EBC22 | Trusted Identities with Private Blockchain Transactions

[Music] you can see i need to work on my click bait a little bit we have a lot of people out in the hallway still anyway yeah there we go my name is core i'm the cto of concordium and we are a layer 1 blockchain which has a very special unique component that no one else has which is we have id baked into every single transaction that's performed on the blockchain we've been around for a little over a year as a public blockchain so we listed on mainnet in june of last year and we started selling our native token the ccd in february concordium is a proof of stake blockchain it's built on science and what that means is that for the past five years we've been working with the university of august in denmark with the university of eth in zurich on basically designing this entire blockchain and what's come out of that is some 70 plus white papers that we've then gone and implemented and and that's something we're pretty proud of because that actually means that what we have here is something that's that's based on something that's not just uh whipped up in a in a basement somewhere the um the blockchain has fast finality uh we're packed to the euro so we have stable transaction fees and a ton of other good things you can see out there um we we use rust and wasm for our smart contract languages and um and coin ourselves is being uh environmentally friendly as well but that's not why i'm here uh the main thing i want to talk about is actually the id um what you have here is a is an interesting thing right out there in the real world and ever since the internet actually became a real thing um identity fraud has become massive the celebrities being targeted um the guy up here uh the golfer there is is definitely one of them there's a lot cyber bullying is is huge right there's so many fake accounts out there all the time and if you've seen netflix recently and if you haven't you should there's this tinder swindler person who's it basically poses as a rich jury heir or something like that and then scams a lot of people the problem of course is the lack of a verified identity it's it's always been a problem it's still a problem and it's it's it's only gotten worse um okay here we go the consequences of course from something like this is they're massive right you can lose your reputation you can go to jail you can lose lose your money and you might actually get very emotionally disturbed also so so the consequences of something like this um are bad and and the problem is is massive i picked some numbers off of the internet and um this 56 billion number over on the left there is basically how much money has been scammed off of american consumers in in 2020 alone the other over there the fake so me accounts that were deleted this was in q2 of 2021 this is from what used to be called facebook and this is quarter over quarter these are fake accounts being deleted now what is the problem here what is it that we need well what we really need is we need to have a way to actually do our private transactions on a day-to-day basis without no one looking into them but we also need to be able to open up those transactions in case law enforcement looks for it right so not something everyone can do we also need to be able to take those credentials and tell others with certainty that we are someone or that we have some claim or something like that university degree employment even a legal identity the solution we have a concordian place into these things and what's in the solution is a couple of things so we have businesses that want to cater to other businesses and to people we have people who want to know whether they're interacting with with real people or real businesses actually and we have the authorities uh who are increasingly getting frustrated about not being able to figure out if if fair play or not is going on right you have the analysis of the world that are looking to figure out what's going on in all of the blockchains that are entirely anonymous and this is a thing only because law enforcement wants it right now concordium is is placed on this what we call the privacy scale as a as a fully decentralized public blockchain so we we're not private in any way we are public and we have a private transaction so if you run a node you won't be able to see and correlate to two transactions we are not fully anonymous though because these transactions can be resolved and let me talk a little bit about how that works so we have another five minutes the solution that we have starts out with a person wanting to get a digital identity so first of all that person submits a picture of the passport and does a selfie check as we we've seen before the identity is validated stored with an identity verifier and a digital identity sent back to the wallet of this person who can then go go about their business now if that person now needs to do some kind of proof to someone saying hey i am older than 18 or i'm from europe or this is my name in some kind of transaction at some website for instance well then that website can request the information the person can choose whether or not to give it away and this is provided as a serial knowledge proof in the other direction okay now the business is then free to validate this claim and can actually store it as well as proof of of whatever it was so for instance this allows you to not sell alcohol to miners for instance and actually store the proof that you didn't do it every single transaction on our blockchain is also packed to the id so what happens is when the id verification process takes place the identity verifier stores a pseudonym and the original id object and every single time a transaction is happening that pseudonym is baked into the transaction in an encrypted fashion so um the reason this isn't a complete disaster because that's what you would think right oops uh now it's peg there but it's not we've actually split the the knowledge and the power here so we have the identity verifier or idp that knows the pseudonym and the original id object and we have the anonymity revokers which in our case are law firms that all have a key and if you bring those keys together you can unlock a transaction on the chain and reveal the pseudonym in the transaction you can also see who was the id verifier that verified this person originally and then law enforcement can go over to the idv and get the original id object so that's how that works and i'll i'll just this is really it right so over here you have the authorities on the left they run a node on concordium they inspect the chain activity and they discover that something is probably going on they say send a court order to the anonymous revokers who decrypt the use of pseudonym on the on the chain the decrypted pseudonym is then given to the idp or idb who finds the user documents and is returned to the authorities who can then prosecute now this is amazing i have another two minutes anyway so um what we believe here in concordium is that this is really the future what we have here is a blockchain that allows you to do all of the transactions you're used to in a private fashion but where you can start having trust as sort of the basis for what's going on you the problem with with old money if you think about it is that they're not really moving to the world of blockchain right now and why is that well there's a lot of anti there's a lot of money laundering going on and there's a lot of aml laws that are hard to to apply and this is really the infrastructure that we need in order to do this so we're private we have self-sovereign identities and we will allow the wallets that we have to have all kinds of claims going forward this is what we're building right now we have the we have everything i just explained but we're going to expand on that so that will allow you to have all kinds of claims and uh and basically use that as a service um out there the um yeah and it needs to be globally available of course not just to 3 but also to web 2. so that gives you identities with accountability and that's really what i have thank you all if you want to know more snap that and go check it out thanks any questions quick one we have 50 seconds left one minute it can be a quick question right i'll go uh in what way do you see that the anonymity revokers it doesn't that sort of defeat the point of decentralized then like in what way would that be accountable well so our solution actually allows for any number of anonymity revokers to be configured so there's not like a fixed number of course there is a we need to evolve on how that will work uh and how these anonymity revokers are appointed but you are right they are they are centrally appointed this time concordium also have to confess is also centrally governed right now but we have pledged ourselves to actually start being completely decentralized starting a year from now we start taking external parties on to help govern concordium and then four years from now we'll be fully decentralized in that fashion as part of that we're going to figure that out as well there's a lot of stuff to be figured out this is early days but it's a good question thank you thank you thank you very much it was a it was great to have you here first time thank you very much so please warm up lost