Brave: Building the Private User-Friendly Internet - Kyle Den Hartog

**Kyle Den Hartog** (0:00)
To put it quite frankly, I think we're doing it wrong right now in the Web3 space. Email is actually a decentralized protocol by design. You look at Google, you look at Microsoft, you look at Spam House. If you couldn't send an email to somebody using Gmail, then you stopped running your own server, and that created the natural centralization, even though you could be doing everything in a decentralized way.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:19)
There's tens of millions of users who use Brave, but there's a couple of thousands of websites that use BAT for incentivization. If you look at how much you actually get for watching an ad, it's tiny. What do you think the challenges here are?

**Kyle Den Hartog** (0:35)
I think you're hitting at the heart of the problem. Excellent question.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:42)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Kyle Den Hartog, who is a security engineer at Brave. You all know Brave, the PrivacyFast browser.
Before I talk with Kyle this week, let me tell you about our sponsors.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:04)
This episode is brought to you by Gnosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and Cowswap.
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**Friederike Ernst** (1:56)
Kyle, thank you so much for coming on.

**Kyle Den Hartog** (1:59)
Thank you very much for having me.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:01)
Cool. Kyle, it's been a pleasure using Brave for the last many years. We've had Brandon on ages ago, so we'll dive into kind of everything that's happened at Brave since then. But maybe before we do that, tell us a little bit about you yourself.
What's your background?

**Kyle Den Hartog** (2:22)
Yeah. So my background kind of comes from a little bit of a mix of cryptography, security, and then expanding into Web3 is kind of the niche specifics. So originally, I started out as a penetration tester, as an intern right out of university, and then expanded into digital identity with that, from taking a computer security course. So I spent about five years working in that space, and in that, I kind of expanded my knowledge on cryptography and Web standards, working as an editor of the verifiable credential specification, and then through that, and kind of the touch points of digital identity to Web3, that's how I ended up at Brave to come and help on the security side of things within the wallet and within the browser, and these days also helping a little bit on the search side.

**Friederike Ernst** (3:09)
What was your take on Web3 when you came in? I know kind of like it's a very divisive subject in the security arena.

**Kyle Den Hartog** (3:18)
Yeah, for me, I've always found it to be kind of user-empowering, and the concept of self-sovereignty, I think is really embodied by the community. I think the way that we represent the principles at times doesn't always match what we say that we could do, but as I've learned with anything, nothing is perfect. You're always striving to be better, and so I think that's really what I'm trying to contribute to the space as well, is how do we make sure we get closer and closer to these different principles that we say that we're working on.

**Friederike Ernst** (3:51)
So at Brave, kind of your work centers around identity and privacy. Tell us about what made you interested in these topics in particular.

**Kyle Den Hartog** (4:03)
Yeah, so it largely actually comes back to the computer security course that I took in university. So when I was interning my final year, my computer security professor presented me with an interesting problem. He said, how could we build a voting system on a blockchain? And I kind of ran down a rabbit hole with that and started looking at digital identity from that perspective. And so it kind of opened my eyes to the idea of how identity plays such an integral role of all of what we do online. We have to be identified whenever we're interacting with a website and whether that's just an IP address so that they can figure out who to send a response to up to building authentication and authorization systems, passwords, passkeys, all of these sorts of things. They all come back to the concepts of digital identity, of knowing who says what about whom.