it's on the next slide so we can go to the next slide but thanks sud um so this quote comes from a book uh that is written by uh shashana zubba uh which is called the age of surveilling capitalism um shashana is a Harvard professor at the Harvard Business School she's also a faculty associate at the Harvard Law School um and a center called the burkman clein center for internet and Society uh which is basically a research center uh within Harvard University that focuses on the study of the crypto space um and I think if I remember correctly it was founded in 96 um so basically to some extent we could argue that this lady knows what she's talking about next slide please.

So the premises uh of the book is basically that surveillan well what the author argues is that surveillance capitalism youy claims human experience as a free raw material for translation into what she calls behavioral data um which are declared as proprietary behavioral Solus fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as machine intelligence and used to feed what she calls uh behavioral Futures market and so basically um well the story of Serv capitalism is a modern one but the book takes us through the 70s and the 80s um to understand where all that came from how it developed Etc um and the key message here is basically that prior changes to capitalism help loen regulations and change attitudes uh for the online age um so hopefully all hope is not lost um but we need to take action um and how do we do that well you wouldn't be here if you did not have any idea on how to do that already next slide please so as I mentioned previously today we're going to talk about three things um and web 3 being one of them um so the first thing that we're going to focus is the quick history of web 3 next slide please so for those of you who have been in theb 3 space for a while uh you probably have seen this slide or variations of this slide pretty much 100 times uh but it's still interesting to go through it so I'll quickly do so um so at the very beginning there was web one uh which was well stemmed from um you know 0 9080 sorry uh to 2000 and it's what we call the static web uh it basically began as a collection of static web pages uh with basic text and limited Graphics um which was primarily used for sharing information um and research amongst uh academics and governments uh we all know how the web started um and it was quite Limited in terms of you know the feature of the creative capabilities for users slowly slowly in the year 2000 to the year 2010 we evolved um and got to what we call Web 2 which is the Social Web also called The Social Web um and basically cized by user generated content um but of course through the year with user generated content we saw the emergence of what we call data commoditization which is the topic that you know the author shashana uh talks extensively in her book um and I was still a student at the time but I remember how trendy a few years almost a decade ago you know big data and analytics were I was in a business school program and I remember like all my friends wanted to become um data analyst and I'm not arguing that data is a bad thing not so because I truly believe that you know we need data points to understand the world uh and to be able to improve ourselves um but the relationship that we have with whomever uses that data and our data should be consensual right um otherwise it leads to cases such as Cambridge analytica which we've seen uh and that data can very easily become a political instrument for manipulation which is the whole argument that shash makes in her book uh which is very valid today and especially in the web 3 World um and so all that led to the web 3 World um which uh started in the 2010ish years to today and the idea of the web 3 world is that it's a semantic and decentralized world uh that's characterized um by a more context aware web so basically giving machines the ability to process and understand information um data ownership control uh and privacy by Design privacy by Design um next slide please cool um so when we asks our when we ask ourselves the questions oh why web three why do we need it um we can't really answer them without looking at Bitcoin I don't know if you can see it this one can you see it someone it's oh no okay well anyhow it's just oh no it doesn't work anymore sorry it was my little Bitcoin neon um that I had taken for this very special occasion um and so if we look at Birth of Bitcoin uh we really start understanding uh how phys well needs in the physical or in the real world uh translate into the digital realm and vice versa um because again uh Bitcoin and it's through its white papers so peer-to-peer electronic cash system um was meant as an alternative to the traditional Financial system um again looking at its birth uh it was birth in the aftermath of the global 2008 financial crisis uh with the idea of you know creating a trustless system and this idea of trustless is really key when we talk about web.

And if we want to translate this idea in technical terms uh we could argue that that trustless is achieved through the consensus protocol in the same way uh we have adjacent ideas sorry um namely dis disintermediation and self sovereignty um in technical terms we could argue that dis intermediation translates into uh the network of notes that we see uh in the different uh you know web well blockchain ecosystems U and self sovereignty pity I know it's it's a bit of a long long shot but um I mean the explanations are in the slides um basically self- sovereignty coming with the acknowledgement of the well that was more sorry whatever was written under ssign here in this slide uh is more the take that Nakamoto had in his uh Bitcoin white paper uh the P to electronic cash system white paper uh but basically these three points of self Oren dis intermediation and trustless uh are the I would argue the foundational ideals I'm not saying that web 3 as it is today um is entirely and currently fully designed with these principles in mind uh especially when we see everything that's happening uh with p network for example sexcess what happened with sushi swap the different rugs Etc but it's slowly trying to get there um next slide please um so this uh links back to the previous slide but we sort of wanted to clarify the key characteristics of web 3 uh which are namely decentralization um so web 3 being built on the principles of decentralization meaning that it seeks to reduce the Reliance on centralized intermediaries um user control uh which we can especially uh see Illustrated through SSI protocols for example so self Sovereign identity protocols and then self sovereignty same thing as user control um next slide please so this is a bit of another long shot that I took but uh uh I think it's quite interesting to paraliz uh the evolution of web 3 with um like so Shad social Social Development um and the increased need for privacy that we have um so if we take the the like social standpoint uh we could argue that from Barter and nomadic Hunter GS um style economies um in we were basic well in which we're B Hunters uh we began uh cultivating crops and domesticating animals and that led to the rise of uh agriculture-based communities um so basically from nomadic we moved slowly into more sedentary lifestyle because we had more food so uh we could afford to um that led to population growth later on to the Agricultural Revolution settlements uh grew into cities um and these cities form the basics of uh the different early civilization that we saw so Mesopotamia Egypt Etc um slowly after that we saw the specialization of labor at its very early stages and that basically LED well a few you know centuries and and Wars later um to the Industrial Revolution um later on uh we after the the Industrial Revolution happened uh we started seeing a shift to a consumer space Society um given the the new production abilities that we had um and this what's interesting is that this consumerism exists both uh physical and digital levels um and we could argue that to some extent it is what has led us um to the issues that we have with uh current data commoditization and the increased need for privacy that we see today and so this parallel can be drawn uh to some extent to the web 3 world which is what's uh you know below um bar economies agricultural indust Evolution points um and can be basically translated as uh you know Bitcoin uh by being a P2P electronic cash system um was like our early barter economies uh in which basically we traded things in a disintermediated P2P fashion um ethereum came around uh and with the emergence of smart contracts it allow us to develop more complex uh vertical uh such as the ones that we see today so defi nft Dow our infrastructure Etc so we can draw the parallel uh you know with the Industrial Revolution that happened in the real world um and now in the web 3 world we're at the point in which all these data is aggregated into these immutable Ledges because that's how you know blockchains work um and we have all these and so that is what happens on the web three world and in the real world uh we have all these gaffas uh monetizing our data um so the main key takeaway here it's just that as societies have evolved uh evolved sorry from um you know basic trade to more complex data driven economies uh we basically uh see the a similar trajectory being followed uh by web3 um next slide please so with all this we justify a clear need for privacy next slide please um so although decentralized enormous amounts of data in web 3 remain unprotected um so the main point here is uh something that I see a lot of people being confused about uh when we talk about web 3 which is um that decentralization doesn't mean privacy I think it's quite obvious to most of you but it may not be to everyone um and why should we care about privacy uh will you ask um well uh if you did didn't trust or they or didn't like what I've presented before um then I will hope and I will try with the next slides um to take us and what is uh what changed the approach uh so go from a theoretical approach with everything that we were discussed uh you know previously with the evolutionary approach Etc um to a more concrete understanding of why privacy uh is important and why privacy matters in web 3 uh next slide please thanks um so let's start with the D5 article um so here the list is much more extensive I've just focused on the examples that seem the most obvious uh for us um I'm not arguing that uh you know a technology such as name can Target all of these I'm just arguing that you know due to a lack of privacy whether it's at user or um a solution architecture level uh this leads to this attack vectors so the first one being transaction linkability um as we all know as all the transactions are recorded uh onto a public Ledger um analyzing transactional patterns uh becomes trivial so basically an attacker can link a user's wallet address uh to potentially a real world real world identity um or any other wallet addresses so this is the first problem second front running uh which most of us are aware of um and front running happens when an attacker observes a pending transaction onto the blockchain mle um and try to execute that specific transaction butas with a higher um gas uh ensuring that his transaction will go before and thereby front running the the actual user then we have uh Ms um so minimum or minor extractable value and the idea here is basically that Miners and validators are looking for arbitr opportunities between different sexors um reorder and prioritize the transaction that allow them to make a profit um and there's been different ongoing discussions and different ecosystems about how to address these mevs and again these are not really user level kind problems that can be solved but more like architectural level but still like privacy linked so pretty important here and finally another type of problem uh well or T vecture is the what we call the eclipse attack um and basically the idea of an eclipse attack is that um we're going to have um an attacker that's going to Target the connectivity between a victim's node um and the rest of the blockchain's network by surrounding his node with malicious nodes uh leading to um the compromised identity of the victim's node uh and potential Financial losses uh next slide please sud thank you um so now if we look at uh well similar so potential attack vectors in the nft vertical um we have three main points which are kind of interrelated uh you know to the idea of transaction linkability but could be branded differently and have um a few points of differentiation the first one being uh pseudonym D the anonymization um so again like all other uh NF transactions are uh transparent since they are recorded in the public Ledger um and th that makes the anonym the anonymization sorry trial um tracking and profiling um this is a bit different but basically because nft you know the the fact of belonging to an nft Community can can reveal much more about yourself uh than a simple financial transaction and thereby Um this can be used for profiling uh profiling purposes at a different level um and it is actually currently being used by growth tool web three growth tools um but I'll talk about that later um and finally transaction linkability which is uh the same notion that we were discussing when uh we were having a look at the you know the defi attack vectors so we can go to uh the next slide please sudo thank you um and so now infrastructure so with this slide we're taking AIT of a step back uh and we'll stay at a high level um because yeah just because like the details don't really matter um and are pretty complex but basically for L2 private chains so even uh if a chain Brands itself as a as private um the ZK proofs of whatever they're doing are constructed after the user submits a transaction or interacts with what we call the sequencer um and does like the metadata in the APR already leaked uh so it doesn't really matter like what they do after doesn't really matter basically uh webc wallets um so even by using a privacy oriented wallet so it's the three uh touch how can I explain this the three touch different uh infrastructural elements but are kind of a similar problem if that makes sense uh but so we work through wallet uh even by using a privacy oriented wallet uh Network traffic and make metadata are still exposed and can reveal a pattern about users and then we finally have RPC service providers um and that links back to the previous two problems um and what's interesting here is that we could potentially argue that RPC service providers uh could be seen as a single point of failure or um or yeah single point of failure um and that POS a privacy risk uh as they could potentially expose uh a user's IP address and reveal his or her online activity uh and location to third parties uh next slide please thank you so how do these manifest in real life uh you know why would we have to care about our online web3 privacy um and I'd like to illustrate that with a few use cases in real life use cases uh next slide please so we first have uh that case which I called the Venezuela minor hunt which happened in in 2018 it was pretty mediatized and the main key takeaways here are that in Venezuela well there's the source so you can read the article later on if you want to um but in Venezuela individuals uh were tur into cryptocurrencies uh uh and to mining as a means of survival uh and as an Economic Opportunity due to the country's economic crisis.

And what the article highlights is like are all the risks and challenges that were faced by these minors uh including threats of violence detention and extortion by uh the local government um and which is why I've put that quote that reads us so it's the author of the article just writing about uh a Mr X who was his main point of contact when um when um drafting the article and the quote goes as um as I read and re and reread his email describing Bitcoin miners being haunted raided extorted and arrested by local police and confirmations of the rumors of state level Bitcoin mining going on I realized the magnitude of risk Mr X was taking the back and forth between Mr X and I went on for almost three months I feared every day for his safety and still do as well as the many Venezuelan people putting their lives at risk mining Bitcoin um and what's even more interesting is that through the article Mr X um kept emphasizing on the importance of concealing any sort of uh pii so you know like private information um and maintaining a low profile to avoid detection by these authorities so privacy matters matters are in real life um next slide please if you don't think that that was uh you know telling enough there's a second case which I called chinis case which was also pretty mediatized and some of you may know of um which basically involved uh A lady called Elizabeth Bisby who was the head of Investigations ATT testing uh at the US Congress I think against another person called Roman Sterling goov uh who was the alleged creator of um um a mixer called Bitcoin fog and through her testimony um she kept mentioning that she was unaware of scientific evidence for the accuracy of uh G analysis software uh they use which is called the reactor um and they couldn't provide any statistical or scientific evidence uh supporting the software's accuracy um and basically the whole discussion highlighted the fact that at this point blockchain analysis uh is more an art than a science um which is something that becomes a big issue when these tools are used by law enforcement and government to convict people for crimes we eventually aren't even sure theyve committed since we don't have valid proofs for us um and you know there's been other few cases claiming to be able to track some like some people cross mixers which is pretty difficult um and they all had to do uh with metadata so metadata matters um next slide please so the last case that I want to focus on is uh the metamask IP Scandal which most of us are aware of um which involved the recollection of more than 31 million uh users IP address when they were interacting with an RPC provider call in fura and uh I've added a quote that I took directly from the consensus blog which sorry which reads that when users interact with ethereum or other blockchains such as sending a transaction or requesting a balance through an RPC provider such as infura the provider receives both sorry the provider receiv both the user's IP and uh the wallet address to provide the service this is not inur specific and is consistent with how web architecture Works generally um and here you silly key the issue is like yeah IP and wallet addresses are linked and this is not just specific to one solution it's specific to the entire to how the entire architecture Works um and this is what we're trying to solve at Nim level uh next slide please thank you so I think that by now we understood uh the importance the needs and the current opportunities that privacy offer um so again privacy is the basis of self- sovereignty um and you know privacy is the precondition for people to have control over their online identities and eventually over their lives as we've seen with the previous cases um privacy Primitives are maturing so what are privacy Primitives they're basically the fundamental building blocks that are used uh to build and enhance privacy oriented Solutions uh and so these are developing stabilizing and gaining popularity um and we can see this through the weekly requests that we've seen go through a group called the universal privacy Alliance uh for projects wanting to join in um next slides please thanks um so privacy is even more critical in web 3 due to uh the existence of the immutable ledgers and we've explained that thoroughly before so whether we talk about layer one layer two uh or layer zero which is uh how we position ourselves um as Nim and you'll understand later why um privacy is key next slide please so our solution how do we address that next slide please so Nim uh what are we so we are basically a decentralized incentivized network level privacy infrastructure and I know this is a mouthful and I will be explaining what that means um but okay yeah let me explain um decentralized so uh we are decentralized uh through the architecture that I'll be explaining a bit sorry I realized that when I propos to explain to explain it word by word it actually made it much more complex and lengthy um okay now let me explain how uh we are designed first as a privacy infrastructure and then I'll get into the detail of network level and anization um sorry so we are a previous infrastructure in the sense that we leverage different uh technical components um to create this infrastructure the first one is what we call the Nim mixnet uh so mixnet is a technology that was invented by David sha um it's not it like it's not not Nim leverages basically that's what I'm trying to say sorry um and uh the mixnet is basically a tool that can help preventing traffic analysis uh by what we would call a global adversary so exactly what was happening uh through the cases the real life cases that I've explained before I've introduced before um this mixnet is incentivized how is it incentivized uh through what we call the Nim token which is a utility token this n token lives on a chain which is called the Nyx blockchain which is a CMM an ABC enabled blockchain um and so this is how this is why we say we are decentralized incentivized priv infrastructure um on this infrastructure we also um leverage uh what we call ZK Nims Nim credentials uh I'll get into detail of that later on um and all this is at Network like works at Network level um and I'll clarify in the next slide in the next slides sorry what we mean by Network level.

This slide is basically a simplified version of uh what's called the official uh seven layers uh OSI model um OSI stands for open systems uh interconnection and it's a a conceptual framework that is used to understand um and standardize how different uh networking protocols and Technologies interact uh within um a computer network um and and the idea here uh is that we work so Nim um we work at Network level um and by working at Network level we can basically be integrated or integrate into anything that's above uh so any sort of application uh anything that uses a network to Route traffic basically um and what's important to understand here is that although in the OSI or the five layers model we are at level three so Network layer um we brand ourselves as a layer zero uh in the the web 3 world just because we are such a low well we are at a low level and uh you know Network layer model but any like most I mean we can we could argue that any blockchain uh ecosystem would here in this model be at an application layer which which makes us layer zero for these uh ecosystems if that makes sense um that's it basically uh next slide please um and being you know layer 3 in the OSI model or a layer zero for other block like other ecosystem uh explains why we can claim that you know like nimc go beyond uh web 3 um as a mix that it can be basically used to power uh web two solutions and when we talk about web two solutions we talk about um secure messaging apps secure uh document uh sharing and collaboration for example platforms um Anonymous blogging and Publishing micro blogging whistleblowing platforms email Services file storage etc etc and in web 3 uh you know web3 wallet uh we've discussed that before um infrastructure uh Max which is the head Deo uh Deo manager is has been working on integr well integration with Le P2P U and Le P2P is basically like a library that is used by Builder to uh build on top of uh and so that would give Builders the ability to use the Mix net directly from L P2P if that makes sense um rpt service providers which we've talked uh in length just before um privacy al2s same thing and IBC enable chains uh since uh we are an IBC enable chains ourselves so broadly speaking anything that has to do with uh any sort of Network interaction send with means like meaning sorry sending data uh sending transactions payments anything really uh oh sorry next slide please s um and so here is basically an overview of how you know as a builder integrator uh or just someone who's really curious uh about Nim could build use or integrate with them um so the different ways are uh well if we start with building sorry which is the one little star um so if we look at that there are three tools so we could leverage um the first one being the different Standalone clients that we have uh which for a builder we would not recommend and would only recommend as a last uh recourse um and we have three stand clients the wasm the websocket and the Sox 5 um we have the types fdk which is basically what can be seen arguably as a wrapper around around the the weing clients um that allows Builder to use what we call mix Fetch and I'll get into the detail of mix fetch a little later execute an query on the Nim smart contracts send and receive traffic over the Nim uh mixnet which is you know the piece of technology that we were discussing before um and buying consume ZK names um rust is very similar uh which is going to name um potentially mixfit differently and I'll get into detail mixed a little later on uh and R SDK will be most likely Co mix request um and so now if you want to use as a user you're not necessarily a builder you're not necessarily like really good technically uh you will have the ability to you know use the credentials buy the credentials to use uh our mixnet uh in the coming months um and also connect uh existing platforms through a tool that we've created which is called Nim connect which is basically a app so just an app uh that wraps around the socks 5 clients that we have um to proxy app traffic through our Mix net um and the last one which we're currently using for uh different Integrations uh with the partners that uh you know we're collaborating with is called mix fetch so mix fetch is arguably part of uh well is part of the the T script SDK um and the idea of mix sorry the idea of mix fetch is that it's a dropin replacement for fetch um and basically allows Builder to mix SC throughout uh course through the Mix net um next slide please and we're done I mean with my part and I'll let my partner add step in now thanks Alexia and now we'll slide please next SLO thanks so the first use case here is data ownership and ocean is doing this really well it allows a user to own their data to say where they want to distribute it and if they want to they can even monetize it rather than this being put into the hands of some private company NeXT is decentralized dat decentralized identity and this is being done really well by polygon ID um a real world use case of this would be say if you wanted to make use of some health care services you could expose just your name and your date of birth to the health care provider rather than your whole ID card and this would give you access to the service next is brave and private browsing for many years now they have been pioneering private browsing allowing you to surf the web without uh without getting tracked or without being bombarded by adverts and all of these use cases need a layer zero technology like Nim to provide the level of privacy that we can afford next slide please right so let's look at privacy and defi next slide please so stepping through the this from a user perspective this time uh privacy in defy means reducing the risk of targeted attacks if a hacker cannot link your trades to your IP address then it makes it a lot more difficult for them to Target you personally with their hacking attacks in the same vein privacy allows you to keep a hold of your strategies when doing trades which means that you can now start to trade on the same level as some of the biggest asset managers out there who have their own proprietary strategies avoiding front running which Alexia already touched on financial autonomy is also very important so users should be able to say where how and when they want to make trades and also something that we probably don't think about enough is Regulatory Compliance with privacy in defi it actually makes it a lot easier for users as well as defi platforms to adhere to some privacy um regulations that have been set by government bodies next slide please okay encrypted communication next slide so Communication in messaging we'll start with data Integrity privacy allows you to vouch for where a message originated from as well as the contents of the message you can know for sure that the contents have not been tampered with you can also know for sure who sent the message and you can choose definitely where that message is going to and last but not least you have protection against surveillance with privacy your messages are not at the whim of nation states or private companies who want to see what you're sending to other users next slide please okay so a very interesting is recent Partnerships that we have forged at Nim the first one is Aztec an OP a rollup as well as alium which is a wallet that gives you access to bitcoin level security now both these um both these projects are doing really interesting things but without the privacy and the IP address obfuscation as well as the geolocation obfuscation that the mixnet offers they wouldn't be able to provide the sort of privacy that we are allowing to take place today next slide please okay so let's look at a recap of what we've learned.