Aspecta

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're working on or are passionate about. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you have a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. And today I'm ecstatic to have Jane, who's Chief of Staff from Aspecta, on. Welcome Jane, happy to have you on.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure, my pleasure. Yeah, this one was almost not going to happen, but I was glad I was able to catch Jane while she was at ETHCC. So perhaps if folks aren't familiar with yourself, would you like to give a brief introduction? Just like who you are, what you do at Aspecta, how you got into Web3?

Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Jane. So I was studying AI from my undergrad in the past four years and thankfully graduated last year. And then I actually got into Aspecta right at the age of whether I want to go to grad school or want to do a startup. So I actually graduated one semester early just to try out like the real world, like the real life, and then got into Web3 space because I was working in a VC. And then like one day my boss just randomly asked, 'Who here knows about Web3 or Bitcoin or Ethereum, any of you know that?' And I was the only one that raised my hand, basically saying, 'Oh, I bought some Bitcoin and Ethereum,' but back then I definitely don't know what exactly that means. I just, you know, randomly buying some things. And then at the venture fund, my boss just suddenly decided to dab into the Web3 space, so he asked me to find some Web3 projects that are worth investing. So that's how I get into this space. And then last year, after I graduated, I met the founder of Aspecta, Jack. And back then he was doing an AI company, like as you can see the slogan here, Aspecta is doing AI-generated identity for pioneer builders and beyond. And then back then he was thinking about doing AI recruitment because his partner actually has the technology, like code NLP, which can analyze people's GitHub codes and then basically doing skills assessment and achievement, that kind of things. But after a series of talk with Jack, I actually convinced him to pivot into the Web3 space to do a bigger thing that can make bigger impact, which is identity. And then I basically said if you pivot to Web3, I'll just give up my grad school and I'll join you full-time to support this company. And that's how I end up being at Aspecta.

Well, that's crazy. Yeah, a lot of people who are really passionate about Web3 just need to find the right person to get them hooked and then yeah, that's amazing you felt so passionately about the space to be able to drop what you were doing and just work on this full-time. That's awesome. Good on you. I guess what do you have in store for us today? We can get right into the content.

Sure. So today I do want to talk a bit about digital identities. And before I show the slides or demo or anything about Aspecta, I do want to talk about the border idea of digital identity a little bit. So whenever people are talking about either digital identity, decentralized identity, or just DIDs, they'll often think because all the projects that we know that are famous for either DID or any other identity related stuff would be ENS. So you'll just buy a domain name to represent your wallet address to let people know you better. But when I started Aspecta, one thing I was thinking about was in the real world, when we are doing different things, we're having different kind of identity to represent ourselves. Everyone is multi-dimensional instead of just one single role in this society. You have to have your driver's license to drive your car, you need to have your passport to travel around the globe, and other things like you have to have a diploma to as a credential for your education things. So Aspecta is building digital identity for developers. So what does that exactly mean? So we do want to build this infrastructure to have to empower every developer to bridging them into the Web3 space and also for those who are already in this space, we want to bridging them with different ecosystem to make real impact, to be able to feel like they're a part of this industry and they are contributing towards the development of this industry. Basically having this ID allows them first do a skill assessment to better understand themselves, their past achievements, their past footprints, basically what kind of hackathons they attended, which hacker houses they lived at, and the group of people he is just hanging out whether it's online or in the physical world. And also being able to get rewarded by the contributions he made into this industry. So that's how I decided to make Aspecta ID. And I'm going to do a little slideshow.

So with the background I mentioned, so I decided to join Aspecta and build this AI-powered identity protocol for all the developers and beyond in the future. One of the reasons why we're targeting developers instead of other people is because developer is the only kind of people who will have all their works and all their basically their life on the internet. So for other careers, they might have to interact with the real world, like the physical world a little bit. But for developers, all their code is stored either on GitHub or in some kind of server or anywhere that in the cloud that is stored on the internet. So that makes us very easily to get those data and do basically assess developers' achievement, skill set, and everything etc., etc. So that's why we're only building identity for developers. And hopefully when this industry gets a bit more bigger and bigger, we can do this thing for more people. And so Aspecta, we're actually envisioning your identity in the digital world. Basically in the Web2 space, people are having different kind of social accounts to represent different aspects of themselves. They would just send their tweet and ask professional questions on Stack Overflow or just chatting with community members that in the same community on Discord or they will just have different kinds of social accounts.

And what Aspecta ID do is we do aggregate all of your on-chain and off-chain accounts together and using our AI model to understand what kind of person you are, who you will like, and your social graph and everything and give this ID back to you to have this fully self-sovereign identity experience. Basically you will be able to aggregate all of your social accounts in all in one place to better demonstrate yourself, to better showcase your skill set and everything. And also one of the things that also back when we first founded Aspecta was we wanted to help more people with less fancy background or less fancy job experience, like they never worked at Google, Amazon or all the big tech or they never got a degree in Stanford or just any of the universities that you can think of. So actually there are a large part of the world that are living like they went to colleges you never heard the name before and they don't really work at any fancy big tech companies before but they have this solid skill set or experience in building real-world projects that are actually contributing to the world. Which those kind of people are the people that we're extremely focused on.

So for the core technology, we're basically using a lot of large language model, using a combination of large language model that's mainly like NLP, symmetric understanding, like knowledge keyword extraction to basically understand your code, your project, or your README to let this computer knows what exactly are you working on. And we also use graph learning which is network analysis to evaluate how strong is your connection and how solid is your work. So for example, if Vitalik gives you a star on your GitHub repo, that might mean more like more things than just two random like new account which have no commits, nothing on their GitHub gives you a star on your GitHub repo. So yeah, we're basically using a lot of models to analyze your on-chain and off-chain aspect.

And this is kind of how Aspecta ID looks and as I mentioned, everything is self-sovereign, which you will have the true data ownership by putting all of your data on-chain. And for the privacy purpose, we're not accessing to anyone's private repos right now and in the future we're working towards just using any kind of privacy-preserving technology such as ZKML or other stuff. Not just trying to throw all the buzzwords, but we're actually, our R&D team is trying their best to experiment like what kind of tool will be the appropriate tool to first protect your privacy and second to help you achieve the maximum of interoperability by either putting your data on-chain or just if you want to store it locally then what will be the correct way for you to have a proof of those things while keep your privacy.

And the modules on the identity right now is basically your skill set, your impact insight. So we will understand your skill set based on different tiers. So maybe Web3 will be the biggest top tier, and then smart contract might be the second layer, and then the last layer will be maybe Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, all other chains you're building on top of. And then the second module is called Footprints. Basically this part not just documents everywhere you've been, like every hackathon or all other activities you've attended in the Web3 world, but also what kind of things you're interested at. For example, I might be very interested in ZK and I talk a lot about it in my Twitter but I'm not a ZK circuit engineer so which I don't write anything related to ZK but so that section will actually go into your footprints part. And then Achievement will basically be all the things you achieve, all the badges you get and also for the experience spotlight will just be all the qualitative data, which in the first part, the skill set and footprints and all the achievement parts are more quantitative which everything is represented in a more mathematical way. But for the experience spotlight part, it will just be a passionate follower of Web3, a strong Solidity developer, etc., etc. And the last section is pretty minor as of current, it's connect with like-minded peers. So a lot of developers, they will, they're so keen into contributing in their own project and sometimes they're ignoring to connecting with the outside world. And for this part, we're just trying to make it as useful, as feasible as possible. So one of the use cases that we're actually trying to explore is to help developers to form groups when they are attending hackathons because I feel like that's one of the biggest pain point for people to attend hackathon. For myself, I came from a AI background. So when I was in college, no one, I was too shy to talk to other teams. So basically I didn't attend a lot of hackathons because I couldn't find a team to join. So that function we're trying to work towards that direction.

So one of the biggest goal for Aspecta ID is to achieve the maximum interoperability. So all the Aspecta ID holders, they will have this self-sovereign feature which every data they own is they do have all the data ownership of the data they have. And then Aspecta is bridging between Web2 and Web3 space. And then in the future we're using this huge network to empower all this third-party applications and ecosystems in the Web3 space. So basically we're just trying to bridging the gap between developers and projects or ecosystem to have them to have a bigger impact in this industry and also get rewarded by their contribution.

Yeah, so we're a project by developers and for developers. So we've been making some significant partnerships or attend some of the events in the past. Basically we just announced our partnership with Gitcoin, looking into integrating into Gitcoin Passport in the next two to three months. And we also participated in the Gitcoin main round which just passed, I think two months ago. And we do host some hackathons with some of the major universities in the US because although we're trying to highlight all those people that don't have a fancy background, but we are using Stanford and MIT students to as the alpha tester to give us some product feedback to see how they really like our product in terms of experience and other things. And also we've been partnering with the EAS, like Ethereum Attestation Service. They are helping, they are actually one of our tech stack we're using on-chain to help people to put all their data on-chain, not in forms of NFTs but in forms of attestations which will save a lot of block space and then you definitely pay less gas fees and you don't have to come up with like a picture or image of your skills or other things. You just need an attestation. And also in the future, as I mentioned, we're building this identity to help developers better demonstrate, better showcase themselves. And what will be the actual utility of that? It will be, we will help developers get funded from different ecosystems. Not just to contribute to their existing open-source project, but also to attend different hackathons to bring maximum of innovation into this industry. And then we're actually partnering with a lot of hacker houses which provides a better experience for our hackers when they're attending those hackathons. Yeah, so that's basically everything about Aspecta, what we've been done and what we're doing in the next step. So do want to know if there's any question from the audience or from Narb?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. That was great Jane. Yes, gang, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat in YouTube and I will answer or ask on your behalf. But in the meantime, I do have a couple questions of my own. So the essence of this is so all my data as a developer, all my data is kind of scattered throughout the web, all the different contributions I've done, say like to Developer DAO and open source is siloed, and what Aspecta is doing is trying to bring all of this together in a single identity. So I guess what would be some use cases that I would be able to use this identity for beyond just like job searching? Curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, so we are actually working on different like real utilities for this product currently. And one of the biggest one is we're collaborating with different ecosystem. For example, Optimism, they have a very solid grant program for all the developers that are contributing to their ecosystem. But now all the developer grants are actually focused on project itself. A lot of protocol are actually focusing on, 'Oh, you are building amazing project and how much volume can this project bring like on-chain to especially into my ecosystem?' But a lot of other open-source project, especially public goods, of course OP has done an excellent job in bringing out their retroactive fund to fund all those public goods project. But what we're emphasizing is the contribution of individual developers, their contribution to those either public good or open-source projects or anything on this ecosystem should get rewarded. So that would be actually one of the main use cases to get developers funding into not getting like a full-time job or doing a bounty, but get paid by what they really like to do. Because when I talk to a lot of developers, I feel like a lot of them are actually spontaneously contributing to a lot of open-source project. And when I ask why and are you getting any paid, they just said no, because I just want to contribute, I just love those project. I already have a pretty boring job in the daytime and I'd rather do something fun for myself in the nighttime. So I'm thinking about just to bring all the spotlight to those group of developers that are actually contributing to the development of our industry. So that would be the thing that we're focusing on in the next. And of course we're going to have other utilities such as we're thinking about collaborating with all the education platforms. So for now I think Web3 University, actually Alchemy University, they just changed their name. So it's one of the projects that we're thinking about collaborating. Basically helping developers to understand because Aspecta helps them to do skill set assessment. Basically they will understand what kind of skill set I have and what kind of level skills I also have. So we can help them to be a better developer by suggesting them all those education content and then when they completed this task, of course they're naturally first going to become a better developer in some sense and also they'll get those on-chain credentials either from the course provider or from us. And the third thing will be just to engaging the whole community. Of course like we have an amazing community like Developer DAO which are gathering a lot of developers here. And then also we do want to give more value back to the community, back to every individual hackers. So we want to just support them to either build the public good projects they want to do or to sponsor their like Developer DAO is doing is to do sponsorship for all the hackers to attend different hackathons worldwide. And then we're actually also partnering with a lot of hacker houses to bring a nice extra thing that you can have to have a better experience to live with a bunch of other developers who share the similar interest, who will maybe become the co-founder of your next project or other stuff. So yeah, that could be several of the directions that we're going to in the next. But to get individual developers' contribution recognized and get them funded will be the main thesis for us to go in the next step.

Awesome. Yeah, exciting to hear that. And this question's more of a general, I'm always curious to hear the answer from folks who have a deep AI background. But where do you see AI and Web3 continuing to kind of cross paths as we continue to innovate in both spaces? This year in general we've seen more and more companies kind of go for that merge, let's call it. But just curious to hear what are your thoughts on where AI and Web3 are co-heading together and what other use cases do you think will start to pop up beyond identity?

That's a pretty interesting question. I actually get this question a lot recently, especially because I had this AI background and a lot of people are actually coming up to me saying, 'Are you regret it that you give up on AI and joined the Web3 space?' Well, actually as for now, I don't see much of, I feel like a lot of the AI combine Web3 project that at least I've been seeing is more in the experiment space. So I was talking to someone, I don't know if you know him, Daniel from Modulus Lab. He's doing like ZKML on-chain, which he is using a fully on-chain model to generate all the to I think it's a thousand NFTs. And I think that's a pretty good experiment. However, in my eyes I feel like AI and Web3 are two entirely different kind of things. So what essentially AI does is to bring more efficiency to boost productivity. And Web3 or blockchain technology is actually doing the opposite way. Because I feel like for AI, you can sacrifice your privacy, you can sacrifice like everything just to get this extra productivity. But for in the blockchain space, that what we actually do is we're giving up on the convenience of using or the easy things to get this extra privacy and security and everything. But I do think maybe other things that AI might be good at could be bringing on-chain is like risk management. Because a lot of larger institutions have been using some pretty simple AI models to do their basically doing a decision tree or any other stuff determine the risk of different accounts. That might be one thing that we can bring into the space because basically everyone is having their transaction fully on-chain and all the data is so accessible. So maybe the risk assessment thing could be one thing that in the AI times Web3 route.

Awesome, exciting. Yes, and now I'll be sure to share your Twitter and Aspecta's Twitter in the general description of this video and the blog that will be coming up later today or tomorrow. But with that, we are at time. Thank you so much again Jane for coming on, really, really appreciate you taking the time to come on. and I just want to wish everybody a happy Friday, happy weekend. And before you leave, before everyone leaves, I want to show you this bang, QR code, that you can use to scan with your regular QR code scanner and claim your Kudos for being an attendee today. And apology, last week we had a mishap with the QR code which we were showing an old one but this one should address that. So you'll have one hour from now to be able to claim this as an attendee and Jane I'll send you a different one for being a speaker today. But yes, just again want to say happy Friday, happy weekend and that will catch you all back here next week. All right all, cheers. Bye.