UniversalProfiles with Lukso

And we're live. So GM, GA, GE, welcome to what is going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project they've been working on, demonstrating new testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share with the Web3 community. And I am ecstatic to welcome back Yamen, who will be giving us an overview of Universal Profile with Lukso. So fun fact before we begin, the last time Yamen came on DevNTell about a year ago, his DevNTell actually holds the record for most views on our YouTube at 1.3k. So no pressure, no pressure, but I know we're in store for great things here. So maybe did you want to introduce yourself once again to the DAO and maybe give a little background about yourself?

Yeah, sure. Sure. So just to comment on the record, it goes because of the Lukso fam. So yeah, introduction about myself. So my name is Yamen. I'm a smart contract engineer. I have a background in computer and communication networks and currently I'm full-time working on Web3, especially the non-DeFi part of the blockchain and rather the social and creative side, which you'll see today in the presentation. So that was a quick, small introduction and I guess I can start with sharing the screen. Okay, I will turn off my camera and start. Okay, can you see my screen?

Yes, yep, you're good to go.

Okay, cool. Yeah, let's start. So hello everyone. Thanks for joining. So today we are going to talk about Universal Profiles. You may have heard or seen this term somewhere on Twitter with this up emoji and wondered what does that mean? So if it's the case, then luckily today we're going to explain what is a Universal Profile, why we need it, what makes it different than the other blockchain accounts and the role that it will play to power the new creative economy. So let's start by doing a reflection on the last years of the blockchain space and the need for blockchain accounts. So over the last couple of years, we've seen an increase in interest in the blockchain technology, starting with DeFi and especially with the rise of NFTs. And this was translated by having big players integrating or willing to integrate blockchain and NFT in their business or platform.

So the market cap for all the crypto boomed up and went crazy to reach almost three trillion dollars. Obviously now it's affected because it's a bear market, but this shows really that lots of people are interested and can see potential in this technology. But when we check who is really using the blockchain, we can see that the numbers start from 150 million exchange users, go down to 85 million wallets, out of these 85 million, there is 21 million MetaMask users and then out of these 21 million, you have 2 million blockchain users who use the blockchain on almost daily or weekly basis. But going further deep into the research, we see that bots have contributed to almost 75% of the transactions, which means that even the number 2 million is not representing the real number of active users, which is less than 1 million, which is a really low number.

So we can see here a real overview of the blockchain users. So we have 99% hodlers, traders, and bots, and less than 1% are active users. So that shows that crypto or let's say blockchain is an area of interest for many million people, but sadly few of them are active. And this is not a secret or like something to hide. Most of the people involved in the Web3 space know that this is the case. So it's worth asking ourselves the question: what is making blockchain less used by most of the people? And when we are searching for the answer, an obvious reason comes to our mind, which is the financial aspect. So blockchain now is mostly focused on the financial aspect, which makes the high number of bots really justifiable because people don't want to know about identity or security, they just want to make money and the less layers they have, the more money they can generate.

Plus there is not much of dApps that focus on the social or creative side. Most of them are related to either staking or lending or trading. So this was the first reason. And the second reason why people are not using the blockchain, and it's the most important reason, it's the user experience. Currently it's like a nightmare to interact with the blockchain. First you need to download a wallet, you will be provided with a key which resolves to your address, and then you need to write these 12 words somewhere and store it safe because without it you cannot re-access your address. And then it will get more complicated because in order to interact on the blockchain, you need to pay for the gas fees, which are fees required by the network to validate the action you're doing.

And in order to get that coin that pays for the gas fees, you need to go to an exchange, sign up, complete a KYC, fund the account created with some money, buy this specific coin and then withdraw it to your wallet that you initially created. So this is already showing how hard it is to onboard people to Web3. And even if they manage to get onboarded, the security we currently have, it's not ideal and we have only few possibilities. Like you have an address that holds your assets, but if the private key represented by these 12 words is leaked, all of your assets are gone. And in case you lost access to these 12 words, then you lost access to your address, which means losing access to your tokens and assets because obviously with a key there is no social recovery thing or a password recovery because it's just a key. Basically on the blockchain you are just bunch of numbers that represent an address that you cannot attach information to it. Like you cannot just say, okay look this is me, I have an image here or like these are the NFT that I created. Like there is nothing showing that these bunch of numbers are representing you.

So of course you have the option to rely on a centralized service to create a profile and to show your NFT, but you may end up getting banned for no reason at all, or just because you are from a specific country. So this is not the real decentralization we want. We want a decentralization where I have my decentralized profile showing my face if I want, and my on-chain reputation that I gained over the years, and have the NFT that I created as a creator or I bought, and then this profile should be independent from the website that shows it. So if a website wants to ban people just because they are from a specific country, which happened by the way, or because they have some political opinion, or just the company operating the website doesn't like these people, they can just go to another website that render and show their profile with the NFT.

So everything that I mentioned, either the security or the few possibilities or the bad blockchain experience, all of this is representing a big challenge for adopting the blockchain technology on all of its aspect. Because if you're a brand, you're facing many challenges not just on your operation side but also on the client side. And we see that at some point many famous brands or influencers launched an NFT and it was not ideal or successful because of the bad experience they had. Like people got hacked, they got fished, and it was really hard for non-technical people to buy it, the process was really hard. While what clients aim to have is more of like downloading an application, scanning a QR code and then claiming an NFT. Or for example like going to a store, buying a piece of cloth and then scanning a QR code and then you will be able to collect the token representation of what you bought. And this is absolutely not feasible with the current way of operating on the blockchain. Because first you have the gas fees which cannot be removed, also the problem of preserving a private key or a secret word is not totally gone. So there is no recovery, no secure way to allow someone else to move your assets, lots of hidden pieces. Even you don't have an identity, as we said, you're just a key on the blockchain.

So in short, we talked about many problems starting from the security to being tied in just one field which is the financial field, and then the most important thing which is the terrible user experience we have. So we mentioned these problems but what's the solution? So everything that we said in terms of problem is known by most of the Web3 space and also they know that there is no other workaround to solve this bad user experience around, except to have on-chain accounts or blockchain accounts. On-chain accounts or blockchain accounts are just smart contracts that will work on abstracting all of this complexity to the user and allowing to have features such as gasless transaction where you just confirm that you want to do this specific action and then an external entity can pay for the gas fees on your behalf. And also you'll get other several features such as social recovery, password recovery, access control maybe where you allowed your device to act on your account or allow your friend to move your assets, maybe you are on a vacation somewhere and you want to do some action, someone can do it on your behalf without actually compromising the like the account that you have.

So literally anything is possible because these features we can build them over time. So like storing personal data, multisig, any access control we can create over time. So as a user in Web3 or as users in general, we are beginning the process of searching in the space which is the better account to use. Like obviously there is a lot of people developing different type of account and we need to go over them and choose what account is the best. So let's say we have several accounts, account A and account B and account C. We can go through account A and check that it has some cool features like relay execution, password recovery, and owner execution. We go over account B, we see that it's a multisig that requires several signature in order to execute one action and it has a built-in social recovery system. We go to account C and we see that it has a social and password recovery, but it doesn't have any relay execution, just a normal execution and it has the ability to store data.

So I abstracted all of this with account A, account B, and account C but obviously there's different players in the Web3 space that you all know that have similar structure where each different wallet, like they still call it wallet but actually it's an account, have different features. So for now we all agree that these are features that are really amazing. But now we need to choose one account so it can be our representation on the blockchain and we can use it to build reputation, interact with application and like owning token with it. So let's say you chose account A and you bought some tokens and since the future is social, you gained some social reputation on the account and you became famous with this specific account. But now there is a problem and the problem is that if later in the future you have another feature in mind, let's say that the social recovery you want a social recovery because you feel like the password recovery that you have in account A is no longer enough, or maybe you want an access control because you think relying on just the owner to operate the full account is becoming hard, then you need to find another account that provide these features, let's say account D, and you'll need to deploy it and use it as your representation on the blockchain, and all of the stuff you have on account A need to be migrated to account D. So obviously all the tokens, I don't know what you could have else, followers maybe who knows.

But there is something that you cannot move to the account D which is the social reputation you gained on the account A. And social reputation could be something like you being recognized with this specific address or with this specific account. Or maybe let's say you have a soulbound token on account A, now you cannot move it to the account D. So this is a big problem that we can find in the space. Most of the people developing account say that, okay our account have this feature and this feature and this feature, but the end, feature are preference and people can change their preference over time and depending on what do they need. And as we said, each time switching to a new account is not ideal and actually it's harmful because people are recognizing you on a specific address with all the reputation you gain there and now you are switching to a new account. And this could happen on and on and on and honestly we can say that, okay we know that these feature are enough, but who knows maybe in two years we need to support new feature that we don't know yet. Is it sustainable and socially feasible to migrate each time we have a new feature in mind? Maybe also it's better to imagine it with an already existing reality account. Let's say on your Twitter account you have a profile and you have hundred of thousand of follower. And now each time you need to get the latest update from Twitter containing new features, you need to migrate to a new account and start with zero followers. Is this something that you would do? Obviously not.

So what we should do with this problem? We need to upgrade the way we use blockchain and sure we can do that with Universal Profiles. So let's see how Universal Profile can solve this problem. Obviously we all know the problem, which is switching between an account and the other each time you need to have a specific feature. So we asked ourselves a question: what is shared between all of these accounts? Like what is the base layer that all of these account are sharing? The first thing that they share is execution. Whether you are doing an execution via relayer or like via a multisig requiring multiple signature to execute, or maybe just have the owner to execute, all of this falls under the category of execution. Which means these accounts can talk with any other address on the blockchain, meaning they can transfer coins and token, they can mint, stake or interact with a marketplace to buy stuff, they can just do any interaction. But each one of these account have a different way to do it.

And the second similarity that they share is the storage. Whether they use the storage to store the address of the owner or the address of the people allowed to execute, or the hash that will be used by the password recovery or even the configuration parameter for relay execution, it doesn't matter, they are all using the storage. So what make Universal Profile unique or different is the architecture it have. So Universal Profiles are not biased toward any use case. They can be used by different people and for different purpose. So if you just want to have an account that store data and can interact with other addresses, then you can own it with an externally owned account, which is a key. But if you want to have more secure execution, you can own the profile with a safe that require multiple signature to execute. And if you want to have the relayer feature, you can just have an owner that is a contract that support transaction relay services, so they can pay for the gas fees and and you just have this feature.

And in case you are interested in all of these features, you can just have a contract that have all of these feature such as relay, like relayer execution and multisig execution. So it's flexible and can work for different purposes. And also UP doesn't need to be a person, it can be representing a DAO. And then you put a voting contract as owner and people then execute based on the votes and proposals. Same with brands. You can have the UP representing a brand and have an owner which is like an access control that let only the CEO to transfer money and maybe the designer to just change the picture on your profile. And actually this is the approach we took when we built LSP6. So LSP6 is another standard, it's a key manager, meaning it's a contract that allows several entities represented by keys to execute through the profile based on some certain permission. So you can allow your mobile phone to only change data on your profile or your computer to add more keys to control your profile. Maybe you can engage a social recovery service to recover your Universal Profile based on some legal verification. Like anything is possible. Plus the LSP6 key manager allow relay execution, meaning if you are an allowed controller on the UP you can sign a message and let the other entities pay for the transaction fee.

But at the end, this is not very relevant as people will go and choose their own owner that have different feature. So you can have an owner that execute based on a password or a hash given or change it to a multisig batching relay calls. It doesn't matter, the choice is absolutely yours. So what make Universal Profile different is not the feature A or feature B or feature C, it's more of like the flexible architecture that allow you to have several features across time without the need to redeploy the account and migrating every token you have and losing your social reputation. So to support all of these technology, we built a browser extension. You can say it's more of like MetaMask 2.0 or even better if you want. And you can visit docs.lukso.tech to download the browser extension. You can just download, press the download browser extension button and it will take you through a guide to download it. And we are in the process of even simplifying the extension to make it feel like more user-friendly and less technical so non-technical people can use it. So you can see screenshot how you can log in, how to manage permission, how to send tokens or log in to different websites. So yeah, lots of cool stuff. And this is possible only because of the process of standardization and especially with the Lukso standard proposal. Like you have already seen the LSP0 and the LSP6.

But actually the Universal Profiles can have full potential if they are used with the different LSPs that we proposed. So till now we have almost like 20 proposals and all of them contribute to what we call the new creative economy. Where the focus is not on the financial side but rather the creative and the social side, where we are fixing the bad user experience and making any entity like brands or DAO or even users really able to do more stuff and reach their users without even having to go like lots of complexity. So with Universal Profile it can be as simple as having an app for each brand or like each DAO and you sign in with your UP and these brands can create like a vault for you containing the assets that you will buy over time. And even if you like remove this application or interact with another application, the assets will be there because you are not relying on the application. It's more of like your profile is owning these assets and the application just render and show what assets you have. So I don't have much time to talk about all the feature we have but obviously the UP have like more non-biased feature that solve many problem we currently have in the space, such as being notified of tokens or followers or anything and being able to react on them.

So currently if I send you Narb like a token or an asset, you will not know or you need to rely on a centralized service like Etherscan to know whether you have received this asset or not because at the end your address on the blockchain is just a key that cannot have custom logic to run. But if you have a Universal Profile, you can configure your Universal Profile to like each time you receive a token you can like run a custom logic like let's say I send you a token, what you can do is make your Universal Profile act each time I send you a token to move this specific token to a vault that you own. Or maybe when you receive a specific token it will interact with a staking contract. Like literally and this is like the choice is yours and it's not just under the category of tokens, it can be anything. I can notify you about followers, about maybe royalties and you can decide how to react on it.

And also we have other feature in the Universal Profile solving many problems as extending the account over time, so you don't need to deploy a new one again if you have like a new function to add or like there is a standard that got adopted in the future, you can still support it even if your Universal Profile is deployed before. And we have also feature that take into consideration how to interact with the Universal Profile, so we have reverse verification. So this is making interacting with the UP simpler for application but without sacrificing the security. So Universal Profiles are the main building blocks that will contribute to the mass adoption of the blockchain but it's not everything. In Lukso we are trying to start with these UPs as the first step but there is a lot of things to work on such as enhancing the authenticity of the NFTs and make them go beyond just being a token ID linked to a JSON somewhere, which we already started to do with LSP7 and LSP8. Also have tokens that go beyond DeFi with cultural currencies, which is like which could help in a new way of forming communities. And any idea that we are not even thinking of right now like social graphs, social reputation, chatting system, anything.

So soon Lukso will be launching the mainnet, it will be an ETH 2.0-like chain. You can participate by being a genesis validator and for the rest of the people if you don't want to participate in becoming a genesis validator you should also check Lukso between time to time because we will be offering free deployment of Universal Profile because we are planning to subsidize early users. And more information on the roadmap and the timeline can be found on the Medium page of Lukso. So finally we ask you to take the pink pill and join us in the journey of making blockchain reach mass adoption hopefully through the new creative economy. Thank you everyone for listening.

Ah that was awesome man. Yes. So crowd, we have about four, five-ish minutes left so if you have any questions please post them in the chat. In the meantime, I did have some questions around the automation, basically the automation bit that you mentioned. So you mentioned a lot of like Web3 automation but can you also trigger like some sort of Web2 style automation in that, suppose like you send me tokens can I, can that like trigger me to post something on like a social platform or send an email? Is that possible or in the plans?

Yeah, sure. So like if we think about it like the Web3 technology is not separated on the Web2 technology because on the backend of the websites if we want to go more technical, you are receiving an event of the receive of the token. So technically you can listen to this event and based on what you received in this event you can do whatever you want. You can make an automated email, you can maybe talk with a service that provide several stuff but technically it's possible because we are emitting an event. This is first. And second, if you want to react on the Web3 side, there is a contract that you can link which you can like put any logic you want into this contract and make it run on each notification call. So like you can be notified about tokens, we set tokens, we set followers, like anything in mind. Like you can just notified and react in a different way, Web3 or Web2, doesn't matter.

Cool. And can you drive that automation through the Chrome extension you mentioned? So if somebody who's like non-technical wants to set up like different flows, can they do that through the extension through some like drag-and-drop thing or have you guys thought about that?

Yeah, I don't think it's possible through the extension because like also the extension shouldn't be something that you use for everything. It's more of like maybe managing stuff, but you can like have a dashboard or like a website where you connect your Universal Profile to and then you can just plug these pieces together and then you will have your custom logic.

Gotcha. And is there plans to make it cross-chain compatible? I know Lukso is a EVM-based chain. Would these Universal Profiles be able to be ported over to any non-EVM?

Yeah, so this is a good question. So technically what we are building are standards, which means that we are writing the implementation of these standards in Solidity which is the EVM-compatible language, but anyone can take these standard and write them write the implementation for them in any language. So you mean like you can deploy them on layer two, like you can deploy them on Solana, I'm not sure if you want to do that but you can do. It's just standard. And also like you can deploy them on EVM chains and you can have the same address of the same like the Universal Profile can be replicated on the same address so you have like some sort of multi-chain identity and using bridges I guess they you can make them talk to each other.

Excellent. Love it. Yeah, unfortunately this brings us to time. But I just want to thank you so much Yamen again for coming on and giving us this great overview. And I want to drop the POAP link for the crowd. I'll also drop this same link in the DevNTell channel in the Discord. But before we head off, I also want to mention a brief note from our operators at the DD side. So did you know that Developer DAO's fundraising operators, Chuck and Witness, are right here to help you fundraise for your projects? So in their fundraising lab on Discord, you can find support in writing grant applications, learning about fundraising, budgeting, pitching, and they can even introduce you to grant leads from different protocols if you want to take your project to the next step. So be sure to drop by their office hours twice a week or schedule a one-on-one because they're here to help. And with that, I will wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend and we will see you back here next week. All right all.

Thank you Narb. My pleasure. Thank you for coming on.