Making Decentralized Identity Click | Titus Capilnean - Civic Technologies

[Music] MGM everyone happy Monday it's great to be here um I'm Titus I run go to market for civic um and I'm uh going to be talking about making decentralized identity click it's a topic that we've been talking about on and off for the past few years I think we're not quite there yet I'm going to tell you why and I'm going to also share a few Solutions on how we can make this uh move forward um as you know for sure identity is super important part of the process I think being here at the beginning of the build cycle is super important because when you make a choice about your identity tool and your authentication tool you want to be able to set it and forget it make sure it works and yeah essentially H make sure your users have a great user experience from the get-go well quick intro about myself um I'm I'm run go to market for civic as I said I've authored uh centralized identity paper at IW a few years ago I've also authored papers on AI and identity with World economic Forum uh co-authored two AI books so I've been the crypto space since 2017 super excited about where this is going and how we can make identity better so about Civic um we're a multi-chain user management platform we started off as an identity platform uh and we quickly realized that to be to be able to deliver the user experience that we want and be able to help web web 3 Builders and web two Builders to uh onboard users more seamlessly we had to go above and beyond the identity piece and build the authentication element as well um we essentially enable people to verify whether a person is a bot or not uh to ver verify a one person one chain connection and also to uh verify their identity for compliance purposes so we've issued a milum passes to date we've we're working with 600 DS and projects on 15 plus chains we've been around for like what almost 11 years now 10 years now um so 2015 we've been building for a while and we're super excited where the space is going so what are we talking about today we're talking about why is the centralized not clicking we're talking about what are the biggest barriers for adoption what needs to change for us to be able to go beyond those barriers and then I'm going to offer a few Solutions and then talk about the path to mass adoption uh and last but not least um I have a QR code where uh there are some tools that we want to offer out to everyone building today to make your uh your on user onboarding experience more seamless so first of all what what's going on why is it identity that is not clicking like we agree that users should be able to control their digital identity uh but the adoption is not there because of the bad ux and by bad ux I mean this um we went from generating Bitcoin address is by by typing or moving the mouse for entropy and these uh numbers and letters on the screen to the seed phrases which I think for most of us like OG's in the space um they make sense but for somebody on the street it's like if you go out and stop them and say hey uh do you want to create a crypto account like do if you store the 16 or 12 seed phrases like is that something that you're comfortable with I'm pretty sure they won't understand why and and what to do with them and they'll be super worried is going to lose them so that's essentially I think the the primary ux problem in the space right now and that's why we're all talking about account abstraction and wallet abstraction in the space so to dive into the big problems in in the space right first foremost friction in onboarding they usually too many steps too soon for users to do to be able to onboard to web 3 apps so let's say you want to play your web 3 game uh you've never had an account with them you don't have a wallet you don't have anything you go in you sign up you're prompted to create a wallet you're prompted to create a phrase you're being asked about what kind of currency you want to use you asked about gas price like about using gas about using certain tokens um that results in like an 80 plus% drop off uh if you compare this to a web 2 experience the friction is much less there people usually sign in with with one click the second thing that we think is a problem in the space is the lack of familiarity of the tools that are being used so you're used to signing in with with an email address you're used to signing in with your favorite email provider or your favorite social media provider when it comes to the crypto space you're often greeted with hey use the wallet scan this QR code or uh connect the wallet that's actually a Chrome extension or browser extension so at that point people are like well I don't know what this is and I don't trust it so I'm not going to use it um the third the third problem that we see is the ecosystem fragmentation um almost everyone out there is using a different identity layer so the credentials are not reusable the uh tools themselves differ the verifications need to be repeated so uh users end up being confused like hey I did this before in a different app why do I have to get reverified again and then last but not least I think the the biggest one that I highlighted in the previous uh section is like the security and Trust concerns that people have um because ultimately the downside in crypto if you lose your seed phrase if you lose your uh your your seed words is that you lose access to your account identity your history like everything you've created around that particular um game or or that particular Marketplace that you've accessed uh whereas in a web 2 space if you forget your password then there usually a reset mechanism so what what does what do we need to change to be able to create a better experience I think first and foremost The onboarding Experience thinking about like how can we minimize the number of clicks how can we minimize the tools that that people use how can we create something that's familiar and and uh soothing for the user when they come in from an authentication tooling perspective adding more secure sign on options adding more more comfortable and familiar ways for people to sign in uh and create a wallet for them that definitely will increase uh conversions the the approach to identity verification needs to change as well let's ask for what we need when we need it on demand uh not go on ahead and say like hey you need to do full kyc to play this uh of jumping chicken game now let's let's optimize to hey what is the attack that I'm trying to prevent so if I'm trying to prevent a bot attack let's just do a simple kind of likeness check if I'm trying to prevent a civil attack then let's Also let's try and do also a uh Biometrics uniqueness verification to ensure that's only one user signs up her account so simple things like that can significantly improve the the experience and then the the third the fourth thing is credentials management making sure we can reuse those credentials from one application to the other and that means using standardized um Frameworks like the DS and and essentially allowing people to carry their credentials from one applications application to the next so how do we end up fixing this um familiar logins in W abstraction is I think the the the lowest hanging fruit and we've seen a lot of builders in the space uh go in in that in that direction um helping people sign in that way uh remove remov that that friction I was talking about uh P passwordless authentication is is another big one there's been a lot of biometric tooling uh added uh we can Leverage The Face Off on on phones we can leverage uh pass Keys nowadays more and more so using these methods to abstract that layer away from the user is helpful and and not having them remember a seat phrase um as I said Progressive identity verification super important to ask for the right things at the right time and then creating those interoperable credentials using decentralized networks is is critical so what does this look like in practice from a solution perspective now we believe in an endtoend user onboarding experience where people get those flexible signin options there's a proof of person verification to empower like those trusted interactions in the ecosystem uh and all that's bundled in for Builders to be able to uh for Builders to be able to onboard use users quicker and and easier so I'm going to go through both of these uh tools the first one is called Civic o um this is where as a builder you can essentially choose which authentication methods you can bring on it's super easy to use um it is generating an embedded wallet off the bat for for users um and you can also onboard people with the uh kind of traditional wallets in the space so you capture both the web two uh novices coming into the space and then than the web three experts uh that are used to these interactions and from a developer experience perspective like we we heard the stories in the off space like there it's difficult to integrate a lot of these tools so with with what we've built um if you just wrap your application around uh with the O provider provide a client ID it works off the shelf as opposed to having to like set up all these backend interactions and and do all this backend work um with that requirement for other tools it's going to go show a quick demo here hopefully it works there nothing better than to show and tell um so give one second here so essentially this is the uh onboarding for civic o you go and and to be able to create a developer account uh you use our o tool obviously um it's a simple one two step then you essentially grab the authentication widget um very easily kind of what you see is what you get get uh editor then you grab the code that I showed earlier as well uh wrap wrap your app around the code and then boom you have your authentication tool up and running right away and then if you want to add other off methods it's as simple as like clicking around in a few a few boxes saving it and then if you go back to the app that you've built now the login tool allows you to um onboard people in all these like new ways that you've just selected so it's as simple as that from an off perspective now what if you want to do some level of identity verification right I think this is where the Civic pass comes in we uh we've been building this tool for many years now this is the one with 1 million passes issues issued to date it's a robust toolkit for developers to implement user verification Access Control using things like uh capture verification using things like Biometrics using things like um government ID uh based authentication also very simple to use um has both front end backend and onchain components i' I've given this example here of an onchain gating um basically wrapping your function around a uh requirement to have a specific type of of token um a Civic pass token so if the user doesn't have it then you won't allow them to execute that particular function these are the things that come into play when for example you want to go above like a Step Beyond uh just the private signatures to be able to issue like a a critical transaction and you want to be able to verify for example is this the same person that initially signed up for the wallet and is in control of the treasury or has this been compromised and being used by somebody else so in the light of the recent uh recent hacks I think this is something we want Builders to think more and more about like how can we add more privacy preserving identity layers to these critical operations so let me show you how this works and mind you this is going to be in the old Paradigm where we do ask people to connect their wallet um so essentially you want to get a uniqueness pass in this case to be able to access um a game let's say so you want to verify with the help of a a Biometrics check this is by the way into encrypted we ask for the signature to be able to encrypt uh the data so once you enable have the the webcam verification we go through say hi to our our our colleague Mitch and then once once he's been uh he's been verified then the pass is going to be issued on chain you can then use that in a smart contract context um by the way the user can self pay here he can also pay on behalf of the user um to abstract away the the gas and the the feeds themselves so now you see have he has the UN pass active and he can now sign in or sign up to whatever app um is being gated so kind of running back to like the the the path to math adoption to the to the path to mass adoption I think like from a web 3 perspective identity and authentication be as easy as web 2 um I think we need to start more with familiar logins add those reusable credentials even if like we need to expire them after a period of time I think it's important for people to be able to reuse them after like let's say um one verification in the same month we shouldn't ask them to verify again unless like we have a valid reason to do that and then just generally build that better ux that minimize IES the number of clicks minimizes the uh friction the number of like other tools that people need to use to be able to onboard so if they just can one click sign up with with Google sign up with Twitter or with GitHub it's way easier for them than to create a wallet from scratch if they're not familiar with the web 3 space and as they get more familiar they can add those other methods to authenticate and then um become more web3 web3 Savvy in the process so I I want to leave you kind of with this with this thought around Mass adoption I think it it won't happen because we tell people it's better it'll happen when they don't even realize they're using it now what I mean by this is right now we use hundreds of apps every day like dozens hundreds of apps for the most part we don't care what infrastructure they're built on if they run on AWS or Google cloud or Microsoft aour or or a private Cloud we don't care whether they're canvas app or a native app on on the phone I think to be able to get to a place where where crypto gets M option and um decentralized identity specifically gets Mass adoption we need to be able to abstract away as much as possible of the underlying infrastructure from the user so that they um they can have a seamless onboarding without having to have like a two-day training on all of these tools that they need to use so now with the Practical part um we invite you to go build um over here there's a QR code that takes you to our docs get started with Civic o get started with Civic pass uh both both of them are available for free right now to try it out please try and break them try try and and put them in their use in your use cases um for civic pass you can use them on testet as you're building um you have super transparent and developer friendly pricing for them um so yeah looking forward to seeing what uh what you guys can build with it and yeah let's make web 3 frictionless I think that's that's the the thing I want to kind of leave you with so that's it from my side um I know we have few more minutes so you have any questions for me happy to kind of hang out and uh and answer them but yeah and feel free to connect with us on on X on our on our website Civic key at on Twitter and then civic.com the website [Applause]