Aligned Apps: Software That Works For You - Lefteris Karapetsas- Web3 Summit 2025

[Music] My name is Left Teres and I will be  talking to you about a problem that has really  

been bothering me uh for quite some time that  most of the apps that we have today um are not  

really made for us but they are taking advantage  of us and they serve mostly their creators or at  

worst their investors. So this talk is about a  different kind of app um what that I like to call  

aligned apps. Uh it's my first time in web3 it's  a very nice uh venue like very different. So for  

those of you that may not know who I am I am I'm  leerisipetas the I've been in Ethereum since 2014.  

I started here in Berlin. Uh I still live here  and and work here but I started um as an Ethereum  

developer. I got hired first by uh Gavin Wood who  later continued and created Polcadot right um uh I  

worked in the solidity compiler and the C++ client  and later uh I joined slit and created this thing  

that probably you guys know the DAO um and helped  with the cleanup afterwards in both the Ethereum  

and Ethereum uh classic chains. Uh later I worked  on payment channels uh specifically Ryden and um  

Ryden network was supposed to be for Ethereum what  um the lightning network is for Bitcoin but it  

didn't catch on as we know um Ethereum is scaling  right now through um side chains sorry u like L2s  

and at the same time I've been um the founder of  ROKI so talking about applications. What is the  

status quo today? Today, most apps basically do  not really work for us. They run on someone else's  

cloud. Almost everything that you will see is an  application that lives on someone's server. Um,  

they don't really explain to you how they  work. They are mostly closed source. Um,  

and they either sell your data to to advertisers  or mine it and profit uh profit with it somehow.  

uh beat Tik Tok or a wallet with telemetry inside,  it's always the same kind of deal. Even in in  

crypto like we we we really like to say that oh  no no no it's not like that in crypto we have  

um uh you know we're in control the our keys are  self custoded but is our data under our custody  

is like the place where we can uh get the data the  indexes the RPC nodes the the entire infra this in  

many chains especially the Ethereum world that  I come from they have actually moved to uh the  

cloud people can very with very big difficulty  run their own uh infra anymore. So both in web  

two and in web three we're coming into this kind  of a new new feudalism right but instead of lords  

and lands we have right now platforms and data uh  we are promised convenience in exchange for our  

freedom we we live in these platforms that somehow  um uh we give them our agency in return for free  

services and these platforms what do they do they  monetize Every click, every scroll, every moment  

of your attention is basically farmed and uh  packaged into nice neat products for advertisers.  

We have basically given up our um uh freedom for  convenience. This is what I like to call digital  

selfdom. We've basically just given up everything  in order to just have convenient apps that  

um lock us deeper and deeper into the ecosystem.  Uh I think that the biggest problem is that this  

change happened slowly gradually. We have actually  quite gotten used to it. This is by now the  

standard instead of being something that we should  fight against. It happened so slowly and gradually  

that we we're used to it. But perhaps right now  it's time to wake up and think a little bit about  

who the apps that we use today actually serve in  in DeFi, right? We we started like 10 years ago  

trying to create this uh new utopia where you know  transparency, decentralization uh like we created  

we wanted to create this finance that allows the  the user to be self-s sovereign. Looking at what  

we have created, there is a lot of nice stuff. But  if you look under, you know, behind the curtain,  

you will actually start to realize that almost  every DeFi app today is in some sense hosted on  

AWS. There's a lot of closed source applications.  There are even uh apps out there that are calling  

themselves Defi and are entirely blackboxed. So  what what does that mean? Haven't we basically  

just sort of recreated the exploitative web 2  stack just you know less user friendly and much  

slower? Um what can we do? How can we go uh ahead  here? We've seen the trap but what if we really uh  

refuse to step into it? What if we had software  that didn't work against us but worked for us?  

Um so we can actually stop being uh data peasants  living under the castles of big tech. We can  

follow the path of aligned apps. These are apps  that basically try to respect um our privacy,  

respect our autonomy. Tools that are built for  you for us. These are not dreams or vaporware.  

They do exist right now. They are built by people  who care much more about your freedom than some  

engagement metrics. Let's look at what makes these  uh aligned apps different and why they may be the  

future worth fighting for. So when I started first  talking about aligned apps, it kind of evolved as  

a term and people started asking me, so what do  you mean by aligned apps? Something vague aligned  

with what? Decentralization, aligned with privacy.  H how do you define it? It's actually much much  

much simpler than this. Um it's an app. An aligned  app is an app that is aligned with you with your  

interest as a user. They generally tend to respect  your data. Uh they do not track you. They actually  

run locally. Most of the uh functionality should  be local. A really really important thing is that  

they can survive the creator the the creators.  Uh nobody can just flip a switch and say, "Okay,  

we're done. We sold the company. Bye. The app is  no longer um existing. The data is gone." This  

should never be able to happen with an aligned  app. So how could we define one? There are many  

many ways you could define an aligned app. But I  would say there are four key principles. One, it  

should be transparent in what is doing. You should  be able to inspect it. You should be able to  

um confirm that what the person that's making it  um is saying is true. So it should be open source.  

Uh number two it should be local first which  means that most of the functionality should be  

local. The data should be local. It should not  leak it should not collect any data without the  

consent of the user. It should absolutely not leak  anything. So it should be privacy preserving. Um  

and finally the business model and there should  be one because uh you can't survive on handouts  

uh should be sustainable. It should not be based  on exploitation of the user. uh just like with  

everything else alignment is not binary. It's not  like an app is aligned or an app isn't. There is  

uh in one of the spectrum we have the metas and  the Googles of the world. So full surveillance  

capitalism and as you slowly go towards the right  you start to see um more aligned applications that  

are local first transparent and they work for the  user. your job as a as a user and as a builder of  

applications will be to go more towards the right  side of this uh spectrum. I I would be aiss to not  

mention the application that my team and I have  been building since 2017. Um when we are talking  

about aligned applications so uh rod is what  we've been building and it's um portfolio tracking  

accounting and management tool. Its story is the  story of almost every app that is really useful.  

It's a story of something that serves a need.  Back in 2017, I think I just decided that okay,  

I've been in crypto for a few years. Now I need  to figure out what the hell should I do with my  

um to understand what have I done what in the past  like three years what did I do? the finan here in  

Germany started knocking on the door and saying,  "Hey, so taxes, how how do you do that here?" So,  

I Googled and I see Bitcoin. Okay, that sounds  good. Let me download it. Oh, it's a website.  

It's weird. They started asking for all of my  addresses, uh, CSV imports, and they say, "Okay,  

you just give all these to me to to us there in  the website, and we will calculate and give you  

a result." as a as a as a an individual, not  even developer, when I see this, I'm like, you  

you really can't be serious. You can't be serious  that I have to upload my most sensitive financial  

data in crypto to a third party website. Yet, even  8 years later, this is the standard. It's insane.  

So um this is how uh rod key was built as an  answer to this you know a place where you can  

um do all this uh tracking accounting and  management of your data locally. You don't  

share this very very sensitive financial data with  anybody. We have seen how much violence and how  

many attacks have been uh against crypto people.  So this is not something to to play with and it's  

an application that's built uh for you and not to  just make uh profit for for a VC. So what are the  

alignment credentials of the application? As I  mentioned uh data are stored locally. It's 100%  

open source ADPL. So whatever I say here you  can just go inspect the code and confirm that  

I'm not lying to you. Um we never uh share data  with uh anybody else. Uh any statistics that we  

may gather they are always optin and by default  they are not there which creates difficulties  

in developing the app but that's a different  subject. Um it can run offline. The asterisk  

there is because we need to improve there. It's  it's um sometimes it breaks down because uh we  

have uh we need to make improvements there. And  the app is funded by you guys, the users finding  

it useful and not by exploiting your data. So  quickly going around and how it looks. It's  

um it look like this. It has um the dashboard  which gives you a bird's eye view. Hence the bird  

uh of your portfolio. You can see your uh exchange  balances um your blockchain balances uh like  

substrate uh chains are supported only Kusama  and Polka Dot. um uh EVM chains, Bitcoin chains,  

and then your manual balance is like if you  have um uh like a you can put your bank balance,  

you can put if you have a car there, if you have  a real estate, like a very expensive painting,  

I don't know, whatever you want, just track it  all and then you see a beautiful net worth graph  

of your entire um uh net worth over time. I  mentioned chains. So rod keys like this the  

core of the app is this uh modular um decoders  that gather data from all the chains you know  

uh substrate EVM bitcoin all the exchanges and  they feed them through uh decoders that in the end  

spit out this kind of human readable events and  this list of events is the core of the application  

it's a huge uh list it's the bigger the more  addresses you have the more uh time you have been  

uh uh in crypto. And what's beautiful is that this  is filterable. You can just um you know filter  

by uh by address by protocol by chain uh filter  by a time range. Uh so for example if you say I  

want all of my address let's say leftis. That uh  worked in the a protocol uh with die in the last  

month. Put these filters export and then you get  a nice CSV list of of those events. You can get  

nice statistics also uh per asset uh amount and uh  value over time for an asset. For example, this is  

the Kusama uh token. Um you can see that the brown  line is the amount this is staking. Over time it's  

increasing but unfortunately the value decreases.  The user here in this example for example didn't  

didn't sell at any point. It just just continued.  Um you can see other nice um uh statistics such  

as how is your net worth distributed over  locations. So how much you have in an exchange,  

how much you have in chains uh and in which  chains etc. or how exposed you are in an asset,  

how much you're exposed in ETH in bitcoin, kusama  in euro etc. And you can get very cool insight  

uh by processing all these um events. So, how much  you have in an exchange, how many trains you made  

in an exchange, how many um uh transactions per  chain, how many transactions per protocol, what  

were your busiest days and other cool stuff like  that. We also have um views per protocol. So, this  

is for Ethereum staking, we have for liquidity, we  have for other EVM protocols. And lately this is  

something that um many of our users have been  asking for and um we also wanted it ourselves  

for uh us is you know they don't want to get out  of the app. So we started to tend more towards a  

management app. So you can now even today use rod  key to send tokens or ETH uh only for EVM chains  

for now but we want to also go for uh substrate  and Solana and um to be able to actually do  

actions on chain from inside uh the app. So that a  little bit about rod key. Um now continuing on the  

aligned apps here you can just replace the word  rot key with any aligned app. I wanted to show  

you this kind of nice uh nice um comparison table.  If you've ever looked at a pitch deck, you will  

see something like that much much prettier where  the aspiring entrepreneur will just show you a  

list of attributes um and will tell you that okay  see my app is um great here check mark check mark  

check mark check mark the competitors xxx no not  good at all please give me money. So this is what  

every pitch deck eventually boils down to. If you  show something like that to uh your typical uh VC,  

they will notice something. They will see that  your line up has everything local. So there's  

nothing in this in in the in the cloud. Uh hence  it's private. It's transparent. So it's open  

source. There's there is no mode here. Um you  don't monetize uh the user data. you don't sour  

them with ads, it starts being problematic for  the VC. There is no tracking. So wait, as a VC,  

when you typically look at this, you are trying to  find for something that you can capture to create  

a mode around um an application or a service so  that you will eventually uh do the unicorn 100x  

and uh sell out. You don't care about the end  users. So when a VC sees something like that,  

they say, "This is not investable. This makes no  sense for me." When an end users look at this,  

it's like, "Oh, this is great. This is exactly  what I want. This is what I would like every app  

to act like." So what I'd like to generalize  about aligned apps that I've noticed over the  

years is that they are not attractive to your  typical. There is there is there is exceptions  

and there is also good angel investors. There are  people who will invest in aligned apps, but 99%  

of your typical VCs will just not touch this.  It's not attractive. I explained why. But for  

the exact same reasons that um an aligned app is  not attractive as an investment to a VC, they are  

perfect for users. Basically, you take you take  the problem that the VC sees, you flip it on its  

side, and then you suddenly realize that hey, this  is what I want. This is how apps should be built.  

because um your typical uh VC application is a  free application. Um you will be told if you ever  

um uh try to raise money to create a new don't  monetize. Don't monetize early. Don't monetize  

even until CDC. Some some people go really crazy.  Just grow a huge user base and capture as much  

user data as you can. But what this creates is a  free product. And it's a cliche by now. I mean,  

we all know it, but it's so true that it has  to be repeated until it it it gets burned into  

everybody's mind. When the product is free,  you're the product. We all have heard this.  

It's it's really true though and um it's something  that we really need to be careful about because  

such products are built just to harvest uh  your your data, sell it to advertisers. It's  

basically optimized not for you. you you you  you are not the main target. The main target is  

um how they will capture your data and create  revenue out of it. So most of the times it's  

advertisers or um uh data brokers and uh  of course they try to lock you into their  

ecosystem by not allowing you to get out. You  know it's free. They don't owe you anything.  

Why would they let you go? The more time you stay  there then better it is for them. they they they  

entice you in and then they don't let you go. Um  but contrast that with the other kind of apps,  

the aligned apps that I talk about, but they're  apps that you need to pay for. They respect you  

because you are the customer. If you are happy,  they make money. If you are not happy, they don't.  

You get your data like it's local. It's with you.  Um it's built for you, not for an advertiser.  

Uh there is no lock in. At any point that you want  to leave, you can just press export uh and take it  

with you wherever and generally the incentives  are aligned between the user and the builder of  

the application. But and this is a very very big  butt. You have to pay for these applications. Why?  

Because they don't have any other way to make  money. all the extractive ways of making money  

are by definition not um something that they  can or uh are willing to do. So a really really  

important thing is that if we want these kind of  apps that work for us, we have to get out of this  

um uh misconception of the app is free so I should  just be using free apps. I've I can't explain you  

how many times I've heard people just say why  would I use rod key file signal or whatever it's  

not as good and it's it's actually asked me to  pay. So if you want apps that work for you, then  

you really have to uh be able to willing to pay  for them because using misaligned apps have very  

very steep consequences from um funds that are  lost when a misaligned exchange gets um screwed  

like FTX. We all know what happened there to data  leaks. Just one I found the other day here is this  

uh Tanzan wallet that I don't even know or want to  know how they managed to expose seed phrases via  

email. what kind of application that was in order  to be able to actually leak your seed phrase over  

an email uh to sensoring something that's really  really ugly in the EVM world and um that all the  

blue chip front ends it started from this tweet we  saw it by bante in 2021 if you can't see the date  

u he notices suddenly that you know in um unisop  front end uh back in 2021 suddenly the address  

and your IP are linked to a narwware core TR TRM  labs of course for compliance reasons right but  

this has now kind of become the standard of the  uh blue zip D5 front ends and the worst uh cost of  

using misaligned applications is loss of privacy  which loss of privacy can have many many many uh  

consequences the worst of which is the many many  attacks we have seen lately especially in France  

um over crypto users whose data were leaked and  somehow their positions like the locations were  

found and they were either abducted or assaulted  in order to uh extract um uh money. So all this  

leads us to sort of a manifesto of how we as  users and how we as builders should be building  

applications that are working for the user. So  the so-called alignment manifesto number one  

uh your data should stay in your device. Your  most sensitive data should not be uploaded to any  

servers. Um the code should be open source. Number  two, the code should be open source. There is no  

um no excuses for no open source code. Um we  can talk about source available and open source.  

This is a different scenario, a different uh  conversation. At least source availability  

should be for transparency for the user. Then  uh number three, you should build with privacy  

as a default. Privacy is paramount. We have seen  in the previous slide. What are the consequences  

of losing privacy? Number four, local first,  cloud last. We are building we're living in an  

interconnected world. We can't build apps that are  completely offline of course, but also not every  

keystroke should be a round trip through a server  as it has become with many uh cloud apps today. We  

should build for our users not for our investors  at the expense of our users. The investors should  

and will make money but only because and only if  we are actually providing value to the users. And  

uh number six, the business model we should exist.  You should always have a business model. Don't  

work for free ever. It should be sustainable and  it should not be based on exploiting your users.  

So there are many aligned apps. Uh rod key is  just what I'm working on. There is there is  

there is many there is many more than this slide.  We all know signal it is one such application for  

encrypted communication. Um standard nodes one  for taking um notes in a local first way because  

most of the node taking apps right now are in the  cloud. Um Kipas X or Bit Warden for uh password  

management. Uh photo prism they're actually  here in Berlin. Um and they have this kind of  

uh Google photos but with some AI features and  it's uh decentralized and and privacy preserving  

and local first to Omama analytics which gives  you privacy preserving analytics for websites or  

or applications. There is many apps but if you  take the set of all apps in existence and then  

which of these are actually uh working for you and  are aligned apps you will see that this is a very  

very very small set. What we should um strive  for is for this to become the standard not the  

exception. Um and how can this be done? Well it  can only be done if users are willing to use these  

applications. It all starts with you guys. It all  starts with the users. Um, it should go without  

saying, but you should strive to use aligned apps  over any uh surveillance alternatives. You should  

support the aligned apps. So, if if they have um  a product that they are selling, buy it. Do they  

have donation address? Donate. Um, do they have  a GitHub repo where you can access and create  

um PRs? If you're a developer, then do them.  uh open issues, give feedback, evangelize them,  

talk about them, spread the word. You can't I  mean probably some of you can if you are builders,  

but if you are not, you can't imagine how much it  means to a developer of such an application who  

basically puts their heart and soul into it to get  um either good feedback or um advice or support  

from uh the users. question what any app does with  your data, especially the Googles of the world,  

but any app. Make it a habit to start asking  them questions. Say, "Hey, where are you saving  

um my data? How does it communicate? How does  it go through the network?" You will probably  

be negatively surprised by the answers that you  will get. But the more people that question this,  

maybe, just maybe, we will get um businesses  build more apps that are working for you,  

more aligned applications. Generally be vigilant  to the builders out there. Whatever you build,  

if you build something that is exploiting  the user data, ask yourself, would you ever,  

as a user, if you weren't the the builder of  the app, would you use that [ __ ] Probably not,  

right? So, do not build something  that exploits user data. Um, instead,  

your number one mission should be to provide  value to the user, not take advantage of them.  

This will make profit for you and your investors  in the future. This is the long game. Um,  

also uh strive for sustainability. This is really  really important point. I can't tell you how many  

friends I've lost from this field who have burnt  out because they just didn't think of making  

money. They just had it as an afterthought because  they just wanted to build. They had, you know,  

the dreams. I'm going to build this and that.  Don't shy away from trying to make money because  

um you will burn out. Your uh savings will run out  at some point and if you do not have a business  

model that is sustainable, you you you just won't  make it and we we shouldn't lose any more good  

people. Generally be vigilant. So um alignment  is punk. Remember this is rebellion. It's not a  

rebellion against um regulators or banks, but  it's against extractive corporations, VCs, uh  

or startups that want to build software that work  against you and milk you for profit. So remember,  

alignment is punk. Alignment is rebellion. Uh  and please stay aligned. Um, in this QR code  

you will find a link about rod key like this link  tree thing where it has all the links for us. Um,  

if you like what you hear, if you identify with  any of those ideas, we have like we are an open  

source uh company. We have an open source repo  in GitHub. You can go try to contribute. Um,  

if your contributions are really good at some  point we are also hiring. We would love to work  

with you. Um as a user please uh use ROKI daily.  Um buy our premium subscription. Um we have been  

working in accounting for now seven eight years.  Uh accounting for crypto. So our team has started  

offering this bespoke accounting service which  is uh it's in the links there you will see. Um

apps are not really plug-andplay. If you  have tried any of the apps including rod  

key you need to do a lot of customization  a lot of stuff. This may be difficult for  

some people. So we are also trying to offer  this as a service ourselves. Um generally  

uh rot aside try to spread the word for aligned  apps. Try to spread the word about apps that  

are doing things for the users and u don't  let yourself be exploited by uh the big tech  

overlords. So uh yes that's all. Um if you have  any questions I would love to hear them. [Music]