2025-11-21 –, World's Fair Stage
Crypto keeps talking about sovereignty, yet most apps remain cloud dashboards leaking data upstream. If we truly want privacy, we must accept that it isn’t free. This talk examines the economics of local-first, privacy-preserving software and aligned apps in general. What they give the user (true ownership, offline access, no data in someone else’s system) and what they cost the builder (no analytics, harder UX, slower feedback, expensive infra trade-offs).
Using rotki as a case study, we’ll dissect the hidden engineering and funding challenges behind aligned apps, explore sustainable ways to finance them without surveillance or VC capture, and show how users and builders can share the cost of real digital freedom.
Lefteris Karapetsas is a long-time Ethereum contributor and founder of rotki, the open-source, self-hosted portfolio management and accounting app that gives users true ownership of their financial data. Before creating rotki, he was a core developer on the Ethereum C++ client, a contributor to Solidity, and lead developer of the Raiden Network, Ethereum’s original layer-2 payment channel system.
With over a decade in crypto, Lefteris has been a vocal advocate for privacy, transparency, and user sovereignty in software. His talks explore the economics and engineering of building aligned, privacy-preserving applications that resist surveillance and platform capture.