foreign
[Music]
awesome but that's a little too much
okay don't don't get too excited
I wasn't kidding about the oxygen there
is a sensor there that's literally
measuring a CO2 in this room if you get
too excited we might suffocate
I'm Andrew vizieri I work at give
directly I'm on the Innovation team
and this is the presentation lessons
from the field threat modeling for the
everyday use of digital currency before
we talk about the presentation though I
want to take a step back and ask why are
we here at Devcon this was the topic
that was first brought up yesterday at
the kickoff on this stage
why South America why Bogota
because ethereum is for everyone it's
not just for financial capitals it's not
just for the most comfortable developed
places it's for people who are uh
still in places where they might not
have Financial inclusion there might be
more corruption there might be more
censorship and those are the people who
really have the most to gain from
using ethereum give directly sends cash
directly to people in poverty poverty
the kind of people who are in those
settings we've reached over a million
recipients we've raised nearly a billion
dollars we work in more than a dozen
countries and we've had some of the
greatest Partnerships that that you can
in the development and Aid space and
that has really been made possible by
our approach giving people cash is
really simple right
if you want to financially include
someone financially include them I think
this really brings me back to
yesterday's talk about subtraction about
keeping things working very hard to keep
things simple and effective it's really
easy and charity to say we're going to
get the best experts we're going to
decide exactly what people need
and I think it's a little bit more
respectful and in fact it's been proven
to be more effective to give them cash
because they know what they actually
need so let's talk a little bit about
our approach and at give directly our
approach always starts with recipients
first
so what does a recipient look like this
is Liz a Uma she's from kibera Kenya and
that's her house on the left so this
house you can see it's very modest it's
made out of a whole bunch of different
materials whatever she had on hand it
probably doesn't have a door that locks
it probably doesn't have Windows that
close but Liz does have some access to
technology
specifically she might have what's
called a feature phone if you're old
enough you might have had one maybe you
skipped that you went right to
smartphones but this is a very simple
phone you can make calls you can send
SMS and you can use ussd now that third
one might be less familiar this is when
you can go through a series of menus
where the app is being served on the
other end by your Telco so you could go
through those menus and you could see
how much air time you have left top up
basic things so in her setting she might
not have reliable access to electricity
it truly does make sense for her to have
a phone like a feature phone that can
last for many days without being
recharged and we want to meet people
where they are when we're trying to help
them and so when we look at our process
we have four steps and each one of them
is designed to meet the recipient in
their environment Target enroll transfer
monitor so what is Target targeting is
of course to figure out who is in
extreme poverty who could benefit from
this or in some cases if we're doing
humanitarian work who's been affected by
the most recent flood or what area needs
some help to achieve equal rates of
gender participation in education so
there are all sorts of criteria we could
use to try to figure out where to send
money and that's the targeting step the
next step is enrollment so this is uh
very relevant for the talk that we've
just heard we need to verify people's
identities we need to make sure that
they're real people that we're not just
sending money to some account somewhere
which was set up for the purposes of
Fraud and we need to be in person
there's no such thing as a free lunch I
think everybody's skeptical if somebody
came to you and said I'm going to give
you what is more than a Year's worth of
your salary tomorrow for free you
wouldn't believe them it has to be a
scam there has to be a catch and so it's
really important actually that we go
there and we can talk with people we can
build rapport with them and they can
hear about other Villages nearby other
people who've already gone through this
process and they can know that this is
truly unconditional cash it will be
theirs they can do whatever they want
with it the next step is transfer
presently
these transfers use centralized digital
currency systems these are mobile money
systems that are operated by telcos
these are very popular in Africa and
Kenya over 90 percent of households use
m-pesa which is safaricoms
mobile money
these sorts of systems truly are the
best systems that we have at the present
day it would not be sensible to give
somebody literal cash although it would
be more private and more decentralized
their house doesn't have locks you know
that would expose them to a lot of risk
and danger
and finally we have monitor so we follow
up we make sure everybody was able to
receive their cash that they were not
threatened they weren't bribed nothing
bad happened to them because of it uh
and that they continue to understand how
to use their phone how to use it safely
securely to protect their pin code Etc
so let's talk a little bit in more
detail about fraud prevention and then
we can talk about how we might reimagine
the system with web3 so give directly
lost 241
000 in 2021
and that's about what we would expect
now that's a lot of money but at the
same time because give directly operates
at such a large scale that's only 0.2
percent of the funds and you can see on
this chart here that 2021 and 2020 were
relatively similar and you can see that
we have a breakdown of the types of of
uh fraud that we discovered the first is
theft makes sense somebody coerced a
person to give them their money or
perhaps uh trick them lied to them
tricked them into revealing their pin
code the next is imposters this would be
people who should not be eligible for a
program perhaps they are assuming a
false Identity or they've pretended to
move into a place where they don't
actually live and the final are bribes
people who have asked for payment for
some sort of favor which is not
appropriate which is an abuse of their
power so the rest of the presentation
I'll talk more about theft and bribes
while imposters are important I think
theft and bribes affect individual
people directly and that's of course
makes them even more important so some
of our measures that we take we have our
standard approach which we've already
talked about we're going to give them
training when we first meet with them
there's a hotline where they can call us
we do follow-ups to make sure everything
went well additionally there's a
recipient advocacy team so this is an
entire team that's firewalled from the
day-to-day work the people who are doing
targeting operations etc those people
don't even know who the recipient
advocacy team are and that allows us to
do audits we audit that nobody on our
team asks somebody for a favor in order
to be included with a program and
finally we'll do risk assessments so
sometimes in a certain setting it's
actually quite
sensitive and so we'll we'll take
additional actions we'll randomize when
we send people to the field if we know
that our field officers are being tailed
by scammers or people who are trying to
take advantage will make it as hard as
possible for them to figure out who was
in our program additionally we'll
conceal who's being enrolled and we'll
stagger payments if we pay everybody at
once they all go to the market at once
it's very obvious that XYZ Village was
the village that most recently received
their payments from give directly so
that was an interesting system
but I think we can make it a lot better
and
to that end let's talk about what give
directly currently does splitting that
into two categories funds in we've
received crypto donations since 2014.
we've been very happy to receive more
than 50 million dollars in direct crypto
donations and I think that speaks to how
well our Visions are aligned give
directly and ethereum are both focused
on financial inclusion they both are
focused on empowering and respecting
individual people and their privacy and
for that reason I'm very happy to be
able to speak here today in terms of
funds out we're still working on
piloting these programs but it's been
surprisingly an interesting learning for
me this year that I always assumed it
would be really painful to use
cryptocurrency you know it's so much
easier if you have a smartphone if
you're in a setting where you don't have
a lot of technical expertise you only
have a feature phone I would have
expected it to be quite quite difficult
but in our initial Pilots it's second
nature if you can make the product feel
like what they've used before feel like
mobile money money then suddenly
everything makes sense by analogy and in
fact there were very few questions about
how it worked and more questions about
what are the fees what are the exact
details of of the financial uh
incentives here so in the interest of
time I won't go through the centralized
versus decentralized I think people in
this audience probably know that there's
a lot of value to be had by more
decentralized system what are the
Privacy threats that we see and
specifically what would be happening in
an naive implementation with a public
Ledger contrast presently we're using
centralized systems so they have some
degree of privacy as long as nobody
leaks the information it's not published
anywhere and we would imagine in a
public Ledger some of these types of
Adverse Events might become more common
maybe the first thing to say is that
while in an naive implementation people
are anonymized they just have a wallet
address that's probably not going to be
enough the first time you transact with
somebody in an everyday setting you've
paid them for a good or service
they've gone to a store that has a known
wallet address it's very easy to quickly
de-anonymize uh everybody in your local
community so thinking about that theft
becomes very easy if you're sitting
outside of a store and you wait for
somebody to walk in and you're
refreshing the blockchain on that
store's address you could see the most
recent transaction you could see the
balance of that person and you could say
it's worth it for me to take the risk to
mug this person because I know that they
have enough money that I will
potentially benefit
bribery similarly people pay legitimate
fees all the time once they've paid that
feed if you can look at their balance
you can know exactly how much you can
extort them where they'll be able to pay
you'll see I'm not wearing any give
directly clothing in fact there doesn't
exist any we're very serious about
preventing phishing and just showing up
in a village wearing give directly
clothing is enough to let you social
engineer much more than would be safe
for our recipients and if you imagine
what somebody could do with a public
Ledger be calling somebody who had been
in a give directly program that person
has already been sensitized to expect a
call because give directly follows up
they would speak to that person and say
hey I know that we've given you a
transfer in exactly this amount at
exactly the state I see you bought a
sandwich yesterday that was a dollar
fifty uh was that you great let me
secure your account please open up your
app I will need your seed phrase
and suddenly they've lost all their
money uh the next category is scams of
course scammers are always trying to
find the people who are the most
vulnerable who don't have people who can
intervene and say wait this doesn't
sound right so they're looking for
people who are elderly people who are
illiterate people who are going to be
more likely to be scammed and we don't
want to make that any easier for them we
don't want them to be able to
cross-reference these are all the
elderly people and these are their
account balances in this Village and
therefore will Target so and so and
finally maybe the most hard to pin down
is social pressure it's supposed to be
unconditional cash it's supposed to
allow people to make decisions for
themselves and if that decision is for
example to send your daughter to school
that might not be the norm in the place
that you live and it's very important
for that person to be able to make that
decision for themselves and for their
family without people giving them undue
scrutiny so of course there are
mitigations for this that was all
assuming a naive implementation you
might have heard of Aztec that's a layer
two focused on privacy and they have
many of these features balance and
transaction privacy it's enabled by
default for example
if if I told somebody hey there's a way
to be private you're going to go use the
smart contract called a Tumblr you're
going to add to that Tumblr in one
amount and when you subtract you'll
subtract in a different amount and each
time you subtract you're going to make a
new wallet address now if you understood
that you were probably Afflicted with a
terrible disease you're probably a
developer and I'm sorry to say it's
terminal okay maybe that joke wasn't
that good okay
um but for normal people that's like way
too much okay they're not going to be
able to do that you need something
that's more akin to venmo you can easily
swap between private and public and you
can be given a little warning that
prompts you hey this is public people
will read it in the future do you
understand those implications and
finally the fees need to be reasonable
uh in a setting where you spend in your
entire day less than two dollars and
fifteen cents to feed and house and
everything
even a fee that's five cents kind of
precludes you from doing stuff on an
everyday basis you know you buy three
meals you spend 15 cents you're getting
close to spending 10 or 20 percent of
your daily budget just on fees so going
to extremely extremely low fees can be
important and given that privacy
features generally require more gas more
uh transaction fees you know this is a
challenge and luckily there are a lot of
Solutions on the roadmap to help with
those scaling issues so if we assume
that we exist in this private L2 in a
future State maybe post surge where the
fees are low uh we still need to think
about how do we actualize this how do we
bring it into the real world and have
people comfortable with it existing in
their country I think it's important to
think about in this hybrid model where
there are real world activities but
there's also uh blockchain underlying
the mechanisms that we can have
censorship resistance as a feature but
we can't have it as a strategy and what
do I mean by that I often hear proposals
of people who may not be thinking about
the recipients or people in extreme
poverty and they say something like
oh okay if if people don't like this
we'll go the permissionless route just
try to ban us just try to just try to
stop us you can't really it's
decentralized so that works if you're
only making a financial product and
you're okay uh with uh operating in a in
a
hidden manner but the moment that you
think about a hybrid method where you
actually need to go out and meet people
and build rapport and you need to follow
up with them all those
activities become impossible with that
approach now what's what's a good
example of censorship resistance
you might be in a refugee camp and
refugees are of course in a very
precarious situation they may be
re-housed moved somewhere else depending
on political changes they might be
supported in one regime and not the next
and so it is really important in those
cases that we have something which is
really owned by the people themselves so
if they're changed if they move
somewhere else if they go to a place
where different Telco operates
all their funds and their livelihood
isn't tied up in Mobile money it's
something that they can continue to have
access to so if we assume that we have
cryptography and we are going to try to
work with governments and have uh
this be a force for good government
we are
going to need a couple more features so
selective disclosure would allow us to
continue to have the kinds of systems
and institutions in place that
Democratic societies often create so I'm
talking about having legal recourse
having regulations even taxation
and I know that's not a really popular
subject but I just want to imagine for a
moment if somebody was interacting with
you in a truly fully private system and
they claim they pay you and you claim
they never paid you and you sue each
other and you go to court and you're in
Discovery
ideally you should be able to say to the
person who said that they paid
prove that I paid and they should be
able to do that without exposing their
public key with or their private key
rather without giving you access to
their funds they should just show you
that one transaction
so that would be an example of how I
think presently we have some solutions
where there's a viewing key you can see
everything that ever happened associated
with that account that's probably a
little bit invasive of privacy and so I
look forward to better ZK proofs where
we can answer the specific legal
question that's at hand for only as much
information as needs to be communicated
to resolve the issue so takeaways from
this talk I hope you agree that ethereum
is for every person and if we think
about every person the people who have
the most to gain are the people in
extreme poverty or in places where their
institutions are really not functioning
very well today we have to think about
each person as existing in their own
ecosystem right they exist in a house
that doesn't have locks what does that
mean for them
they exist in a place where their
government is going to need to be a
partner if we're going to help educate
them and bring them services in real
life and finally I would like to
thank everybody for their work and
remind you that today's EIP is
tomorrow's family tree that's kind of a
lame rhyme but it's the case that some
of these really uh
I don't know Bland or at seemingly at
first glance
not very intriguing improvements
actually fundamentally change how usable
this technology is so if you read the
text of eip4844
you might not get it at first if
somebody explains it to you it makes
Roll-Ups less expensive thank you to
Proto for providing me with this chart
how much less expensive if you look at
gas fees on optimism for example the L1
data fees are like 97 98 of the expense
of each block so if you can imagine that
we create this EIP
we're going to suddenly be in a case
where instead of paying five cents for
every transaction you're paying a
fraction of a Cent and you can actually
use it every day and it's a zero to one
change it's a step change that I'm very
excited to see happen hopefully in in
just a few months so thank you again I
would encourage you to support uh all
the relevant eips and of course the
surge uh reach out if you think we
should work together my Twitter is also
just at my name and if you're interested
in donating to give directly that QR
code will direct you to all of our
addresses thank you if you have
questions feel free to raise your hand
and one of the volunteers will hand you
a mic so we can go ahead and take some
questions there's a question right here
in the front row
thank you very much for this I I'm kind
of impressed that you've raised 50
million dollars from philanthropists
that are sort of handing over the
decision making of where the money goes
that's impressive do you have any kind
of idea
are the sorts of people that uh that
that that do this I think that a few of
them are giving their donations under an
anonymous circumstance I mean it's just
a crypto uh wallet address anybody can
send to it but I know that vitalik has
been one of our top donors and you know
thank you to him
yeah awesome I know there's a question
in the back and there's also a question
over there Hi man uh great job what
you're doing man I just heard about how
about your project and what you're doing
uh what's the landscape in Latin America
like what are you what what do you think
about Latin America here we have so many
problems that you describe like crime
corruption bravery
worst governments you know like there's
it's really bad and I see that you
support a lot of African countries so
can you tell us about Latin America if
it's in your roadmap or or not or when
yeah
great question so we've done projects in
many places throughout the world Africa
tends to be the primary source because
many of our funders are looking for
where is the place where the poverty is
the most extreme the most widespread and
so their dollar will go the furthest
now I don't think that that precludes us
from being other places but it's a
question of finding the funding of
people who are specifically interested
in seeing change in Latin America and
luckily there are a lot of things on the
horizon I know that there are some U.S
government and other International
organizations that have recently
proposed some more Aid so hopefully give
directly will be able to bring some of
that to Latin America soon
awesome I believe there's a question
over there to you on the yeah with the
gentleman in the black shirt AGM uh
amazing presentation thank you for that
I'm Russ uh founder of 40 acres Dao and
chief five officer and we used we kind
of echo a lot of the same sentiments
that you talked about today really
through trying to create self-sustaining
communities of color utilizing
blockchain technology as we've seen like
the biggest hurdle has been just this
convoluted language and vernacular in
which we use every day that makes sense
to us but for other people just goes
over their head liquidity pools yield
farming amms so we've been trying to
aggregate all that information through
education empowerment and engagement and
so the question I really I mean you guys
been doing beautiful work raising 50
million dollars and so as far as
allocation goes do you guys focus on
protocols is that something you've been
thinking through helping aggregate it to
certain communities versus just
individuals themselves thank you great
question so right now we're at the
Prototype stage so our funds presently
are used to test delivery in
cryptocurrency uh directly to recipients
and I think that
we obviously want to have that kind of
killer app that says why did it make
more sense to do this on a general
purpose blockchain and that goes back to
I think at the beginning of of this
event they spoke a little bit about over
emphasis on financialization right that
there should be non-financial apps and I
think that that's an incredibly
important point to show that this isn't
just an alternative to mobile money but
this is actually something new and
different this is infrastructure this is
part of a functional Society so I don't
have a particular protocol that I can
say today we're kind of proving that
first step which is it's at least as
good as mobile money and once we have
that information hopefully the ecosystem
will have a lot of great partners that
we can start proving why it's beyond
present-day Solutions I know that we
have just run out of time but thank you
again I'll be off to the side after the
talk and I'll be with you at dinner once
you invite me there thank you so much
Andrew for your talk I think it was so
important to remember the human aspect
behind blockchain