dm3 Protocol

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 people in Web3 to come on and show what they've got. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating test best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Essentially, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community here. And today I am ecstatic to have Steffen from dm3 protocol on. Welcome, Steffen. Happy to have you on.

Yeah, thank you for having us. My name is Steffen Kux. So, I'm from Germany. So, from my education, I'm a mathematician. So, and I worked for a long time in the automotive industry building interesting software, simulation, optimization, and so on.

And since 2017, I joined the Web3 world. So, a friend of mine was building a company and I shared with him the vision to build products based on Web3 technology. Yeah, in this time we did a lot of interesting developments. A small Ethereum client, a lot of applications of Web3 technology into industrial use cases. Building software for industry, for mobility, for energy applications and so on. And since 2022, we founded a new company which is called Corpus. And this is a venture or product studio especially focused on Web3 products. So and in this we are building different products, different projects, and dm3 is one of these projects and now I'm the CEO of dm3 and yeah, we are starting to spin off dm3 from the venture studio now. Yeah, and today I will share some insights into Web3 messaging and especially how dm3 can help to solve a lot of problems.

Amazing. Yeah, let's dive right into it. Just so we have enough time.

Okay, let me share my screen to show some slides. So today I want to talk a little bit about the dm3 protocol and how we can solve a lot of problems we have in the Web2 messaging world today with Web3 messaging. After a short motivation about the topic, I want to talk about Web3 messaging and introduce the dm3 protocol, and show how the dm3 protocol can be used and what are the benefits by using dm3 in your applications. dm3, as I can say in the beginning, is an open-source project. It's completely public good. We share all the things with the community and especially we invite the community to join in and to use it to build a standard for messaging interoperability.

So when we think about messaging, then of course we see in the very beginning email was actually one of the first killer applications of the internet. It was a kind of decentralized, we had all these mail servers, and one thing in the beginning it was completely unencrypted. And actually is almost completely unencrypted today. I don't know if you tried to send encrypted messages. I tried it for a long time, always sending my public keys around with my email. I never received any encrypted message or email back.

So then in the last years, maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, there started the time of the Web2 messengers. We have all these big messengers starting in this time. And they solved some problems we had in the Web1 world. Now we have almost all messenger are encrypted. But what we can see is these all these services are centralized services. We have these silos and I have to commit to join such an ecosystem in order to be able to communicate with others. All of or most of these silos are controlled by big companies, there's absolutely no interoperability. If I'm using WhatsApp, I cannot send a message to Telegram. Or if I'm using Signal, I cannot message with Facebook Messenger and so on. We have these silos and they have a lot of functions, but yeah, they are centralized systems controlled by these companies. And even we have these single points of failure. For instance, if the servers of this single service are going down, then there's no messaging. And if they quit my account, I lose all my communications of the past.

So now we are in a time where Web3 messaging actually starts. We see a lot of Web3 messaging systems coming to life during the last one or two years. Actually even more messengers than we have in the Web2 world. They of course are encrypted, they using decentralized technologies, but at the moment most of them have a similar problem than the Web2 world, they are siloed. They are closed systems and we don't have this interoperability. And we think for Web3 messaging interoperability is absolutely essential and we need it to build a connected messaging ecosystem.

This I already mentioned. When we look back to the Web1 world, we have these unencrypted messages and also we see a lot of spam. If your provider is not filtering spam, you would not find any useful message because more than 50 to 80, some say even 90 percent of the messages are spam. And this leads to the problem that even if we have a more or less decentralized system, only the big ones are accepted. If I run my own mail server, it will send messages directly to the spam folder of the receiver. Encryption is not yet really possible and secure communication via email would be nice, but is in the most cases not possible. So then we have these Web2 messengers, as I said, we have now these central systems building big ecosystems, but yeah, these are closed systems and we cannot send messages from one system to another and we are fully dependent on the providers of these messaging services.

What are the problems? Encryption especially in the email systems is a problem. We have also the problem of privacy. Even if the messages in these Web2 messenger are encrypted, the metadata are not. If I send a message to someone else, the provider knows whom I'm messaging. They may not know the content but they know that I have written such a message. In centralized systems that is always the case, we don't have this privacy that I can send a message without anyone knowing whom I was messaging to. Another problem is the self-sovereignty. I'm dependent on the provider. I cannot decide what I want to do with my messages, they are on the services hosted by these companies and I have to rely on them. Interoperability I already mentioned. If I want to message someone, I have to be the member of the same ecosystem. Centralization is not a bad thing for every solutions, but regarding messaging, if I have one party in the middle which I have to depend on, then if this is not offering the service anymore, I'm not able to use this messenger. So that's why I have these single points of failure. Last but not least, we also mentioned this already, spam is overflooding all our inboxes. Of course there are solutions to find out and to recognize spam mails, sometimes even good emails are recognized as spam. At the moment my personal inbox is a mess.

So now is the question, what is special on Web3 messaging? What can we do better? The first thing is our profiles, my identity has not to rely on any provider. I can have my key-based identity, I have my key in my wallet and all what I need to do a secure communication can be based on these keys. The user can decide what services is he using or where should my data be hosted and so on. With decentralized systems we can overcome a lot of the problems. Encryption is absolutely essential, by default every message must be encrypted. And also privacy must be something which we really take care of. One thing I think is a very special thing for the Web3 world. Diversity is something which is really good. In Web2 messengers, the goal would be to be the one and only messenger. But in Web3 we learned that diversity is a real good thing. We can have solutions which focus on special communities. For instance, I can have a messenger which focus on an NFT community. Or another messenger focuses on how I can manage my data on my computer without any other application. So that means a lot of different solutions or protocols and communities are really a good thing, but what we need is interoperability. The user may decide what messenger is the best for him or her, but he or she must be able to send messages to everyone else without being in this ecosystem as well. Yeah, and Web3 mechanisms can help us to prevent spam and here we have very efficient mechanisms to completely remove spam from our communication.

Let's talk a little bit about Web3 messaging, what is Web3 messaging and what are the benefits? Encryption is absolutely essential. In the Web3 world we already have keys in our wallet and based on these keys I of course have to encrypt all my messages. There must be no middlemen, no backdoor, only I'm responsible for the security of my messages and it must really on my keys. And also we can sign these keys. In the email world we all have seen this before, I receive a mail from someone whom I know, but when I read this mail I see this identity is used by someone else and a spammer used the name of someone I know. In the Web3 world we have our keys and we can sign our messages. And with this we can absolutely secure that he was the sender.

Then we have decentralized systems, there are a lot of different approaches in the Web3 world to build decentralization. With dm3 we also have an interesting approach, which makes it very easy to have a decentralized network without the drawback that you have a lot of traffic in this network. We think that interoperability is the key of success of Web3 messaging. We need this interoperability to interconnect our systems and to build one connected ecosystem for messaging. Self-sovereignty I also mentioned before, one ethos in the Web3 world is that I'm responsible for my own things. When it comes to the last point, a registry, I want to go back to the email system. In email, I can send encrypted messages, the problem is how to discover the public keys from the receiver. There's no good solution in the email world. In the Web3 world we can have a central registry which is completely decentralized. If I have a decentralized application which provides this information, everyone can use it permissionless and everyone can get this data in this system. And this is something we really need to have messaging across borders.

So what is really essential for Web3 messaging? And we think there are three points which are essential. The registry, we think this is the absolute essential part, so that we have a central but decentralized registry for encryption and delivery information. Then we need a decentralized network so that we don't have a single point of failure to send messages from the sender to the receiver. And that we have a way that we can easy integrate interoperability into solutions, protocols, services and so on.

What is the dm3 protocol? dm3 protocol is a layer-0 and layer-1 Web3 messaging protocol. Which means you can use it directly in your application to send and receive messages, it also acts as layer-0 protocol so that it is able to connect other protocols. To build a central but decentralized registry we decided to utilize ENS, the Ethereum Name Service, so that everyone who has an ENS name can publish the dm3 profile which contains the information about the encryption keys, signature keys and the delivery information. And we need this decentralized network of delivery service nodes which are able to relay the message from the sender to the receiver. And our focus especially is on the interoperability part so that the dm3 protocol can be used as this interoperability layer to build one connected ecosystem. And also scalability is a very important thing. To scale it to have a lot of information in parallel operated. WhatsApp, they are operating more than 200 billion messages per day. This is a lot of data. That's why when we talk about scalability, it's really important to have scalability in view, even if our ecosystem are small. Security, encryption, privacy, of course this must be in focus.

I don't want to go too much in detail about the dm3 protocol architecture. On the bottom we have the blockchain layer, we are using ENS which is built on Ethereum. We are using CCIP, the cross-chain interoperability protocol, which makes it possible that I have information in ENS which is not stored on-chain but verifiable on-chain. Then we have this protocol layer and here the message transport protocol is the essential part. It defines how messages are defined, how messages have to be transferred. All these other things are protocol extensions which are nice. If I want to make my product dm3 compatible, I only have to implement the message transport protocol. On top of it we have the application layer. Here I have the interfaces to other ecosystem, we call it gateways. And we have our own dm3 messenger. We want to show as reference implementation how the dm3 protocol can be utilized. And we have these embedded widgets on top of it which can be used in any application. If you build an application, and you want to have in-app in-game messaging, just use the dm3 embedded widget and with one line of code you have a fully featured messaging solution. Even this information included. And I think this is something we miss totally in the today's world.

The last thing is spam protection. We know there is a lot of spam in messaging. Using Web3 technology we can sort out spam very easily. We have these service-based spam protection mechanisms, here we can check for ownership and activity, we can check if the wallet of the user is holding a token or an NFT and only if this is available we will receive this message. It's very expensive for spammers. On the client side we can add additional spam protection things. For instance you can deposit a token or value on your message and the user who receives the message can decide if this is a spam message, then this deposit is burned. And if not then it is returned to the sender. A very efficient way to prevent people to send spam. I can also accept advertisement mail but there must be 50 cents attached to it. So that I can have an incentive to read messages which are sent to them.

Let's summarize what we have talked about. Web3 messaging can help to solve a lot of these existing problems. There are good solutions. We need this interoperability, we need diversity in our ecosystem but we need to connect it. And with dm3 we have this layer-0 layer-1 protocol so that we can build messaging solutions on top of it. I will not go in detail about roadmap but what we are right now in this stage, we have a good specification of a lot of parts of our protocol, we have a reference implementation which is available. Next year the real network will launch, there will be the dm3 token which will help to organize and to govern this system. With the dm3 token we will build a governance system so that the community can decide what happens with this protocol. If a protocol joins this initiative, they will receive tokens. We try to build this community protocol which helps to build a connected Web3 messaging world and if this works out, then of course we also want to go to the Web2 world and offer this because what works in the Web3 world is also applicable to the Web2 world very easily.

We invite everyone to join this initiative and be part of it. Find some resources which help you, everything is free and open source. You can go to our website dm3.network. Here you find all the information and all the contact information to get in touch with us. Thank you very much.

Yeah, that was great. Yeah, unfortunately we didn't have enough time to go through all the questions but there was one about whether or not the protocol was fully built out or not. I think the roadmap kind of answered that. Is that roadmap publicly available for people to look at or...?

It is, so I can share this information, on our website we have a lot of this information, the current roadmap is not yet published but yeah, we will publish it on our website dm3.network so that it is visible there as well.

Excellent. And for people who didn't get a chance to get their questions answered, how can people reach out to you specifically or the team to get those answered?

Easiest way is contact me at stkux.eth over dm3. You can go to our website, we have a lot of resources there, you can use the reference implementation to directly contact us. Of course you find also a lot of other channels, we have a Telegram group, you find my Calendly can book an appointment there. On dm3.network our website you find all the information and all the contact information to get in touch with us.

Awesome. And we'll be sure to add this contact information in the YouTube description after the fact as well. But before everybody leaves, firstly I want to thank Steffen for taking the time to come on. This was very interesting and very detail packed. So yeah, we'll be interested to learn more going through those docs. And for everybody who stayed till the end, here is the QR code for you to scan to go to the Dform form to fill out for your NFT claim for being an attendee on DevNTell today. Steffen, you are also welcome to fill this one out if you so choose. But folks, you'll have an hour and a half to fill out this form before it closes out. So be sure to take out your regular QR code scanner, scan this code and fill out that form if you want to get your hands on your DevNTell attendee NFT. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and that will see you all back here next week.

Thank you very much.

All right, all the best. See you. Cheers. Bye.