Scatter allows you to securely connect to blockchain dApps and privately manage your digital identity.
Ashe Oro: Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome back to the Liberty Entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host, Ashe Oro, and today on the show, we've got Nathan James. You probably don't know who that is, but he's also known as N.S. James. He's the founder of Scatter, which manages signatures, identity, reputation, and your security on blockchains, including Ethereum; EOS, my favorite; recently, Tron; and possibly Bitcoin in the future.
Ashe Oro: Nathan, thanks for joining us.
Nathan James: Thank you for having me.
Ashe Oro: Everyone in the EOS community knows who you are, but just in case they've been living under a rock for the past six months or so, who are you and how did you find the whole blockchain thing?
Nathan James: Well, I'm Nathan James. That's who I am, right?
Ashe Oro: Or are you N. S. James?
Nathan James: Or am I N. S. James? I don't even know anymore. [crosstalk 00:00:53] handles.
Ashe Oro: The programmer formerly known as.
Nathan James: Yes, the programmer formerly known as Nathan. I'm just a programmer who likes the idea of blockchain, loves the idea of blockchain. You know, there's a thing in blockchain where, once you get it into your head, you just can't sleep anymore. All you do is dream is about blockchain and I think that it's really true. It is. I haven't slept since EOS was launched, but when I do sleep, I sleep of blockchain.
Ashe Oro: I was going to say, "In like five years."
Nathan James: Yeah, in like five years. Exactly.
Ashe Oro: So what is Scatter? In your own words, what is it?
Nathan James: A lot of people seem to focus on its single sign-on aspect, but that's the smallest part of it. Scatter is a multi-blockchain key protector. It allows you to sign things on the blockchain without ever exposing your key to the thing that you're signing it on, so applications, desktops, games, whatever. It helps you protect yourself. That's its first and foremost goal.
Nathan James: Now, we're starting to also add identity on top of that. We're starting to add reputation on top of that. Single sign-on is a byproduct of the identity and reputation. You can log into applications locally without having to give up your information to Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever.
Ashe Oro: I know that this started and you're big in the EOS community, but why did you also decide to support these other chains like Ethereum, Tron, and I think possibly, Bitcoin?
Nathan James: It goes back to what we're fighting, right? We're not fighting Ethereum as EOSers. We're not fighting Tron as Ethereumers. We're fighting banks, we're fighting governments. It's hard to say that on camera, right? We're fighting FICO scores. We're trying to fight centralized components. Fighting between us, between other blockchains, isn't constructive. It's not helpful.
Nathan James: I've taken a very agnostic approach with Scatter and we're just going to add all the blockchains. It will allow us to do amazing things in the future.
Ashe Oro: And why did you start developing Scatter on EOS and for that community specifically?
Nathan James: Actually, it came out of a need, and not just my need, everybody's need.
Nathan James: When I first got into EOS, it was December of 2017. There was nothing like Scatter, there was no signature provider. Now we have a couple of different ones. There's [inaudible 00:03:20] TokenPocket, there's Lynx. Scatter was created because people wanted to make apps. All throughout the apps that I saw people making, they had that little stupid input field where you had to put in your private key. I was like, "Well, there's no way this is going to sustain itself." Right?
Ashe Oro: Yeah.
Nathan James: Who's going to do that? And I started working on Scatter. I think it I had it out a week later.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, I know that you did, and I don't know what it was called, but we could register Scatter identities back a while ago.
Nathan James: Right.
Ashe Oro: Ironically, we had to use MetaMask. What is this? For most people, even myself whenever I started using MetaMask, I was like, "What is this? What am I even doing here? Why do I even need this?" I got these weird accounts in MetaMask, and now I have accounts in Scatter, and accounts in EOS. What was it? Whenever I purchased the Scatter username Ashe, what did I actually purchase and how will that Ashe username be used in EOS DApps?
Nathan James: That's actually not only for EOS DApps. That's the brilliant thing about it is there's a service that I've been working on for, I don't know, the past six months. It's called RIDL. It's the reputation and identity layer, which is a sister system for scatter. It could be used by all DApps on any blockchain, whatever, comes with the JavaScript API.
Nathan James: What it does is it allows you to make an identity unique across all networks, all blockchains, centralized or decentralized applications. Your name Ashe, for instance, is now, because you reserved it before it went live, you now own it for 100 years. It doesn't expire. Whereas normally, these names expire every year.
Ashe Oro: Sorry haters. I've got it.
Nathan James: Yeah, sorry! Ashe is taken. There's always Chuck Norris.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, but it helps normal users have more of a sign-in experience to act like we're kind of used to already.
Nathan James: Right. And then on top of that is the actual reputation. I can give you reputation on top of your unique Ashe identity, which apps inside of Ethereum can use, apps inside of EOS can use, centralized applications can use. Then that reputation's actually decentralized on a blockchain, so a centralized application can use it, taking the benefits of the blockchain without ever having to integrate with the blockchain.
Ashe Oro: Yeah. Let's talk about that reputation for a second. I think that this is one of the most amazing parts of, not only blockchain in general, but also Dan Larimer's blockchain strong identity [crosstalk 00:06:10] blockchains.
Nathan James: Right.
Ashe Oro: I could remember the article he wrote. It must be five, six months ago now, talking about radical privacy or radical transparency and the necessity of having strong identity on a blockchain or really just on the digital space itself, and how that would prove to create a more-
Nathan James: A foundation.
Ashe Oro: A foundation and a fair and just society. Whereas with an anonymous type of site, look at all the trolls. How many trolls on Twitter would actually say that stuff to your face if they knew who each other were?
Nathan James: There's a very important thing here is we have the base layer. The baser layer's meant to be trustless, but that is so, so very limiting and dangerous for a bunch of different types of applications. We have to have that foundation of a trust on top of that trustless to be able to build certain things like loaning platforms or credit score platforms, anything to do with finance. You want to know if the person is able to pay back a loan. You can't do that trustless sense without having them stake tokens or all that stuff.
Ashe Oro: And the whole idea of you don't own your reputation, right?
Nathan James: Right, right.
Ashe Oro: That blew my mind when I figured that out. You can try to get-
Nathan James: Manipulate it.
Ashe Oro: Manipulate it, create it, build it, whatever you want to do, but at the end of the day, your reputation's what other people think about you.
Nathan James: Exactly.
Ashe Oro: And now we've got-
Nathan James: And it's not only what other people think about you, it's what other people think about you in relativity to what they think about everybody, right?
Ashe Oro: For sure, right. If I don't know you, but I see you're doing business with a shady businessman, then I probably think that there's a high probability of you being shady as well.
Ashe Oro: This is – and I can't remember the name yet – but the team that won the London Hackathon was building this type of smart contract reputation system, you know?
Nathan James: I was actually a little angry at yet.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, all right. Let's talk about that.
Nathan James: I was a little angry.
Ashe Oro: Because that's basically what Scatter's trying to do?
Nathan James: Well, this is a small part. That's a small fraction of what RIDL does. That's what Scatter is using RIDL for.
Ashe Oro: Okay.
Nathan James: Inside of Scatter, based on the reputations of the contracts or domains or entities that you're interacting with, it goes to RIDL and it fetches to see if it has certain fragments of the reputation in a negative fashion. If it has negative X scam, negative X trust, something like that, it'll give you warnings and tell you that maybe you shouldn't be interacting with this application, maybe you shouldn't be sending this user tokens.
Nathan James: And then I saw that on the Hackathon. I was like, "These motherfuckers!"
Ashe Oro: [crosstalk 00:09:04] the hackathon. Man.
Nathan James: First place, huh?
Ashe Oro: $100,000, huh?
Nathan James: $100,000, huh?
Ashe Oro: Yeah, right? Two people. No, it's a great idea. It doesn't surprise me that someone else-
Nathan James: For sure.
Ashe Oro: Or either saw what you were doing and implemented it for the Hackathon.
Nathan James: Right.
Ashe Oro: Because it was a difficult ... Privacy and security is a very difficult theme to program.
Nathan James: It so much is.
Ashe Oro: And to create about. I know that you said you were talking to several teams about just people trying to get ideas. What was that like? You're sitting wherever you're sitting and multiple people are hitting you up to chat about [crosstalk 00:09:38]-
Nathan James: I'm sitting here eating a bag of chips in my house and people are like, "We don't know what to do!" I'm like, "Mm-hmm (affirmative)."
Ashe Oro: No, it was tough. We were fortunate enough, Team Chestnut here, to get second place.
Nathan James: Chestnut!
Ashe Oro: Thank you. Hey, even that idea, this whole smart account idea that you set the firewall, you set the parameters, you set the rules of the engagement for your account. I went to a presentation the next day and I saw Martin from Tokenika presenting on the same type of idea. It's just like when really great ideas' time has come-
Nathan James: Absolutely.
Ashe Oro: It's going to flow into multiple people.
Ashe Oro: And seeing all these people building so much, we were talking before we started recording here about how not only is Scatter exploding with, it seems like, a fresh, hot update every four days or something, but so many people are building. What does that tell you about the number of people building in this bear market? I guess I only have a lot of visibility for EOS, but what's your experience with that?
Nathan James: You know, I talk to probably more developers than anyone else on EOS, including probably Block.one just because I'm more accessible.
Nathan James: There's a lot of people building. There's applications I can't talk about and I couldn't talk about six months ago. There's things that are coming out. There's an STK for Scatter coming out soon for Unity 3D, so a gaming platform. I'm going to be putting on a competition with cash prizes for the best triple-A style desktop game that people can build on one of the blockchains that Scatter supports with the new STK just to test it out and make sure it's ready.
Nathan James: I started leaking a little bit of that to some developers and every day, I get hit up by one developer like, "Yo, when's the STK ready? Yo, we want to build desktop games. We want to do this, please give it to us already." You know?
Ashe Oro: And for the non-programmer or non-tech listener, what is an STK and why are these developers wanting it so much?
Nathan James: An STK makes it extremely easy to just load a library into a project and then they can just start programming their game without having to worry about contacting Scatter or contacting a blockchain or any of that. They can do what they're good at, game programming, and let us do what we're good at, securing your private keys and interacting with the blockchain.
Ashe Oro: Right. I know that you initially developed the Scatter Chrome extension, and then I think it's been deprecated recently in favor of the Scatter desktop app. Why the move there? What did you learn and why are you pushing so hard for people to use the desktop app now?
Nathan James: There's a bunch of stuff that I learned on the, I guess it was a seven-month journey of going through the extension. Extensions are A) insecure because they can be auto-updated without your consent. In Chrome, you can't even turn that off, which is terrible. If anybody ever put a gun to my head and told me to update Scatter extension, I could update it and steal whoever has their Scatter open's keys.
Ashe Oro: Oh, wow.
Nathan James: That's not something that I want the responsibility of. It's not something I believe in. I don't think that we should be doing that. That was my first big decision to move away.
Nathan James: The second is that the desktop is far more accessible. Now, you can use it on Safari, you can use it on Chrome, you can use it on Firefox, Edge, Opera, whatever browser you want. You don't have to install an extension. You can also use with desktop apps, like games.
Ashe Oro: That's the most amazing part. Whenever I figured out that you may have created a cross-platform, write once, use everywhere-type-
Nathan James: Yeah, it works on mobile. It works on mobile!
Ashe Oro: Okay, let's slow it down here because I think that this is ... I've got a bit of an engineering program background. Whenever I read that, I got so excited that I wanted to raise money for you. I didn't care if you spend it on pizza or beer or if you spent it on free ... You ended up wanting to give out free accounts with Scatter, but I thought this was so revolutionary that this could be a reason that people move towards blockchain because it's so accessible.
Nathan James: Right.
Ashe Oro: By the way, we did end up raising 302 EOS for my man here.
Nathan James: Yes, it was much appreciated.
Ashe Oro: Paid it out through the Freedom Proxy. Shameless plug here for the Freedom Proxy.
Ashe Oro: But yeah, what does it mean? Now that you've moved to the desktop, you've got something called Scatter JS. What is that and how can you possibly have a cross-platform [crosstalk 00:14:28]-
Nathan James: We talked about what an STK was a second ago. Scatter JS is just a JavaScript STK. JavaScript is the most used language in the world. That's what runs all of the web applications. It runs a lot of desktop applications, mobile applications. What that enabled was that DApps applications, developers of applications, could write code once using that STK, the JavaScript STK, and those applications would work on desktop, they would work on Android, I hope that they'll work on iOS if Apple doesn't completely screw me.
Nathan James: But it allows them to do something which all developers love, which is not have to write things for each platform because nobody has time for that. Some teams are small and they don't have the resources to do that.
Ashe Oro: Yeah. Where do you see this, if teams can write once and use anywhere, what does this even mean? I know that was the promise with Java back when I started coding in 1999 and 2000.
Nathan James: They dropped the ball on that one.
Ashe Oro: Didn't they? That was the promise though, that Java was going to be a cross-platform-
Nathan James: Got the JVM!
Ashe Oro: Exactly, you got the JVM. Exactly. Where do you see this going, in layman's terms, and then in technical terms? What does this even mean? What are people missing here? Why aren't more people excited?
Nathan James: I don't know, actually. I think it's a very technical thing. You can't expect people who aren't very technical to understand the implications of this.
Nathan James: Now that there's prototype on Android which already works and some native Android applications are using it to interact with the blockchain, with your private keys. There's a EOS Knights, which is a native mobile application interacting with Scatter, which is another native mobile application. It's not even on the web at all and it's signing things for you. That's a first.
Nathan James: And then on desktop, there's Mac, there's Window, there's Linux. You can use whatever platform you want, however you want, and you can interact with desktop applications, you can interact with web applications on any browser that you want. It gives you, the user, full accessibility and it gives the developers full accessibility. It's kind of encompassing the whole spectrum here.
Ashe Oro: Yeah. As an example, I'm using, let's say ... Let me just look at my list of tools here on my desktop. Oh, this could be scary. No. I've got Age of Empires here. Age of Empire.
Nathan James: Right, you can use it with Scatter.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, you can use it with Scatter, which is great, so the EOS blockchain.
Nathan James: Yes, you can.
Ashe Oro: And so now, instead of just getting points awarded, I could potentially get their-
Nathan James: Tokens.
Ashe Oro: Their tokens awarded.
Nathan James: Right.
Ashe Oro: And most likely, with-
Nathan James: And they could never take them from you.
Ashe Oro: Right, and they could never taken them from you. Well, I guess it depends on the smart contract.
Nathan James: You could put them on an exchange.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, right? We saw what happened with [Try 00:17:26] where some smart contracts do allow you to [crosstalk 00:17:29]-
Nathan James: Right. Eh, this is up to the contract developer, right?
Ashe Oro: Right.
Nathan James: It has nothing to do with EOS or Ethereum. You could do that with Ethereum.
Ashe Oro: For sure.
Nathan James: You just can't update the contract do that.
Ashe Oro: Right. So I'm playing a real time strategy game, like Age of Empires. Actually, Age of Mythology. This is my favorite RTS of choice, but I could be paid out in actual tokens through their system, through own tokens economy, and I would have a wallet, potentially built into the Age of Mythology app itself.
Nathan James: You wouldn't though.
Ashe Oro: Okay.
Nathan James: You would have Scatter. You would have Scatter. That's why Scatter is so awesome for those desktop games. If you wanted to have a wallet inside the desktop game, you would have to put your private key into that desktop game.
Ashe Oro: Oh.
Nathan James: Now, the same way that you don't want to put it into web applications, you don't want to put it into a desktop application because you don't know what they're doing with it. They can contact Scatter, sign things with Scatter without ever seeing your private key, and then push it back to their application.
Ashe Oro: Right, where you would approve the transaction.
Nathan James: Well, you approve it on Scatter.
Ashe Oro: Right. Oh, okay.
**Nath