Decentralized Identifiers and AI with Rizel Scarlett

Episode Description

Anthony Campolo and Rizel Scarlett explore Web5, decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and how decentralized tech intersects with AI.

Episode Summary

Anthony Campolo sits down with Rizel Scarlett to discuss her move from GitHub to TBD, a company within Block focused on data ownership and decentralized identity. The conversation walks through the core technologies behind Web5, starting with decentralized identifiers (DIDs), which provide blockchain-free identity using BitTorrent's mainline distributed hash table. They explore the W3C DID spec, noting over 100 experimental methods, and then shift into verifiable credentials — cryptographically signed digital documents that enable tamper-evident proof of identity, licensing, and ownership, with real-world applications in music copyright, pharmaceutical supply chains, and mobile driver's licenses. The pair compares verifiable credentials to NFTs, noting key differences like revocability and tamper evidence. They examine decentralized web nodes (DWNs) as a storage layer where users control data access through JSON-defined protocols, contrasting this with Ethereum's smart contracts. The AI angle emerges through projects like Kin, which stores AI conversations in DWNs for user-owned contextual memory, and Autonomy, a tool for querying personal documents via AI. Anthony also demos AutoShow, his tool for generating transcripts and show notes from YouTube content, before the episode wraps with Rizel sharing her plan to build a privacy-focused pregnancy tracker on Web5.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Catching Up and Rizel's Move to TBD

Anthony welcomes Rizel and asks what she's been up to since their last conversation. Rizel explains her transition from GitHub to TBD, a company within Block alongside Square and Cash App, where she focuses on data ownership and decentralized identity technologies.

Anthony recalls a 2022 conversation about Web3 and notes how Rizel moved into the decentralized space just as most developers were pivoting to AI or abandoning it entirely. Rizel shares that her interest was partly driven by wanting to work with colleague Angie Jones, partly by curiosity after feeling saturated by AI hype, and partly by TBD's mission to facilitate global money transfers — a use case she found personally meaningful beyond an American-centric perspective.

00:04:01 - Decentralized Identifiers and the DID Spec

The conversation shifts to the technical underpinnings of DIDs. Anthony shares his earlier exposure through Magic Link's Ethereum-based DIDs and contrasts that with TBD's blockchain-free approach. Rizel explains that DID DHT uses BitTorrent's mainline distributed hash table rather than a blockchain, and that over 100 experimental DID methods exist in the W3C spec.

They live-explore the DID specification together, discovering TBD's entry among the registered methods. Anthony draws parallels to IPFS and its content-hash-based approach, and they discuss how DIDs can be embedded in DNS TXT records, similar to how Bluesky uses DIDs for domain-based identity. The hands-on exploration gives viewers a sense of how these standards actually work in practice.

00:10:39 - AI, Content Verification, and Verifiable Credentials

Anthony connects decentralized identity to AI by raising the need for content verification and data ownership in the age of generative models. Rizel introduces the Content Authenticity Initiative involving companies like Canon and Adobe, then pivots to explaining verifiable credentials — cryptographically signed digital documents that leverage DIDs for issuer, holder, and verifier roles.

Real-world use cases bring the concept to life: music copyright protection prevents false ownership claims, pharmaceutical supply chains verify legitimate medicines and pharmacists, and mobile driver's licenses use verifiable credentials with revocation capabilities. They compare VCs to NFTs, identifying key differences like revocability and tamper evidence, and even consult ChatGPT to fact-check the comparison, with Rizel's domain expertise proving more nuanced than the AI's response.

00:20:58 - Convincing People and Decentralized Web Nodes

Anthony asks about the challenge of advocating for decentralized technology. Rizel candidly recounts posting a blog about data ownership that was dismissed in the DevRel Collective, and shares that framing around data reusability — like carrying airline preferences across providers — resonates better with people than abstract ownership arguments.

The discussion then moves into decentralized web nodes, the storage layer of the Web5 stack. Rizel walks through how DWNs function like databases with CRUD operations, authenticated by DIDs, with access control defined through JSON protocol documents rather than code. Anthony highlights this as a major improvement over Ethereum's smart contracts, where bugs in code-based access control could expose users' funds. They note that TBD currently hosts DWN servers in tech preview, though users can also run their own.

00:29:35 - BitTorrent Parallels and TBDex Finance

Anthony draws an extended analogy between decentralized web nodes and BitTorrent, explaining how torrenting worked as a peer-to-peer file distribution system. Rizel mentions that TBD is developing a prototype wallet for storing credentials, and they briefly touch on TBDex and the financial exchange layer, where participating financial institutions like Yellow Card provide liquidity across African countries.

The tangent into torrenting history — from Pirate Bay etiquette to Rizel's little sister still using BitTorrent — provides a lighthearted interlude. The conversation illustrates how decentralized concepts have deep roots in earlier internet culture, even if today's implementations are more sophisticated and standards-driven.

00:33:51 - AI Meets Web5: Kin and Autonomy Demos

Rizel showcases two AI projects built on Web5 infrastructure. The first is Kin, an AI assistant that stores conversations in decentralized web nodes so users retain ownership of their data. She demonstrates how it remembered personal details like her job title, favorite TV show, and current interests — all stored locally rather than on a third-party server.

The second project, Autonomy, allowed users to upload documents like lease agreements and query them through AI with a vector database, all stored on DWNs. Though the project appears to have gone offline, the concept of user-owned AI-queryable document storage remains compelling. They also briefly examine ConsenSys Mesh's work connecting Ethereum DIDs with verifiable credentials, showing where Web3 and Web5 ecosystems overlap.

00:51:08 - AutoShow Demo and Wrapping Up

Anthony pivots to demonstrating AutoShow, his Node-based tool that extracts audio from YouTube videos, transcribes it with OpenAI's Whisper model, and generates structured show notes with chapters and timestamps using LLMs. He explains how the output can be dropped into YouTube descriptions for automatic chapter creation and paired with Astro content collections for SEO-optimized websites.

Rizel shares her upcoming plans, including talks at Render and CascadiaJS with Angie Jones, and a personal project to build a privacy-focused pregnancy tracker on Web5 after experiencing firsthand how quickly personal health data gets shared across platforms. Anthony closes by expressing enthusiasm for finding a fellow advocate for decentralized web technology, and both agree the space will gradually gain more attention alongside the ongoing AI wave.

Transcript

00:00:02 - Anthony Campolo

All right, we are live on The Webdevs with Rizel. What is up, Rizel?

00:00:11 - Rizel Scarlett

Hey, not much, just chillin'. Having a good time. How about you?

00:00:17 - Anthony Campolo

Doing the same. Yeah, super excited to chat with you. It's been a while. What have you been up to recently?

00:00:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, so last time we spoke, I think I worked at GitHub. I was getting into open source a bit. But right now I've moved to a different company called TBD. That's a company within Block. Block has a couple of different companies like Square, Cash App, Tidal, and TBD as well. We're focused on a lot of different things, but for sure: data ownership, being able to verify your identity in different ways, and then different things with finance going on as well.

00:01:04 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's super interesting. Do you remember when you would interview me when I was working at QuickNode and we had a conversation about Web3? This was back in 2022. I remember talking to you about it. At the time, I was trying to pitch this Web3 stuff to a lot of my web2 friends, and there was a wide range of responses to it. You seemed fairly open to it and found it interesting. What you're doing now is not quite the same as Web3, blockchain, or crypto, but it's in the same sort of area. I found it really interesting that you kind of went that route right when almost no one else was doing that. Basically everyone was either getting out of this whole decentralized space, pivoting to AI, or just staying away from it.

00:01:59 - Anthony Campolo

They're continuing to stay away from it. So what made you interested in it, and what made you want to... especially working at a company like GitHub, where you could stay for a decade and have all sorts of opportunities? You were already doing a lot of stuff there. I imagine it had to have been something really interesting to get you away from that.

00:02:21 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I will say, I know a lot of people were pivoting toward AI, but I'd already kind of gotten to explore that space and set the tone in some ways, talking about GitHub Copilot and how people can better use it. So I was just curious about what else is out there. I think for a bit I might have gotten a little exhausted by some parts of AI, because it was every single thing. So I was like, is there anything else out there? I think the initial thing that attracted me was that Angie worked at TBD. I wanted to be able to work with her. I had a couple of other friends from the past who went to Resilient Coders with me, but the technology also seemed pretty interesting. They want to kind of remake the idea of the web.

00:03:13 - Rizel Scarlett

And then they have this thing — I didn't understand everything I saw initially when I looked at the documentation, but they had this thing called TBDex, which would allow you to exchange money easily, globally. So if you were going to send money to someone in South America or the Caribbean, I knew how much of a struggle that was. So I thought, this is something that's actually helpful to more than just an American-centric perspective.

00:03:43 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, totally. That's usually one of the first things I would mention as a use case for crypto. So it looks like this is where they get back into the finance and payment type stuff.

00:04:01 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, but not necessarily. It could be for regular money, any fiat, or crypto. So yeah.

00:04:10 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, just regular payments. No, this is super interesting. I didn't know about TBDex, because I had heard about DIDs — decentralized identifiers. I think the first time I heard about them was Magic Link. There's this company that's based around email login, but they had actually originally been an Ethereum company that had kind of pivoted to that. So they were using DIDs on the Ethereum blockchain, and it was this kind of huge, ridiculous setup. But I thought it was cool because it was a web native technology. That's the thing they always talk about with DIDs. So it really made Web3 make a lot more sense, because you could have blockchains and cryptocurrencies and all this stuff, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the internet — it could just be some computers out there in the world.

00:05:07 - Anthony Campolo

So do you have identities that are currently using DIDs somewhere on some services? What are you currently using that actually implements this stuff?

00:05:20 - Rizel Scarlett

I guess I don't... okay, let me see how I can describe it. With Web5, if you want to interact with the Web5 ecosystem, automatically you use this method called Web5 Connect, and it'll create a decentralized identifier for you. So I guess I do have decentralized identifiers out there. We're still in the process of making it basically consistent, I guess, because right now it's locally stored in your browser storage. If you clear your browser, you end up getting a new DID. So I don't have, like, "this is my consistent" one.

00:06:02 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I just made one. I did it.

00:06:05 - Rizel Scarlett

Okay, yeah. Did you go to the quickstart?

00:06:10 - Anthony Campolo

Let me share my screen so people know what the heck is happening right now.

00:06:15 - Anthony Campolo

You did yours...

00:06:16 - Rizel Scarlett

And I just remade this so we could even go through it if you wanted to. Yeah. You have this concept... go ahead.

00:06:26 - Anthony Campolo

Well, I was just going to say — yeah, basically it looks like you create just like a project, and then you have this kind of thing, and then you're just console-logging out your DID. And what's DHT?

00:06:39 - Rizel Scarlett

DHT... so there are different types of DID methods. Different companies, or even individuals, have made different methods for different reasons. Maybe they're like, "I want this method to be able to hold this specific amount of information." DID DHT is what TBD made. We made this to be a blockchain-less DID, so it doesn't rely on blockchain. It's actually on BitTorrent, something called mainline distributed hash table, as you can see in the paragraph. So that's what DHT is. We also support JWK. There are hundreds of methods.

00:07:20 - Anthony Campolo

That's super interesting. Do you know anything about IPFS?

00:07:25 - Rizel Scarlett

Not really, but you could tell me.

00:07:29 - Anthony Campolo

It's another decentralized kind of thing, but it's a file system. They're also kind of similar to BitTorrent. So this is like what you said: it's not a blockchain, it's closer to something like that. Let me look at...

00:07:52 - Rizel Scarlett

Ask me all the stuff.

00:07:54 - Anthony Campolo

This is so cool. Yeah, it's just like — I always like going to the actual website because I want to know what's in the spec and what's just code other people are writing. So let's see: there exist 103 experimental DID methods. Wow.

00:08:19 - Rizel Scarlett

So everyone just keeps making their own, I guess.

00:08:24 - Anthony Campolo

Interesting. Let's see if you guys are going to be on here.

00:08:29 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm not sure. I didn't even double-check, but — oh, there it is right there.

00:08:33 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:08:34 - Rizel Scarlett

And we have our own spec too. Let me give you the right link for our spec.

00:08:41 - Anthony Campolo

I'm sure I could find it.

00:08:48 - Rizel Scarlett

There it is. That first link.

00:08:50 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:08:57 - Anthony Campolo

DIDs as DNS records, that's where it gets really interesting. So can your DID become your domain?

00:09:05 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if we've shown it that way, but perhaps.

00:09:19 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it looks like you can — there's a domain in the TXT. Yeah, this is also similar to IPFS. IPFS had ways of — they would create a content hash based on whatever is in your file system, and then you could stick that in a specific syntax in a TXT record and then point that basically at a domain. And then that domain would then sync to the content hash.

00:09:49 - Anthony Campolo

Probably a similar thing. TXT records basically let you just shove anything in there. You can kind of hack all sorts of weird stuff into DNS and domains.

00:10:01 - Rizel Scarlett

Kind of like how Bluesky is a little bit with the DIDs.

00:10:05 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I don't know exactly how Bluesky works, but I know it uses DIDs, and they give you a domain, so it all comes together somewhere in there. But we're super far off from where we were originally going to be, so...

00:10:21 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah.

00:10:23 - Rizel Scarlett

I sent you a blog post just for further reading, whatever you wanted, by the person who created the DHT on our team. He expands on it a bit more.

00:10:39 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, what I think is cool is you actually had some really specific use cases that this is already being done with, which involves AI, which I thought was pretty cool.

00:10:57 - Anthony Campolo

BlackGirlBytes? One or no one?

00:11:01 - Rizel Scarlett

No one.

00:11:02 - Anthony Campolo

There we go. Yeah. "Future of Personal AI" — yeah, this is the one. So this is actually something I first heard about — there was some guy writing blog posts about AI and crypto and blockchain and how you're going to need crypto stuff to verify the AI stuff. This was like 2018 or something. At the time I had no idea what was going on. But basically we're kind of there now, where AI has gotten to be such a big thing that we want to be able to do two things that I see crypto being used for. First is just making sure you can train and use your own data without having to expose it to a third-party service. But then also you could use it to verify that a piece of content is an original, or that it hasn't been tampered with, or that it's real or AI-generated.

00:12:15 - Anthony Campolo

So, like watermarking and stuff like that. What do DIDs have to do with AI?

00:12:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I think, like what you even brought up about the verification part. Before I dive into what the blog post says, there's the Content Authenticity Initiative. It's a couple of companies. Maybe you already know this; it sounded like you were touching on this. Companies working together, like Canon, Adobe, different media companies. Basically what they're doing is proving that the content that was generated, whether it's an image or a video, is real. So you'll have kind of like what you said, a watermark, like a little info icon, and it'll say when something was created and why, et cetera. And I did talk to another guy, similar to what you said, who had a blog post where he'd basically created a ChatGPT-like thing, and it was saying...

00:13:25 - Rizel Scarlett

"This information is actually real and not just hallucinated. And it comes from this specific area." But I think I should tell you about verifiable credentials, because you're talking a lot about decentralized identifiers, and verifiable credentials leverage decentralized identifiers. That's what helps with the verification of everything.

00:13:45 - Anthony Campolo

You had a post about that too, didn't you?

00:13:48 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I have a lot of posts about it. In short, it's a cryptographic way to prove something. It's like a digital version of any legal document you have, or any document in general. So if you had a driver's license, if you had a... I'm trying to think. I don't know why things are missing from my mind... a degree or something like that. I've even chatted with a lot of people on live streams. One guy is using verifiable credentials for music copyright, so people can't say, "I was actually the one that created this song." You can't take ownership because you have this proof here, signed digitally. And people are also, or this organization is also, using it for pharmaceutical supply chain, because apparently, I didn't know that in the pharmaceutical supply chain, they trade medicines, but you can't just trade with anyone, of course, because it could be fake.

00:14:48 - Rizel Scarlett

It could be a fake pharmacist. So they're leveraging verifiable credentials to say, "This is a real version of, I don't know, Lexapro, and I'm a real pharmacist." So DIDs are being used in verifiable credentials to specify: here's the issuer, here's the subject or holder, the person receiving it, and here's the verifier. Those are where the decentralized identifiers are being used. And then you have this verifiable credential that can get converted into a JWT or CBOR or whatever kind of signed format, whatever the SDK uses. For Web5, we use JWT. And then you can use that as proof back and forth, whether it's for AI or whatever. That was really long, and I can go back to that "Future of Personal AI" blog post, but I'll let you ask me questions if you have any.

00:15:43 - Anthony Campolo

Yes, it's an NFT. It's very similar.

00:15:48 - Rizel Scarlett

I think... well, there are a couple of differences. I don't know why they're not coming to mind. Can you revoke... you can't revoke an NFT, right?

00:15:59 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. With an NFT, if it gets stolen, you're just kind of screwed.

00:16:06 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I think that's one of the main differences.

00:16:09 - Anthony Campolo

Like, you —

00:16:10 - Rizel Scarlett

You can revoke a verifiable credential. Mobile driver's licenses — I think that third blog post I wrote — mobile driver's licenses use verifiable credentials under the hood. And the reason government agencies have chosen it is because of the ability to revoke it if someone loses their license.

00:16:33 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm going to pull up ChatGPT real quick and ask it the same thing. What's the difference between NFTs and verifiable credentials?

00:16:54 - Rizel Scarlett

I think NFTs also aren't tamper-evident. I'm not...

00:17:00 - Anthony Campolo

What do you mean by that?

00:17:02 - Rizel Scarlett

Well, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know that much about NFTs, but with verifiable credentials, if someone went in and tried to change information within it, it will show that it was edited and it wouldn't be valid anymore. I can even share my screen later if you wanted to see what I mean.

00:17:28 - Anthony Campolo

Okay.

00:17:49 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, that's what I care about. I was...

00:17:51 - Rizel Scarlett

Like...

00:17:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. "NFTs are primarily about ownership and uniqueness, while verifiable credentials are about verified claims and identity-related information. NFTs enable trading ownership; VCs allow for secure privacy and verification."

00:18:10 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't like this.

00:18:13 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, because this is like — they're both just defining themselves in their own terms. But owning something is a verifiable claim that requires identity, because you can't own something unless you have an identity.

00:18:29 - Rizel Scarlett

I found...

00:18:31 - Rizel Scarlett

a blog post.

00:18:33 - Anthony Campolo

What you were saying about... let's see. VCs can be revoked, can't they? And they're...

00:18:43 - Rizel Scarlett

Tamper-evident.

00:18:45 - Anthony Campolo

And have tamper evidence.

00:18:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, see — you're smarter than ChatGPT.

00:18:56 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't know anything about NFTs, though. It got me on that.

00:19:04 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, yeah.

00:19:05 - Rizel Scarlett

So if someone said they wanted to pretend that they gave you the driver's license, or they wanted to change the date when their driver's license expired, it'll show that.

00:19:20 - Anthony Campolo

And ChatGPT is going super slow.

00:19:27 - Rizel Scarlett

Is everyone using it? Also, VCs are a W3C standard, so you can look it up in the spec as well. Just like... ah.

00:19:42 - Anthony Campolo

So I guess a verifiable credential is not something that would be transferred from one person to another.

00:19:52 - Rizel Scarlett

No, you can't do that.

00:19:54 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, because people were using NFTs like verifiable credentials. Like in some developer DAO, you'd get an NFT and that would allow you access to the Discord server. And it's connected to your wallet, so your wallet is what gives you the identity. So there's a cluster of all these different technologies that all kind of enable similar things. And it's mostly about: how do you have end-to-end encryption on all of your stuff in a way that doesn't require a third party to hold those keys or verify those things? So that's why there are differences, but they're aiming for the same thing. That's why I find it really interesting that everything Web5 is doing, I can kind of map to a Web3 thing. They're just doing it with different tech, but the underlying point of why they're building it is similar.

00:20:58 - Anthony Campolo

And what has been your experience trying to convince people that this tech is worthwhile or that they need it? Because for me, it was always like people just didn't seem to be concerned about owning their data or having to use third parties, or they just lived in a country where they had very good property ownership laws. So what has been your experience trying to make the philosophical case for this tech to people?

00:21:30 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I will be honest, I think I'm still learning. Especially in the beginning, I had written this blog post on data ownership. I was so proud of it. And then I posted it in the DevRel Collective, and people were essentially, short summary of what they were saying, like, "This is kind of dumb." And I was like, oh.

00:21:48 - Anthony Campolo

Okay.

00:21:50 - Rizel Scarlett

But I've tried to listen to stuff that Angie says. Some of what she talks about is the reusability of data, and I think that sometimes gets people. She gives this example: let's say you set your preferences for an airline, like, "I always want"... whatever... for Delta. And she gives the example that if you were to use Web5 or decentralized web nodes and stuff like that, you can bring that data with you to a different airline. If you had to use British Airways or something like that, sometimes people are like, "Oh, that's cool." I think they also get interested in the verifiable credentials use cases when I tell them people are actually using this for music copyright, or the AI example we were talking about with content verification. So those are the areas where I start to get people a little more.

00:22:48 - Rizel Scarlett

I think when I say "Web5" in the beginning, I automatically lose them.

00:22:55 - Anthony Campolo

That sounds like a joke. Yeah, it literally — it sounds like someone made a joke. So much of the jokes are like, "Web5 — wasn't there just this thing called Web3? And where's Web4? Is it because it's Web2 plus Web3? Is that right?"

00:23:10 - Rizel Scarlett

That is the reason. And I know a lot of times they say it's tongue-in-cheek. A lot of our naming conventions are kind of just fun jokes, like even the name TBD. I think the tech is hard, so they wanted to give it fun, silly names. But I think some of it really depends on the different use cases. And I think the example around using verifiable credentials and DIDs for those global financial exchanges resonates with people who've had to send money to different countries, because people know it's annoying going to Western Union. So I think that sometimes helps solidify it.

00:24:03 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So I'm interested in the decentralized web nodes part now, because I literally never even heard of this until I saw your blog post mention it. And I'm looking at the TBDex white paper actually, and I saw it's in here.

00:24:23 - Anthony Campolo

They need an interface which stores, covers, and fetches data. So this is really the storage layer underlying the whole stack, which has DIDs as the authentication. And then this is the storage. And I guess where does the compute happen? I guess the compute would also happen on these web nodes.

00:24:52 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't know what you mean by compute, to be honest. You mean...

00:24:56 - Anthony Campolo

So like, say you have your decentralized web node. You have all of your documents — like you saved all your journals — and you want to run a search on it or something.

00:25:18 - Rizel Scarlett

Okay, yeah. Go to the documentation. Basically you can treat it like a database. You can do CRUD operations on your decentralized web node. So like you said, you authenticate with your DID and they're like, "This is Anthony's decentralized web node, DID:DHT:1234 whatever." And then you can query for data, you can send data, and whatever. I think the cool thing, or maybe the more unique thing, about decentralized web nodes is that you have control over who the data is accessible to and what parts of the data. So maybe go to Protocols; I think that's where you might want to go. You would use a protocol, it's not the same as the HTTP protocol, but you would use a protocol, which is just a JSON document, to say, "Here's who gets access to this." So we can look at this example here.

00:26:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Right, and like this is your protocol for social media XYZ. You have different types: you have a post, you have a reply, you have an image. And then you can say, "For my app, anyone can create a post and read a post, but maybe you only want your friends and family to see an image," or whatever. So you have that control over who gets access and who doesn't.

00:26:46 - Anthony Campolo

So this is the equivalent of the smart contract. In Ethereum you would have a smart contract where you would write some code that would kind of do all this. So do you write actual code in a programming language, or is it just JSON objects? You're not really writing logic, it looks like.

00:27:09 - Rizel Scarlett

For defining the protocol, it's just the JSON object. But for the entire Web5 SDK, it's a language. So if you wanted to, click "Build" and then DWN records. That's where you're writing code, where you can say, "All right, Anthony can say Rizel gave me access to see her blog post. I want to query this protocol for this type of data, blog post from her DID." So that's where you're writing code. But for just setting up the protocol itself, just JSON.

00:27:58 - Anthony Campolo

See, that's really great, because the thing that messed everything up with blockchain is that the way you would define the protocol there, you would just write code. If you were actually trying to define who has access to what, there might be a bug in it, and you might actually give someone access to all your money by accident. Your whole contract is totally screwed. So having just a very specific JSON definition, it's more like infrastructure-as-code kind of thing. Yeah, totally.

00:28:38 - Anthony Campolo

And you can set up roles.

00:28:41 - Rizel Scarlett

You can point it to a specific person. These were made a while ago. I don't know if they're still relevant to how we do them now. Oh good, they did update it. Cool.

00:28:57 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, this is cool. Pretty straightforward — you're just defining your data model along with your permissions. This is really cool. So you could host a server — that's where the compute happens. There's a server you can host.

00:29:21 - Rizel Scarlett

If you wanted to. Right now, in tech preview, TBD is hosting a couple of DWN servers for folks. But if you wanted to host one locally, you can do that.

00:29:35 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's the same thing with IPFS. Protocol Labs was running a whole big IPFS cluster, but then other people could run it on their own machine. And this is really like the BitTorrent thing. Did you do torrents when you were growing up?

00:29:53 - Rizel Scarlett

No, I didn't.

00:29:57 - Anthony Campolo

I thought you were going to be the age where you just... I was just the last generation of people who really did torrents, because I torrented music up until 2002, 2003. And then that's when the iPod came out, and you had streaming services, and everything kind of came after that. But the interesting thing about torrenting is that you would download a uTorrent client, and then you would try and download a movie or a song, and it would be downloading from multiple people at once because it would be living on different computers. And then once you downloaded it, people would be able to download it from you. And so you would be like the node for the content once you downloaded it. But if you just downloaded something and then deleted it from the torrent, then you were no longer interacting with it. And that was considered bad etiquette for torrenting.

00:30:56 - Anthony Campolo

You're supposed to reseed the stuff you downloaded.

00:31:00 - Rizel Scarlett

I might... okay, I could... did you do it with movies? I feel like I did.

00:31:05 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:31:06 - Rizel Scarlett

I watched someone do... okay, I don't...

00:31:07 - Anthony Campolo

Did you ever use The Pirate Bay? That's a torrent site.

00:31:10 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I wasn't commonly doing it because I think I was like seven. But I might have... it sounds familiar. I feel like I did it once or twice.

00:31:22 - Anthony Campolo

Cool.

00:31:24 - Anthony Campolo

So you said they are running their own servers?

00:31:31 - Rizel Scarlett

And that's what happens when you do Web5 Connect. It just connects to the TBD servers. Yeah.

00:31:40 - Anthony Campolo

Currently in tech preview.

00:31:42 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, there's so much stuff in these docs.

00:31:49 - Rizel Scarlett

Shout out to my team and Angie. We built the docs.

00:31:53 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, these are great. The pages themselves are pretty concise, which is nice.

00:32:08 - Rizel Scarlett

Right now we're developing a wallet, but it's more just as a prototype, just so people can get an idea of how to store stuff. That's just my blog post, I think, just saying: no, crypto is not cryptocurrency.

00:32:28 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, you go way out of your way not to associate the two things, which I understand. I'd be curious... at some point these things are going to connect to cryptocurrencies. It's just a question of... what are the participating financial institutions?

00:32:50 - Rizel Scarlett

Within... I'll be honest, I'm not focused on the TBDex stuff. So maybe there'll be some gaps in my knowledge, but that is within... I'm more on Web5. But that is within the TBDex network. In the TBDex network, you have three actors: you have a participating financial institution, that's the one that's going to say, "You want to exchange, you want to send money to, I don't know, Africa or something. You can send it for maybe like three naira or whatever," so they give you different options for liquidity.

00:33:31 - Anthony Campolo

It says here Yellow Card is the first FI offering liquidity across 20 African countries.

00:33:40 - Anthony Campolo

Interesting. Okay, so let's go back to the AI stuff.

00:33:51 - Rizel Scarlett

I went so far away from it. Sorry.

00:33:53 - Anthony Campolo

This is great.

00:33:56 - Rizel Scarlett

That thing you clicked was really interesting. There's this organization called Kin, or maybe "My Kin" or something like that, and they essentially made their own version of ChatGPT, but they're using DWNs. So instead of your data going out into the world and being leveraged by different tools, you can just... oh, I need to update that. We've moved our YouTube channel.

00:34:27 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:34:29 - Anthony Campolo

So it's no longer... what's the name of the YouTube channel? TBD Videos?

00:34:35 - Rizel Scarlett

There are a lot of channels with TBD, so I bet. Yeah. And "videos" — and then you go to... what was it called? Keep scrolling.

00:34:53 - Anthony Campolo

How long ago was it?

00:34:58 - Rizel Scarlett

There are a lot of AI ones. Oh, "Your AI Bestie," "The Key to Building Trust in AI." That's what it is.

00:35:06 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, there we go.

00:35:11 - Anthony Campolo

So to the site. Here we go.

00:35:14 - Rizel Scarlett

Basically the whole conversation with your AI agent gets saved in a decentralized web node. So you're not thinking, "This is getting stored in a place I don't know about." What they want is that eventually they're going to make it so you can choose who you want to send the data to. And they're even imagining a world where, let's say you like to order Starbucks every day at 9 a.m. Maybe you give the AI agent a verifiable credential and it orders it on your behalf every day at 9 a.m. That's what I'm quoting from the CTO's explanation.

00:36:01 - Anthony Campolo

Interesting. Yeah. So I can chat with it. Contextual memory, personalized reminders, and you're working on integrations. What's proactive chat?

00:36:15 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't know.

00:36:17 - Anthony Campolo

This is not your product or your company anymore, so I'm just asking out loud. But the memory part —

00:36:23 - Rizel Scarlett

The memory part is really cool. Like, look at that image they have there, right here. For me, I wonder if I still have it on my phone. It had, like, "My name's Rizel." Let me see. I had signed in. It was like, "Your name's Rizel, you like to watch this TV show," just from talking to me. So that way, you know, like what ChatGPT... I know they came out with GPT-4o or whatever that's supposed to remember stuff, but this really remembered everything about me: my favorite show, my job, all this other stuff. I'm trying to log in. Hopefully it still has it.

00:37:04 - Rizel Scarlett

And skip. Yep. Yeah, even like... I just logged in and it said...

00:37:12 - Rizel Scarlett

Let's see. Here it is. I don't know if you can see it, my screen's dirty, but it says that I'm a staff developer advocate, I'm learning about Web5, I'm watching Love Is Blind right now. So it just pays attention to certain stuff so it can bring it back up for the future, which I think is cool.

00:37:43 - Anthony Campolo

See, I just want to say hey to people in the chat. Hey! Someone said they were the first person to crack Command and Conquer and sold them in school for a bomb.

00:37:56 - Anthony Campolo

No, I'm talking...

00:37:57 - Rizel Scarlett

About torrenting. Maybe. No.

00:38:01 - Anthony Campolo

They said they made a lot of money torrenting.

00:38:09 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I mean, you still gotta pay like four bucks to rent a movie from Amazon or YouTube or something. So it's still worth torrenting. You still save some money.

00:38:20 - Rizel Scarlett

I think my little sister torrents, because she told me the other day, she was like, "I'm watching this." And I was like, "how?" And she's like, "download BitTorrent." And I'm like, you still use it?

00:38:33 - Anthony Campolo

So she's more — yeah.

00:38:40 - Anthony Campolo

So you had one other...

00:38:44 - Rizel Scarlett

I had a lot of AI ones.

00:38:45 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. It was "Web5 Meets Generative AI." Let's look at that one.

00:38:51 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh yeah, this was really cool. A community member made this, and they called it Autonomy. I think they're still working on it. Basically, you upload different files onto there. They gave the example of uploading their lease agreement, and then they used AI to basically chat with it and ask questions like, "When does my lease agreement end?" That way you don't have to read through the whole thing. They were using a vector database as well to piece up the information pretty quickly. And then using DWNs, of course, to own and store your data. But they were still trying to figure out how to have the vector database on a DWN. Oh yeah, let's see if it works for you. I never tried it myself. Where's the AI part?

00:39:48 - Anthony Campolo

Let's see. So I've got this one. I put my resume in there. I can look at it, I can download it, and I can share it.

00:40:01 - Rizel Scarlett

If you want, you can view the video really quickly. I wonder if there's a specific minute. I'll send you the new one.

00:40:13 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So say you've got a whole bunch of music.

00:40:17 - Rizel Scarlett

We moved...

00:40:18 - Anthony Campolo

He moved his GitHub to us, apparently.

00:40:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Dang.

00:40:27 - Anthony Campolo

Let's see what was there. His name is Anthony.

00:40:34 - Anthony Campolo

Good name.

00:40:38 - Rizel Scarlett

It's Mateo? And...

00:40:44 - Rizel Scarlett

Did he get rid of his GitHub? Where's it at?

00:40:48 - Anthony Campolo

He still has his GitHub, but maybe he transferred it to another, like, a company or something.

00:41:04 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, actually, I think I might... let's try this. Nope.

00:41:10 - Rizel Scarlett

It's good that you're going through these. I don't even know how many links are not working anymore.

00:41:17 - Anthony Campolo

Maybe he just killed the project.

00:41:22 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm going to have to hit him up and see what happened.

00:41:25 - Rizel Scarlett

I'll show you the YouTube video then. That sucks. I'll go to the minute where he demos it. It was my first live stream at TBD.

00:41:44 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, that's cool.

00:41:48 - Anthony Campolo

Actually, I have an idea. Let's try this — if it got saved in the Wayback Machine.

00:41:59 - Rizel Scarlett

Ooh, that's smart.

00:42:01 - Anthony Campolo

Here we go.

00:42:11 - Anthony Campolo

Maybe he rebranded it.

00:42:13 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, maybe he gave it a different name. I'm going to hit him up on Discord and be like, "Hey, what happened?" But I found the minute at which he demonstrates this.

00:42:27 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, let's switch to your screen.

00:42:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Share screen. Oh no, this is a new laptop.

00:42:40 - Anthony Campolo

You can hop off and back on if you need to.

00:42:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Okay, I'll do that. BRB.

00:42:47 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, while you're doing that, I'm going to take your thing and plop it into Claude so we can get the show notes. If anyone else out there hasn't said hey yet, say hey. Okay, many tabs open. Okay, that looks...

00:44:05 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so for those still hanging out, here we go.

00:44:10 - Rizel Scarlett

Thanks for the patience. So I'm sharing it now. When he had demonstrated it, it looked like this storage, and then he was asking, "When does my renter's insurance expire?" So he didn't necessarily have to click on that particular document. And here it says: your renter's...

00:44:36 - Anthony Campolo

Insurance policy —

00:44:37 - Rizel Scarlett

— is set to expire. I love it. November 2024. Oh, go ahead.

00:44:40 - Anthony Campolo

Can you mute your sound?

00:44:43 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, you can hear it?

00:44:44 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:44:47 - Anthony Campolo

Sorry.

00:44:48 - Anthony Campolo

All good.

00:44:49 - Rizel Scarlett

I pressed "Mute Tab," so I thought... but did you miss everything I said?

00:44:54 - Anthony Campolo

No, no. I think I know what's going on here. It looks like the current app that's still running, he probably doesn't have it hooked up. What we're looking at right here, this is just localhost. This is not actually running. So he may have never even deployed this at all. And the thing itself might never have actually worked, because the problem with a thing like this is if he's got it hooked up to a chatbot, someone's got to pay for that.

00:45:21 - Rizel Scarlett

That's true.

00:45:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I'm not sure if he had chosen to show it locally because it had additional features. I can't remember, since this was so many... this says "one month ago," but it wasn't. It was like a month after I started. So maybe seven months ago.

00:45:42 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Looks like it was in December.

00:45:50 - Anthony Campolo

Let's see if this is his same handle on X. It says his account was suspended.

00:45:58 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh. I'm going to hit him up. I haven't seen him in Discord in a while.

00:46:06 - Anthony Campolo

Very interesting. So that project is kind of a bust. But I like the idea, because there are other services that are doing this. I'm trying to think of what some of the ones I've heard about are.

00:46:27 - Anthony Campolo

Private French companies.

00:46:35 - Anthony Campolo

So we've talked about Kin and then this Autonomy. Are there other AI things you've been looking at that are related to TBD stuff?

00:46:49 - Rizel Scarlett

The only other one I think was this guy who worked at ConsenSys. He made this. It was just a demo application again. It was called StarChat. Let me see if I can find... ConsenSys. Basically just proving, "This information is legitimate and it came from this particular place." Let me see if I can find it. StarChat. I'm going to look up Nick Reynolds, Nick Reynolds, ConsenSys Mesh. And then he did something with AI. Let me see if I can find that.

00:47:43 - Anthony Campolo

Let's see. Oh.

00:47:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I think [Veramo?] is a company within ConsenSys, or the other way around. StarChat. Ah, here it is, his blog post on Medium. I'll put it in the private chat. I don't think the demo works anymore either, because he made it on July 17th, 2023, and he brought it back to life just for the live stream. But yeah, he made StarChat Beta, and it's on Hugging Face, and it's using decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials to kind of say, "This information came from, I don't know, WebMD, and it's legitimate." That way you know it's not just the AI hallucinating.

00:48:32 - Anthony Campolo

Right. Yeah, it's a little more built out, but it looks like Verite Labs — they create stuff around DIDs also.

00:48:50 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, their SDK is quite similar to Web5's, just the verifiable credential part of what we do, from what I've looked through.

00:49:05 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I'm curious — I'm not seeing how they're related to ConsenSys. Sorry, ConsenSys the company, right?

00:49:12 - Rizel Scarlett

ConsenSys Mesh. Yeah, I don't know either.

00:49:16 - Anthony Campolo

ConsenSys Mesh is not — oh wait. Oh, this one — with a C — this is ConsenSys.

00:49:24 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So this is the company behind Ethereum, or the company that formed around Ethereum — that's probably a better way to put it. So this is where Web3 and Web5 meet each other. Oh, I think this is what that is. Yeah, there you go. Boom.

00:49:47 - Rizel Scarlett

Gotcha.

00:49:51 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. No, this is really interesting, because I was seeing things like ENS — Ethereum Name Service — and here you've got DIDs. So this is — at the beginning of the episode I was saying how Magic Link was using something like this: a way to have a DID on the Ethereum blockchain. Yeah, it's cool. I think it would make sense for all this stuff to play together nicely at a certain point.

00:50:21 - Anthony Campolo

If anyone wanted it to. You've got a React app here. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Cool stuff. This looks pretty old. They're still calling it Krakow.

00:50:38 - Rizel Scarlett

Because that is a throwback.

00:50:41 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:50:42 - Rizel Scarlett

That's funny. In addition, there are some Web3 companies getting into this. And there are some Web2 companies too, a little bit, like Auth0. They do verifiable stuff. Microsoft does a little bit of verifiable credential stuff. So it's kind of interesting that some of these companies are dabbling in digital identity as well.

00:51:08 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. All right, so check this out. AutoShow is basically a Node scripting workflow that does a couple of things. It starts with a YouTube URL, you start with this, and then the command you would run... I don't know how well you can see that, but...

00:51:35 - Anthony Campolo

This is over here. So "--video," you're passing a video. You can also give it a playlist with multiple YouTube videos, a list of just arbitrary YouTube video URLs, or an RSS feed. And then you can specify a transcription model. But basically what it does is it rips the audio out of the video and then uses Whisper, OpenAI's open source transcription model, to create a transcript. Then it appends a prompt to the front. The prompt is what generates the show notes. So I tell it to create a one-sentence summary, a one-paragraph summary, and then chapters with timestamps. And then you give it an example of what you want to create. Then you copy-paste this whole thing into an LLM and you get something like this: "Cole Davis discusses how Switchboard uses self-sovereign identity to revolutionize music rights management and streamline the music industry."

00:52:38 - Anthony Campolo

Cool. And then you can see you've got chapters: Introduction, Background on the Music Industry, his journey and inspiration, then the demo, then talking about industry adoption, onboarding, copyright laws, and then the final wrap-up. So what's cool is if you were to drop this into a YouTube description, it automatically creates those chapters for you because it recognizes these. And then you can click them as links. And if you wanted to, you can clip your video and have a whole bunch of clips with titles and descriptions already. So that's something I want to start doing with some of my more long-form content. And it just gives you a nice description. So if you want to tweet it, you have something right there to tweet with. And you can tweak the prompt if you want. Like sometimes if you're doing some content and it doesn't have a title, you could say, "Create three potential titles," or "Give me three key takeaways someone should have from this content." That kind of stuff.

00:53:40 - Anthony Campolo

So yeah. And if you want to check it out, it's called AutoShow.

00:53:51 - Rizel Scarlett

Let me bookmark it.

00:53:53 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. If you star it, you'll be the tenth person.

00:53:57 - Anthony Campolo

Hey, look at you.

00:54:02 - Rizel Scarlett

Got it. I'm going to star it and then bookmark it. Yeah.

00:54:08 - Anthony Campolo

This is good.

00:54:09 - Rizel Scarlett

Let me try out all these little AI things. I'm like, how do I get my content... how do I streamline the creation of my content?

00:54:18 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So if you end up using this for your own stuff or for TBD or whatever, let me know. I'm basically showing this to all my streamer friends — I'm showing it to Ben Holmes, I'm showing it to Nicky T, I've shown it to Jen Jannard, Michael Chan. You're the fifth person I've demoed it to, I think, because all those people have craploads of, like, hundreds of hours of YouTube streaming content or podcast content out there in the world. And I'm like, these are my target audience, because they're just like me: they have too much content.

00:54:52 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, it's hard to manage it all. Thank you. I think I'll definitely try it out.

00:54:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And there's one step deeper where it also creates front matter based on the metadata of the YouTube video. So you can actually get full markdown files. And if you pair that with an Astro content collection, you can just plop it all into an Astro starter. And then you have an entire website with SEO-optimized pages of every video.

00:55:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Hell yeah, I like that. That's great.

00:55:28 - Anthony Campolo

Oh my God, that's AutoShow. Thank you.

00:55:32 - Anthony Campolo

We're at the hour mark, so I'm going to have to go because it's my partner's birthday and we're seeing a movie. But let's just share some links, and — anything you're working on, or what's some cool stuff happening, either AI or not AI related with TBD?

00:55:49 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:55:50 - Rizel Scarlett

I mean, we're going to be at Render. Both me and Angie are going to do a talk. So if y'all are going to be there, definitely come by. And I'll be at CascadiaJS, probably in July. I'll start live-streaming myself doing a project I want to build, like a pregnancy app tracker. Since a lot of the trackers right now... literally, as soon as I got pregnant, Facebook knows I'm pregnant everywhere. So I'm like, what if you just...

00:56:22 - Anthony Campolo

You're pregnant? I didn't know. Yeah, hey, congrats!

00:56:27 - Rizel Scarlett

But yeah, as soon as that happened, I'm like, wow, I could definitely see how the data gets easily sold and shared. So I want to make a better app, first of all because some of these apps are not that great in my opinion, and then also build it on top of Web5. So I'm going to weekly-stream that, but that's about it.

00:56:45 - Anthony Campolo

That's awesome. That's such a great use case. And it's something that's personally interesting to you. I'll want to follow along with that. That's very cool.

00:56:56 - Rizel Scarlett

Awesome. And thanks for chatting with me.

00:56:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, for sure. Super glad we could connect. We should definitely stay in touch. You work on so much cool stuff and you're connected to a lot of interesting people. I'm just happy to see literally anyone else interested in the decentralized web, because I felt like I was shouting into the void for the longest time.

00:57:19 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, and most people are still in the AI wave, but I think it'll slowly but surely catch up.

00:57:26 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Well, thanks for being here and thanks to everyone who was watching in the audience. We will catch you guys next time.

00:57:36 - Anthony Campolo

Hey.