Day 2: Daniel Gasteiger (Procivis)

Transcript

[Music] now some of the growth numbers associated with blockchain blockchain technology are truly staggering if not a little bit overly ambitious I was reading just the other week that the blockchain identity management market was said to grow from around 90 million dollars this year to just shy of 20 billion dollars within five years we're now going to be hearing a lot more about this industry with our next block of three speakers first up we have Daniel gasps Tiger he is CEO of pro civis which makes government approved electronic ID solutions Daniel thank you and give Ali

hi everybody it's great to be here in the heart of crypto valley my name is Daniel I'm from the suburbs I'm from Zurich I work in Zurich and I have comfort of companies in Zurich and today I'm talking about blockchain as an enabler for equally government and digital societies and I would like to talk you through basically how the story of Perseus inform developed and I would like to start with the story of Estonia and with that I start directly with this short introductory movie if that works imagine starting a new country

completely from scratch free from any pre-existing economic system tax laws or formal government a bankrupt country with its future and direction completely in the hands of its people that's the story of Estonia it was 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and Estonia had just regained its independence but with few resources in a small population the country had to find a way forward with the internet beginning to boom leaders decided to invest in and build in a society the first project was tiger leap which put computers and the Internet in every school and got Estonians online fast by the late 90s all Estonian schools were online in 2000's tonyia became the first country in the world to

declare internet access as a basic human right and today Estonians are connected online through a mobile ID using the we can vote online in elections we collect their own taxes and you can do a school police happiness all of this personal data is protected by technology called blockchain a decentralized network with countless channels that make it exceedingly difficult to hack and as a backup Estonia will create the world's first data embassy in Luxembourg a storage facility to house an entire backup of Estonia's data capable of rebooting the country in case of a cyber attack the result is a country that runs

like a tech startup Estonia teaches first graders how to code it is the world's fastest broadband and holds the records for most startups per person creating the future is estonia's driving project and increasingly its core business - with the introduction of a residents Estonia is hoping to invite entrepreneurs to invest in the country so it's person to pilot and apply and if these events are the same way Estonians and the newsmen personally using that card use them establish contact study who and different Dayton and others will see and and then remove with knowledge really so far just 18,000 people have signed up but some believe that with 10

million residents paying $100 a month each Estonia would not even need to tax its citizens it's certainly an ambitious goal imagine starting a new country compared so so what did I show you this movie the movie actually shows what a nation can do when it comes to a digital development of the whole system basically and the reason why I show you this is because basically the perceivers vision is based on this story of Estonia and how they developed from a country literally with nothing after the fall of the Soviet Union to a country that is now the world leader in digital society and basically the story here is that it all based itself on this digital

identity so the Estonian model basis itself on the fact that every Estonian by birth the first thing before he gets a name he gets a digital identity that the identity then follows him throughout the life and that life basically can basically fully digitalized in Estonia nobody signs any contracts anymore in Estonia everything is done digitally when it comes to the taxes as we heard or any other things I'll come to that in a second but that's the that's really the story behind what we are doing a perceive is the earth overall so it's about blockchain so while obviously this goes back 20 years already this story they have this decentralized system which is basically called X road which

basically connects all these independent databases ultimately on on what they call a blockchain but it's actually a decentralized database system from the government and is all linked ultimately to this digital identity that is essentially managed by the government and issued for them so that's kind of the link to the topic of blockchain 2 which we talked a bit later again obviously in more detail but they've done in 20 years they have is basically digitalized as I said all of their services that now more than 1,500 digital services that can be accessed and used with this digital identity card and it started with attacks like I did in Switzerland that's the similarity to Switzerland but it didn't end there like

in Switzerland and on from as you can see here tissue signatures in 2002 then the whole public transport was digitalized around his identity it went on to the to the mobile ID that they had a health systems if you go to the doctor in Estonia you never have any written paper-based and prescriptions everything is done digitally why your identity eventually now ending with this a residency program that we heard Cosmo talk about in the thing so anybody can become a digital resident of Estonia and incorporate the company there thanks again to this digital infrastructure and the digital identity framework that they introduced we then came back or I came back after my first visit there and I looked at okay so what does Estonia been doing for

20 years and similarly at the same time Switzerland is not the leader in this in this space government I then basically issued in a bit of you to to launch a paper for our incorporation of procedures and we literally compared over the last 20 years what has happened in Estonia under that what has happened in Switzerland and what are the lessons learned for governments in order for them to be successful and the first and most important element is digital identity is the enable for everything and we are not quite there yet in Switzerland we are starting a second initiative as we speak called suicide II we tried it once already in 2010 this failed miserably but at least it's an attempt now to digitalize the country

thanks to this identity solution we are obviously working on a similar element with with our solutions but that's not that's not all obviously depends everything depends and also on the government and in that sense all the public officials and the politicians and everybody in the country that actually formed strategy for the country to fully believe in technology and that's the second similarity and that's obviously in the case on we are here in souq Estonia has done that with the internet suka standard with the blockchain and so thank God we have two and the government officials here in soup that are open and willing and take some risk to experiment with it and I think that's why kind of the link to Switzerland makes sense in that context because there's an element now of building a solution and basically a whole country thanks to blockchain

technology on something totally new so that's the story of Estonia I'd like to now give you quick overview of the rest of the world when comes to blockchain in a government there's a few a flurry of of initiatives and the economies throughout the story last year that governments might actually be the big package of blockchain technology it might actually be the the industry that takes it on the first and I fully believe this could be very well the case because there's so many official and obvious or advantages that this technology provides to government which we will hear about and these are just some examples where governments already started embracing the technology like Malta is a good case at the moment where they build the whole

national strategy around the topic Japan South Korea obviously we know all about what is happening in the Middle East Abu Dhabi and also Dubai and Sweden also has basically started engaging on blockchain based land registries the UK in 2016 repo issued this report on digital edge technology and basically highlighted a few of the examples that governments could actually benefit from when it comes to applying technology like blockchain in the public sector and again I mean ultimately you see already there in two years ago it was kind of a topic for forum one of the leading governments in the world and so I think it's not something that I'm should be dismissed easily as a big opportunity

now a little bit more advanced is Dubai they proclaimed already two years ago as well that they want to build the whole nation on blockchain in the whole government the whole infrastructure around their government should be based on blockchain technology by 2020 they just revised that I've read last week that to 2021 so they're a little bit behind I guess but they have built a whole range of services that they want to kind of use in the context of blockchain technology from royalty points to issuing insurance claims automatically viable option technology and so on and the big claim is that they can save and that's a big topic the savings obviously for any government in the world they can save 1.5 billion dollars every year in just simply by not

handling all these documents that I currently do it in paper and in the case of Estonia as a cross-reference they save every year 2% of GDP thanks to the fully digitalized that I have so not only is the technology itself interesting obviously for many reasons it's also helping governments to become more efficient we then derived from the study that we've done we have basically derived the three key use cases that we think are going to be important when it comes to blockchain use digital identity obviously that's what we just discussed Eve outings the second one that I fully believe will be a major killer app for blockchain technology and thirdly obviously what is

already happening also here in Switzerland for instance in Geneva Digital registry so that you actually timestamp documents onto the onto the blockchain for future reference of of authentication doctrine identities now we're coming a bit closer to the real topic of identity here there's a huge network there's a huge global list of initiatives that are working on this topic I just basically take take this overview as an example there are many more there's basically every day another identity blockchain startup appearing I would like to highlight one especially this is sovereign and my my friend and that speaks off to me Basel II we'll

talk about this in more detail that's a very good example of how digital identity on blockchain the future can actually look like when it comes to e voting we have another example here it's net net vote IO an American initiative open source initiative so they are basically developed for the last two years based on a theorem and evolving solution and as far as registries are concerned we have obviously nest as already mentioned in Sweden initiative with the start of chrome away and the government of Sweden and the banks that I'm actually looking to digitalize their whole land rest land registry and have made some good progress over the last three years in that space so with this introduction now you come a little bit

more about what we are doing and how we are actually using blockchain or not using it at the moment when it comes to our services our product is basically called a ID plus it's a plus stands for the identity and all the services around it and as you can imagine as I said the identity is key it is needed to actually introduce all these services around it in the case of Estonia we've seen there's 1,500 services so there's a big potential once you have an identity structure and the identity solution to actually then build a whole network of services around it why digital identity I mean ultimately our covered most of these points already it's about efficiency gains it's about

economic growth opportunities for the country but it's also other things it's about improving the services and the security issues that we see in many existing government services that are so-called digital when it comes to online portals of governments or if you want to download a form from a former government all these things are not secure and in Switzerland we know about the the documents that you get from government are getting regularly faked so if you get a credit record statement for instance they are apparently a big threat because they are constantly being faked and all these things can actually obviously be addressed and thanks to digital identities then that are actually protecting all these documents as in our case with a digital vault

you can then basically develop the services based on on on that framework the problem why didn't it work and we I already mentioned it we had this experience in 2010 already in Switzerland there was a national initiative called Swiss ID at the time not to be mistaken with the new society basically that's the old one was a French Swiss it was simply not user friendly and obviously with such an important topic like government services if you think about the endgame in our case is a voting you cannot just risk to have any sort of of security gaps in the solutions that you're building so what happened in Switzerland be basically the

services that were introduced for digital identity were so over engineered that at the end of the at the end of the day they simply didn't work anymore nobody could use them they were so heavy on on the security aspects on your computers you need to install 1,500 different certificates it simply didn't work and so with not working also basically constant there's no services to be used and so it's a slow death and the C systems basically didn't didn't work in the case of Switzerland again it was very expensive solution so not only didn't they did not really work but then he also had to pay a lot of money for it 150 francs per year which simply doesn't make sense I personally believe fully and strongly that the digital identity should be a service that governments are offering to its citizens for the better

betterment of actually the government itself so if you actually pay a lot of money or ask for a lot of money for it it will never work then the application side of things if you cannot use it you don't get critical mass on the side on the on the on the one side of the users you don't get services to go with it the ecosystem overall and then generally speaking again here in Switzerland we have this topic at the moment of people being paranoid about things like Evo thing because things could be hacked obviously bit the reason the experience is somewhat understandable but you also have to take a certain calculated risk in order for it for something to start working so you know actually can obviously always improve I wouldn't suggest that actually to do evolving in the political context directly on the

blockchain at the moment but you can obviously use it to exactly what Chuck is doing next week to start using it in the context of some some some on controversial topics to to do surveys for instance and so that's why typically digital identity solutions not only in Switzerland it's it's it's rare to the country in Europe other than the Nordics main mainly have introduced a working solution for this so with the idea we try to with the ad plus we try to deliver solutions for a government that are ultimately enable digital societies that's our our claim it enables our solution and labels basically the thrust of the interaction between the citizens

the government and third parties by actually having that ability in our case our all our services that we are building our smartphone based services or apps on smartphones and in the backend obviously security Polkton technology at the moment in a limited way in the future with our second version we're going to be fully embracing digital identity protocols we also not only have that but it's important to see that once you have the identity and obviously the documents that for seeing in the future so digital driving licences digital all the documents that I mentioned earlier all of these documents also need to be stored somewhere and that's also a part of our solution that we basically build a evolve the digital world for four important documents and lastly you can't fully control and that's to my last

point and at the end you fully control the data so you're actually in charge of the data once the government has proved this you control who gets us access to it you're always fully aware of if you're sharing information what you are actually sharing on to weak information goes to and again similar to the to the slide as shown before this is kind of the ranges of services that we foresee that a strong government approved digital identity can enable so it starts what we heard before in Estonia with with health solutions I'm a strong believer that again here in Switzerland we have an initiative called digital patient file which is going nowhere again at the moment that's going to be one of the killer solutions for for

strong identity and obviously all the things around kyc e banking all all the things where identification is extremely important again a clear use case for a digital identity solution like ours signatures a signature signatures online and then the whole rest that you can see on this slide and again my end goal is to actually have a solution that works with a digital identity that enables you to fully embrace the democratic system in the way of being able to apply a voting to the system in our case it takes three steps so you download our app you basically install it on your phone you you enter your information

based on the document that you to get you from your government obviously this needs to be in sync then you go to the government they actually check it for you they in the background have a system to enable you and then once the the identity is approved you can start using it in our case it's basically being used mainly with a QR code you can actually log into portals without any passwords anymore you can authenticate yourself at the bar for instance by just scanning a code and the power will see it we are talking in our case with our client in 2000 to do it with the casino to do a check if you're actually a blocked gambler and so forth so you can anything where you are in public have to identify yourself can be

done with this with this QR code solution that we've built and so that's also something that could be interesting for e-commerce obviously if you can identify somebody through our solutions you know that government has checked it the information that that you're sending through is correct so there is no fake accounts anymore in the context of of online trading and and so it's a win-win situation and plus it's a much more convenient solution than password and username as we have it still seen it we see still see it in most of the cases so this is our pilot client in Switzerland we have two initiatives private initiatives at the moment that are looking at a identity beyond what is the national initiative suicide as I

mentioned before obviously here in souq they have already introduced in the city of to blockchain fully blockchain based solution we have been a bit more cautious because I'm first of all our client is not so experimental like like the government of to secondly I also think there's a good reason to start to do to do this step by step so we basically built a cloud-based solution with the timestamp functionality to actually record the identity the hash of your identity approval on to a blockchain and go from there so that's our step as our first version um the same functionality you download the app in this case of inch of thousand you can only download it if you're in Switzerland you then go to the government they approve it and off you

go and you can log in and use the services of the government's online tool of off thousand lastly or rather second loss we basically also worked on on a voting solution already we are working with University of Surrey on any theorem based solution that we basically showed as a prototype back in April this is working we are working to continue building on this now to go again step by step we start with a student voting approach this year the next year we're trying to go into a development of commercial applications so for ATM mouldings for and this is basically something that we pursue as an open source project so

anybody can participate in this we're trying to also build global networks there's an a similar initiative in Australia called horizon States and as mentioned before network that I always another initiative in that space and so we're trying to build a sustainable long-term solution for e-voting because in Switzerland again we have this problem there is an e voting initiative the government of Switzerland wants to push through a voting based on very old technology based on solutions that from my perspective nobody will use the history repeats itself it's the same situation like with the first Swiss ID totally unused friendly totally old outdated but overly secure so I guess it's gonna be dying the same death like the one we we have seen with Swiss ID so

we'd rather have a little bit more time and work together also with the experiences here in soup from next week and see how we can build a fully blockchain decentralized evolving solution for the future and lastly and now this is the end game for for me and I believe fully that this is going to be what I'm what we all will hopefully see in the note of the far distant future if you take what you what I just discussed with our solution and you think through what this could mean if you have your own identity you manage that identity and in this case now this is fully self so in digital identity that we are talking about here and there's more and more development in that space these protocols as I mentioned before all over the world we have you port like here in

soon we have neo in in China we have other initiatives like sovereign we have a theorem being developing a new standard for identity and everything self sovereign so you basically take control of your identity you decide who actually a test for it so it's a transnational solution it's not just a Swiss identity that you can use in the context of Swiss services but you can actually use it transnationally if you don't add to that the fact that all this personal data issues that we see on a daily basis people losing your data because they don't protect it people actually get hacked people actually abuse the personal data that is out there from you like in the case of Cambridge analytical Facebook if you can actually revert that

story and you can say okay I take my data it's under my control I have an app that is a super secure app that enables me to manage the data in a way that I'm I control it and I'm sure I'm in full control of it you then add to that the ability in the future to to not only request your data back and that's our one of our drivers behind this project values actually that you can in Europe now asks data back under the GDP or regulation so you can go to Facebook or you can go to anybody else that holds data about you tell them please give me back my data in electronic format we then with valid convert that into a machine readable solution that you can have in your smartphone and then the

endgame is that you can actually use that data the way you want and monetize it if you choose to do so so obviously everybody knows that the data that is currently being shared with anybody out there has been used it's been mined it's been in the case of Facebook we heard it's been added and the secret profiles built around that data that they then obviously monetize for themselves we try to turn this around with with valid and all things we build a marketplace for personal data monetization so you can imagine that you basically have your smartphone app you have your health state that you have your financial data you have any other data of you your work data your experiences your diplomas and this is very important and very interesting data and not even Facebook can do that they

don't have the access to more data than your likes or or whatever pictures that you upload but with such a solution you can actually then combine all of that you can then offer that on the marketplace that you're building to a third-party bit an advertiser for our DB a pharma company in in Basel and you can actually then monetize the data by actually just offering it on on the marketplace so project valve is all about that we have launched this project last year we are now in the middle of building it on July 13th we are announcing the roadmap to to the MVP and we are very excited because we've seen over the last few months again GDP our thanks to GDP on Facebook a lot of support by by basically supporting us

with this initiative and with that I have finished and I thank you very much for your attention and see later