Eigen X Metis AMA Notes
On the Fed 15, Eigen and Metis held the first collaborative AMA in Metis community. Below is the content we share.
1. Can you make a short introduction about yourself and your team to our community?
Hi, folks, thanks for having me, so glad to be part of this AMA today. I am Stephen, the chief scientist of Eigen Network, I focus on privacy-preserving computation. Our team has a very deep understanding and engineering background of blockchain and Privacy-preserving computation. Before we started this project, we were building an open-source blockchain protocol in a big internet company.
We believe privacy is the basic human right in web3.0, and we are trying our best to build the drop-in privacy infrastructure for every web3.0 participant.
2. What is Eigen Network and what do you do?
Eigen, if you guys know machine learning well, you must know the Eigen Library for linear algebra. Eigen in German means distinctive, characteristic, particular to a person or place. We use it to indicate that we are doing something to help everyone capture, hold their unique value, from your data, interest, and any works for Web3, and finally, monetize the value from it.
Eigen Network aims to bring privacy to everyone in Web3, and help everyone capture, hold and monetize the value from their data. It seems like a conflict, but actually not, the linkage between the PII(personally identifiable information) is very private, but since most of Defi Dapps expose those linkages somewhere, like Google Analytics.
People are facing a big privacy challenge in Web3.0.
“Right now, web3 requires you to give up privacy entirely,” Tor Bair, co-founder of private blockchain The Secrecy Network, tweeted earlier this year. “NFTs and blockchains are all public-by-default and terrible for ownership and security.”
But current privacy-preserving technology is not really drop-in. The first issue, most of the privacy-protecting projects are not EVM compatible, if you are trying to build a very isolated ecosystem, you need to build everything, like blockchain protocol, wallets, explorers, parters, liquidity, DEX, users, etc, this is why the privacy-enabling public chain, like Secret Network, Oasis or Platon are still struggling.
But take a look at Metis, the curve is so beautiful.
Secondly, privacy is relatively pricey, you can not hide anything by Zero-Knowledge proof, one proof verification would cost more than 2 million Gas, multiple the gas price 21Gwei, you need pay 0.04, assume $3000/ETH, you need to pay $120. Can not believe it! But for sure, the cost is decreasing due to the new ZKP protocol evolution.
So those are the reasons we try to build the privacy infrastructure on Layer 2, Metis, Arbirtrum, etc.
So basically we offer 2 products, EigenSecret and EigenShare. EigenSecret focuses on decentralized confidential data stores, allowing you to store, recover, and update your private information, including your private key, secret words. It’s totally self-custodian, which means you take total control of your sensitive data, and we just help you to make it easy and friendly.
and EigenShare focuses on extracting the value of the data. Consider a young person who gets “carded” when he or she enters a bar and produces a driver’s license as proof of age. The license includes things like full name and home address; these are completely irrelevant to the question of legal drinking.
Another example, EigenShare helps people monetize their data, like your contribution to the Liquidity pool, NFT collections, and even the general Transactions. These activities are very important to you. If you lose the linkage between your PII and the activities, your privacy leaks. We adopt ZKP and a trusted execution environment to run the data mining algorithm and then build the user credential as proof of your skills or profile. It’s mostly like the personal credential, but we use ZK proof to hide sensitive information.
Beyond that, we enable you to share your activities or the data of your interest to help achieve an accurate user profile and better personalized content delivery on our privacy-preserving network. This needs offline privacy-preserving computation technology, like TEE, MPC, or Homomorphic Encryption. Like the patient can share their data to hospital or insurers with temporary access, our protocol can ensure the privacy of the data, but the hospital and insurers can utilize the encrypted data to figure out a better solution for the patient.
We think web3 is a big opportunity for people to take back the ownership of our data from the big internet giant, and the privacy computation is the infra.
3. So let’s start with our partnership, what does Eigen Network see as the strategic partner of Metis and what do you stand to gain?
Metis is an amazing L2 Optimistic Rollup based economy platform. Providing us Low gas fees, Fast transactions, Native storage, High security.
Metis, All on Ethereum. All decentralized. Amazing!!
We also have much experience with L2, we define ourselves as the first Layer 2 private computing network.
As to the corporation with Metis, we aim to provide:
1. PR cooperation: AMA, Twitter, and other forms of media publication
2. Portfolio management, multi-signature smart contract wallet is available for Metis.
3. Eigen will launch privacy-preserving DEX on Metis.
4. We can see Eigen Network keeps being innovative. But I want to know from your perspective, how do you differ from similar Defi/Money market platform
Simple to answer is we focus on privacy, guarantee the basic security of your money, we provide security-centric user portfolio management, like decentralized data store and recovery, social recovery, fine-grained payment management, and private data monetization.
From the perspective of portfolio management, we don’t have much innovation, we are making an effort to support mainstream Defi protocol, enabling the user to optimize the user’s capital efficiency. And we also will collaborate with the other amazing project on Metis to build a more secure, privacy-enabling and long-term growth and success ecosystem.
5. What is the current status of your project and the upcoming activities/major events we should expect.
EigenSecret has released the generally available version, meanwhile, we are auditing our smart contract wallet. Welcome everyone aboard and any feedback would be grateful. And in the next month, we will launch this EigenSecret product, supporting the mainnet.
EigenSecret is a security-centric portfolio management user interface, and we build some security-centric infrastructure, including Web2 compatible Login, self-custodian account, and multisig wallet.
6. Please share links to your website and social media.
