Identity is bigger than any single chain with Chris Hart

having me my name is Chris heard and I am the CEO at Civic Civic we've been working in the blockchain identity space for it seems like a really long time we started the company uh back in 2015. um we've been thinking about identity working on blockchain identity it's a sticky subject and you may be asking yourself haven't we solved this identity thing yet we've been talking about identity it seems like in every conference if you have your bingo card out and you hear the word account abstraction maybe you get to cross that off if you hear w3c like all of these Concepts come up over and over again and it seems like every conference it gets a little bit further away and the road has been really really long so the answer to this have we solved identity we is no we haven't solved it a hundred percent but I want to believe and I actually think that identity is the Cornerstone of so many different things that we want to do on blockchain and in web 3 that we actually have no choice but to solve it it is foundational it is essential if we're not able to solve identity then there's going to be so many Downstream ramifications that are negative to our space that it's going to be really hard to move forward so I do see glimmers of hope it's not all bad news about identity there are good things happening and I want to talk about some of those first so what about decentralization before we can talk about decentralization we kind of have to talk about centralization so centralization has problems if you're a U.S citizen I can guarantee you your social security number your address your phone number your email all of that's on the dark web it's for sale and in fact web 2 companies are designed to monetize that data so centralization many people would say it's bad we got to get rid of it there's no place for it I take more of a middle ground actually there are reasons why some data number one shouldn't be on chain can't be on can't be on chain to be gdpr compliant and ultimately there is a reason for some centralized data however decentralization provides a lot of benefits things like transparency things like more control over your data it's a new approach to privacy it's got some risks in landmines but it's got so many good things going for it like dapps can suddenly look at elements of your identity and form a judgment as to the suitability of you being able to access a specific product or a specific good we're going to get a couple more buzzwords in here before we talk about where we're heading because like I said the road was long and we got to talk about w3c standards so this is where a lot of these words that you've heard in other conferences are really going to come home so self-sovereign identity that's your portable digital identity nobody can take it away from you it's not dependent on a centralized authority to enable you to have self-sovereign it's basically saying I am me I am self attesting to my identity and I think it's a really important foundational plank of identity you can have true blockchain identity without element of self-solver it's essential on the other hand verifiable credentials these are also really important is it enough in all cases for you to say no I'm Chris Hart I'm the CEO of Civic well members of my team receive texts all over um this past week saying they were me and telling them to wire money so is that a verified credential because they came from a phone number that seemed recognizable it's not so there needs to be verifiable credentials that are supporting our identities in ways that really make sense but still allow for some of this self-sovereign nature to come through the important thing here they're tamper and evident and credentials can be verified by cryptography that was the big sea change in identity is now you can verify identities with cryptography and of course you've probably heard about cellbound tokens vitalik has been talking about this for a while it's essentially designed to associate properties of a person and it's discoverable on chain but I actually have a little bit of a problem with sold down tokens because they are permanent once you have a soul bound token that thing is associated with you forever and if you associate multiple wallets with that Soul bound token suddenly you're creating this web of activity that you're involved with on chain and it can be traced back and so I think so bound tokens well they have an interesting role to play are not the answer by themselves and then all of this stuff kind of rolls up into this new standard this did standard now a DISD standard you've probably heard like I said this term abstraction layer a bunch of times and you've wondered okay what is that thing this abstraction layer well basically what it does is it enables verified decentralized identity it can refer to anything it can refer to a person a company it can refer to a data model it can refer to a lot of different things and it actually is a big game changer but here's the problem did standards differ there's a did standard for ethereum there's a did standard for Solana there's a proliferation of did standards if you go to the w3c website today and you look at the list of proposed did standards I think there's roughly a hundred so we've got this proliferation there's these good rules of the road but now there's all of this different swirl going on where you know things are getting really complicated so but we should be all good because we have decentralization defined we've got these w3c standards we should just be implementing those and we're good to go right well I don't think so the devil's in the details so there's different ways to think about what you do on chain you are not one-dimensional and you may find yourself identifying with different parts of this diagram you may think to yourself hey if I'm doing things on the blockchain I only want to do those if I'm Anonymous 100 I'm going to go do an nft mint I want to be anonymous I want to get my nft and I'm good to go I want to participate in a dow I want to use an amm I want to go to uniswap and nobody should know who I am and nor should they have a right to know but at other times you might find yourself identifying with this pseudo-anonymous profile let's say you're a gamer and you have an avatar and you've worked really hard on that thing you've grinded 200 hours and you want it associated with your profile okay that's a layer of identity it's not fully Anonymous it's not fully doxed but it's something in the middle and that's okay too and we need to be able to support those kinds of structures in the way that we're going to Market with identity and then sometimes you might find yourself on this right hand side in real life you need to be doxxed I can tell you the IRS is not going to accept these left-hand columns when it comes to time to pay taxes April 15th don't forget to come in right up sorry um yeah I'm the guy who mentioned taxes during eat Denver sorry guys but there are reasons why you want to be fully doxxed California DMV just issued tens of millions of Deeds onto the tasos blockchain how long do you think it's going to be before they start associating real identities with the ownership of those vehicles and how are they going to establish those real identities they're going to be the driver's licenses and now real ID is even a step up from the old school driver driver's licenses but that could be a passport or whatever so it seems like maybe we're okay right because I could just spin up a wallet if I want to be anonymous it takes me like two seconds I'll spin up a wallet I'm good to go maybe I want to have one for each one of these profiles but what happens when you start wanting to do things on multi-chain you're going to want to do more and that means you're going to be connecting to more chains to access more services and that gets complicated really really fast it gets complicated for you as a user and it also gets complicated for the builders if there are dap Builders sitting out here or listening to this presentation I have a message for you you don't have to build this because we have and basically what we are trying to design is a way for individuals to manage the different aspects of their identity and Builders to build in a multi-chain or a cross-chain way in a way that they can control the dial between that anonymous somewhat docked pseudo-anonymous or fully doxed modalities so what is the solution let's talk about that for a minute I would I don't have a beer but if I did somebody would be holding it all right so at Civic what we're doing is we're building that bridge to mass adoption so we're unlocking cross-chain identity tools we announced this week's support for eth mainnet polygon we've got arbitrum coming up soon in a number of other chains that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks we're reducing complexity for Builders and we're reducing complexity for users of those tools so let's talk about what that looks like first verifiable credentials and on-chain attestations we we have a thing called Civic pass it's not really an SBT because it's a lot more flexible it's not permanent and we have those available in a cross-chain cross-wallet model Enterprise grade apis Builders want to build Builders don't really want to talk to you not in all cases until we've got docs and apis for people to just go pick up these tool sets and start building now and what that enables these Builders to do is to extend their product from polygon to ethereum from ethereum to Solana from Solana to near and so on and so on in a really seamless way we think it's really important that there's easy to use controls we're showing here the developer dashboard this is currently an alpha internally we're going to be releasing this in Q2 but it's basically a tool set so that you as a builder can start to understand what kind of passes have I issued on what chain what kinds of functionality have I enabled with these passes have I enabled things like age gating am I doing a capture check this kind of tool set we think will really help with adoption and frankly we think web3 deserves these kinds of tools you don't always get them as builders on blockchain but we think you need them so it's all designed to support your solution whatever that solution might be you may identify with one of these things as a builder on the left hand side or as a user as something that you do yourself defy amm dexes stable coins nfts anti-bot you may think about civil resistance Dows voting gaming Etc but this is the thing ultimately people are going to want to do all of these things on all of these chains don't forget about all the chains that are launching almost every day it seems like not the least of which is coinbase based right so there's this proliferation of chains and guess what users don't want to care what chain you're on they don't want to have to think about that they just want to go use a service Okay so this is I think the framework of where things need to go there needs to be a layer of services that abstract the identity that abstracts some of the wallet complexity and enable this cross-chain capability I've got a really short little video here just to kind of talk a little bit more about what Civic is doing um we'll get to that in a minute just one more slide before we get there and this is kind of the way we think about how the ecosystem is going to evolve the things in Orange basically are what users are interested in for the most part they might be interested in managing their identity with Civic Domi which is our user platform they may need to do ID verification they could be participating in defy or dowds or entering Discord channels there may be a bot protection use case but you got to have these Enterprise tools that are in the darker color here so that includes apis and dashboards controls guess what for fintechs to come into this space they're going to insist upon controls and with the likes of silvergate Bank going down we know we know that there are less and less fintechs willing to deal with Fiat onboard and off board so it becomes really important to have some kind of a compliance layer so finally I just want to share this with you just a fun little video 15 seconds will go fast [Music] okay thank you very much I know we have a few minutes here left at the time at the end uh I'm happy to take some questions but uh thanks very much Denver anybody hello cool um so I I joined a little bit late and maybe you touched on this in the presentation but for the identity management um what are you using to secure the data that you get from the user or how does that like is it a ZK proof or te kind of where's your security solution there yeah that's a great question so Civic does not take or store any data actually so we do have services that will do things like identity document verification but those documents only move through our systems in transit and are never stored on the Civic servers what we are doing is putting an attestation on chain that basically acts as a credential or a signal for a credential that then allows you to access a service it also allows any smart contract to go look on chain you can either as a builder do this on chain you can look directly at the attest station or you can hit our API and that basically says this person has a valid passport from some country or whatever whatever the detail is so we're not actually storing that so in that way it's very like a ZK but it also in a future release is going to give the ability for you as a user to store your own data and then choose to release that to a requesting party hi okay there are many silver chains there are many chains right yeah and there is no specific chain that supports all the chains right then how you guys are connected with those chain wallets and what kinds of wallets are you connected with got it okay just for people who didn't hear um the question was there are many chains and a proliferation have changed and so how are we connecting to all of the chains so basically and and wallets which wallets are we connecting to so basically the way we think about this is we're issuing a native token it's it's kind of like um think of it like an nft into the wallet natively so for example if you had something on Solana that said hey you've passed a identity document verification and then the Builder said yes but I'm bridging my solution like Phantom did for example I'm bridging my solution from Solana to ethereum then the Builder can just say Civic issue that same attestation but on the new chain so basically it's configurable such that the Builder via API or with our dashboard can say I want to have this Credential Check I want it on these three different chains and then the user is connecting the wallet and the user is able to say here's my additional wallet on these additional chains so we we kind of don't even need the connection directly to the wallet all of this stuff is on chain directly so we're working with wallets but we're not actually needing to connect and integrate directly with the wallet anyone else we got just a couple minutes hello cool um another question is is this at least at this point in stage is it only for technically minded people or can a Layman kind of download the app or go onto the website and connect their identities yeah great question so yeah for the Layman um Civic dummy is the URL that you want to check out right now it's focused on Solana we've been really focused on bridging all of our back end architecture to multiple evm chains so if you go to Civic dummy if you happen to have Solana wallets you could connect three four five wallets see all of the identity verifications for each of those wallets see all of the nfts that are inside those wallets we have direct wallet to wallet messaging and a few other cool features so for the Layman I would say connect on the user side to Civic dummy if you're a builder right now our API is up in live and the docs are available available and that supports all of those chains that I mentioned so they can start building dashboard is coming in Q2 do you see a need from the consumers of this did where they would like to run some verifications on the attestation that's attached to your identity say a D5 platform would like to check whether you're in uh your net asset value does exceed a million dollars for instance yeah so so the question was um is there a need or if there is a need to perform further verification on a did our adapter Builders able to do that I believe yes okay yeah so the the way that this works the builders will know what wallets are receiving what attestations so in other words let's say in the case of a decentralized exchange they know a wallet is connecting that the DAP is then checking on chain to ensure that wallet has a token associated with it with the appropriate level of authorization once that's done the DAP can do whatever they want with the information about the wallet so at that point in time everything's on chain on blockchain so you could go and look and see okay associated with this wallet I see this much value I think your underlying question is what if multiple wallets are connected and there's things like credit scoring that you might be interested in where you say okay but this individual has 10 wallets and I want to try and figure out for a lending protocol how much net value do these assets have therefore how much am I willing to lend them that sort of thing so dids are private by Nature so it's really up to the user whether or not they want to share that information we don't allow for the sharing of that by default it's only the one wallet that the DAP is interacting with but I think it's a really interesting Avenue for us to explore further and I think we're out of time so thank you very much appreciate it