Digital identities and why self-custody is the future

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your trusted source for useful and legitimate information to remain on the Forefront of the internet Revolution I'm Jaybird and we believe that web3 is going to change the world that's why we're here to guide the world's top talent into this space to contribute get ahead of the curve and capitalize on the opportunity in today's episode we're exploring digital identities and why self-custody is the future and here with us is Tim Boss the CEO of sharing now Tim brings over two decades of experience working at both startups and large Enterprises all with a focus on

emerging Tech he's held senior roles in organizations such as Microsoft and Accenture joint venture between them Barclays GE Capital Atari and others he's also built many startups his first in 2004 where he focused on building a software framework for tracking valuable assets around the globe blockchain before blockchain existed then he most recently founded sharing and he'll tell us on today's episode all about founding sharing and why she decided to focus his life and his career on self-custody of our identities because it is so important to own our data but

also it's fascinating how much Tim talks about the friction that we experience when it comes to our data and our identity and he talks about identity in more of a holistic sense then not just our digital identity not just our identity of what we do online but our identity in terms of our passport in terms of our driver's license in terms of our address in terms of The Wider picture of who we are and how we can bring that online and do it in a safe secure way and then how we can use that identity in a much more frictionless way when we need to interact with things

both online and in real life there's many use cases that Tim gives today this is an incredible episode that is really so important at the end of this episode it's amazing how Tim makes his prediction for 2023 or you need to stick around to the end to hear that but it really shows the importance of understanding digital identity and understanding self-custody and how it's possible on chain enjoy today's episode before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of

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web3 tool for managing and understanding our community members it combines both on-chain and web 2 metrics all in one user-friendly dashboard with Chasm you'll know things like which other communities your members are part of and which of your campaigns are truly driving results that's why at web3 Academy we use Chasm to launch campaigns optimize growth engage our community members and automate workflows with this all-in-one tool if your community is already on chain and get to know them better with Chasm head to chasm.xyz using the link in the description and discover why top brands like a mutable Nifty labs and collab land are using Chasm Tim welcome to the show thank you

it's great to make you really excited to have you because today we're talking all about digital identity self-custody identity decentralized identity pick whatever term you want to use which is such an important topic I've heard you say before that if you don't own your data you don't own your identity maybe let's use that as an entry point what does that mean to you we talk a lot about having custody of your crypto and tokens and don't leave it on the exchanges and I actually see that as the same about your identity I mean your identity contains so much information about you you know it's not just your passport or your photo of you or things like that your identity is everything about you and over the last sort of 10 years we've tended to sort of share so

much about ourselves and our information stored on servers like Facebook and Google and things like that and it's starting to bite us back I've always taken the view that we should have our own custody of our own information and we should choose who we share it with and not let other companies choose who they share our information with I love that it is so important we've created this world and look web 2 has given us a lot a lot of good things and there's been many benefits but now we're in a position where maybe things need to change okay before we dive deeper into digital identity and what you're building over at share ring let's just take a step back how did Tim decide to dedicate his life to web3 how did you fall down the

rabbit hole wow that's a big rapid hole so back in the 90s I worked in the video game industry so I worked for a company making video games and actually I started off testing games for them years ago and then I ended up becoming the general manager for their I.T infrastructure and there's around 996 so not long after Toy Story came out 3D intros and games were all the rage and they needed a way to basically render 3D stuff really really fast and obviously you got these 3D artists they can't really easily on their computers so I created one of the first distributed render farms and the idea of actually using say decentralized technology to sort of compute like really difficult

problems really really appealed to me and I think we had all the computers in the office plus about 20 computers that we purchased that were just rendering videos creating through sequences for sure for me it's just his passion for Tech I love diving in and just making stuff after that I worked for a few Consulting companies and I work for Microsoft Accenture joint venture join the Dark Side for a little while I worked for an investment Bank around sort of early 2000s I just sort of thought I want to do my own thing like I'm so passionate about the stuff that I'm doing I want to go out and do my own thing so I started my first company called bio watch which is a GPS tracking company initially for animals but now we started selling Vehicles sold that around 2008 then started a peer-to-peer

Caravan sharing business with my wife at the time sold that in 2013 it wasn't going very well at all it sort of needed too much time and effort that more than what we could actually put into it then in around 2013 I started keys and keys had the original goal of creating a platform for the sharing economy like an open-ended platform and we're very very quickly realized that using web 2 architecture at the time it just wasn't possible so we sort of focused just on car sharing fast forward to around 2015 I came across the ethereum white paper and it blew my mind like I'd mined Bitcoin before because of like I loved the whole idea of decentralized computing and stuff so around 2010 I

mined my own Bitcoin on a laptop for about six months I had no idea what happened to any of that um so here don't don't get me started on that one when I read the sort of ethereum white paper I thought this concept of a distributed virtual machine on computers all around the world that you don't trust and having sort of these immutable sort of finality of the transaction I looked at that and thought we can create these protocols for the sharing economy and this is going to solve us a huge amount of problems one of our problems with keys was creating this one-size-fits-all protocol but also providing this frictionless onboarding process with reusable and self-solving digital identity and that's sort of where sharing was born so yeah 2017 is

sort of when the idea we're sharing came out that was sort of me looking at the the different things you could do with ethereum and smart contracts and stuff for a couple of years and then we sort of landed on sharing in around 2017. so it was driven from more from a need instead of a solution looking for which is I guess unusual in this space it sounds like you've pivoted a lot in your work and in your career this wasn't a question I was planning to ask but I've just got to ask this because it's always interesting when somebody has that ability to Pivot is that natural to you is that something you've learned where does that come from it's something that's sort of natural I guess it's a bit of add in me I see problems and always look for solutions to those

problems in terms of pivoting art for me they've all been Stepping Stones to where we are today when you say pivots sometimes I imagine that to be left turn and it'd be right there but I actually see that where I am is an evolution of all the stuff that I've done before so where we start with keys in terms of the base of the core SAS technology that we created that evolves per perfectly into the Caravan sharing stuff which evolves perfectly into the car sharing stuff which the problems that we had then around identity and frictionless access evolved into what we're doing with sharing so I've got this sort of view that as technology evolves the possibility is what we can do with that technology also evolve with it and we've I've sort of looked at harnessing those possibilities into these new sort of

ideas and solutions to big problems that's great I love that okay before we get into the possibilities of what you're building at sharing let's just set some context for digital identity you talked a little bit about this with the first question I asked and that quote that you've said but what is digital identity today and what are the problems with it right now today people see digital identity as a digital version of your passport I see it as much much more than that I see it as a digital me so it's a digital representation of me and who I am so obviously to access certain services and to go into places or buy certain things

I need to prove something about myself and that's where visual identity comes in it gives me the ability to prove something about myself either in a web 3 world a web 2 world or in real world and that's what I see sort of digital identity as and there are sort of some very firm definitions of what digital Identity or didi is under sort of w3c standards and I personally see that as a lot more than that I see it as a digital me and something that allows me to do something and make it easier for me to access certain things or prove something about myself in the real world or the virtual world right so it's more bright to Identity in general of things like your driver's license or your passport and using those things the way you would use in the real world but right now

they're physical and you think about them more in a digital way yeah exactly and I also sort of feel that we're going on to your next question where it's broken at the moment is we're forced to share everything about ourselves to do small things and a very good example of that is here in Australia where I am if I'm sort of young I go to 7-Eleven to buy some cigarettes or some alcohol or something like that I have to show them my ID and in Australia your ID contains your full name your date of birth your driver's license number your home address it contains everything about you so I'm handing this card over to someone that I don't know that I don't trust that they can look at and get all this

information about me just to prove that I'm over 18 to be able to buy that alcohol and goes to going into clubs and things like that or when I'm signing up for a crypto exchange service or something like that and all they want to know is that I'm not in a certain jurisdiction that I'm allowed to trade and things like that but I'm doing a selfie I'm photographing two forms of ID like I'm doing all this stuff and just giving away my information with apple I can sort of store all my stuff in my Apple wallet and then they have all my information like there's just this over sharing of information it's biting us already there's some major hacks in Australia with the Optus pack and the medibank hack where people's passport information passport numbers tax file

numbers like all this information has basically been leaked and those companies had no right to hold all of that information they had to but they had no right to because they didn't need all that information our mission is really to a provide this frictionless access to goods and services but also whilst maintaining this trust and high level of security and actually ownership and control of your information it's something that I believe that we're solving give us an example of how it would be different and maybe use the example of a young Aussie going to get cigarettes from a convenience store how could it be different with words sharing that's a really good example so if an organization trusted the technology that was developed right I could go into this

7-Eleven store scan a QR code with my phone and it basically is green light this person is over 18 I can buy it and take it away right maybe I'll use Biometrics like a thumbprint or something like that so we use like a zero knowledge type of system to be able to prove that I'm over 18 because that's the only question that they're asking are you over 18 so I should be able to answer yes and prove that I am through the technology through this trust that's created with the technology without sharing any information about myself I don't even need to share my date of birth I just need to confirm that I'm over 18 because there's trust in this verified identity that's been created that's a really good extreme example of it other examples are a lot of sort of these D5 lending contracts and things

like that institutions cannot interact with them because of the counterparty risk associated with them not knowing who they're lending or morrowing from we could effectively create say a soul-bound token that says two things one I'm allowed to trade because I'm over 18 or maybe there's ah restriction or B I'm not in a sectioned country and that allows me to enter interact with that D5 platform so then institutions can suddenly interact with it because they know that everyone that's interacting with it is not from those sanctioned countries that sort of goes from one physical thing into 7-Eleven to web3 and there's everything in between it's about sharing the minimum amount of data that allows you to gain access to the service you want to access obviously to achieve this there's a lot of things

that need to be built a lot of different stakeholders that you need to get on board how are you getting there give us an idea of the sharing sort of ecosystem the different apps that you get you have the Vault a few different things that need to be used in order for all this to happen yeah really good question so we started the development of this in 2018 and honestly I didn't realize how hard it would be to solve the problems and you know like I'm happy to say we're finally there but to break it down in the most basic sense there's three parties to any of these transactions one is the party that creates or the issues the identity so that could be either a government issue any identity it could be sharing that's actually verifying the identity on your behalf a university issuing a

graduation certificate so there's the issuer of the identity then there's the user themselves so the user holds what we call the sharing Vault the Vault contains all of your verifiable and verified credentials in it it's completely self-sovereign so it's in your phone you can back it up to a cloud driver or local storage in case you lose your phone I want to swap it it's encrypted with your public keys so we use asymmetric encryption so that only your private qlc phrase can decrypt it and then the third party in this is the receiver of that information so the technology we started with obviously the vaults and the app that's wrapped around it blockchain that sits on which is a the cosmos SDK and then also the transaction mechanism and the pricing

mechanism for the transaction so all that sort of stuff we built first and the latest part that we've built is what we call vql Vault query language so we needed an easy mechanism to be able to get information out of the vault in a secure manner so we created this idea of a query language that's based on JavaScript so I can write a query that says Au rating it's a simple yes no AO over 18 and then that will generate a QR code it'll either generate a QR code or if I'm using the SDK It'll ask the SDK directly and I can simply put that QR code out there and either put it on a website which is what we call a dynamic one or even print it out put it at a location someone scans out and that's

the mechanism for getting information out of the Vault so that's that query language I can also create a query that says what's your password number first name last name email address like what's some specific information about yourself when I scan that QR code on my app I'll actually see the information that's been requested and I can say yeah I don't want to share that or I can say yes okay and share that thumbprint to prove it to me that's sharing it with that third party for us as I said before the mission and for us is about removing friction from these interactions but also maintaining that trust security and ownership of your information so through those areas of what we've developed we've achieved that and I guess all three of those parties are experiencing friction right now just here's the few

examples that you gave it's incredibly costly to manage all this the security to manage the data the number of people you need to do something that really doesn't require that much effort to do there's just so much friction right now so okay how do you get there then just quickly on that last comment an interesting fact so we've spoken to a few insurance companies and one of them was to get our own insurance and when they were looking at us as an identity company they saw that we store or nothing about a user the only thing we store is their email address and their name that's it right but we don't store anything else one of the things that they basically said is it's starting to become impossible to ensure companies the cyber security risk because of the

amount of data that's been stored and because of all the hacks that have been happening recently so we have companies talking to us now saying we don't want to store this information how can we avoid storing this information so the need is there company that don't let information they don't want to store it but they have to be able to prove something about someone to be able to access their services so we're seeing these fundamental shift in the narrative from these organizations where information is power and information as an asset to this whole thing about we don't want this stuff we can't ensure it we want to operate our business without storing all this information what's the focus to get there obviously when you have multiple users or stakeholders you have to get them all on board that's

very difficult so how are you approaching that in the past we've sort of sometimes fallen for the risk of sort of trying to boil the ocean because there's so many different opportunities there's a thousand different things that we could do a thousand different ways that we could approach this so effectively we've got two divisions running the business one is what we call sharing Foundation which is the underlying foundation of the blockchain and the Vault the query language and things like that so the plan for that as we're moving forward now is to create hackathons and incubate different projects and Builders building on our blockchain so Builders creating smart contracts that leverage what we've done Builders integrating with the valkyrie language and so on so we'll provide incentives to basically allow people to

build on that the other division is what we call sharing Business Solutions and that's really focused on the digital identity side and the SDK that we've written and actually working with businesses to integrate that SDK which is the Vault into their own systems into their own apps we're currently talking to some governments in terms of digital identity so digitizing their physical identity and allowing people to use it for various services within that country and then also a number of organizations that can benefit from what we're doing so no specific verticals but we are sort of finding you know great opportunities in the car sharing area in food and beverages alcohol sales online sales deliveries and things like that Finance

as well so it's quite Broad in terms of the areas but in terms of where the sort of horizontal stack that we're focusing on is very much that SDK and the digital identity side of things because that's really our hit to start getting critical mass of people using the system and I've heard you talk about events as being vertical that you focused on it's one that I find interesting mainly because I think everybody understands events when we talk about Finance sometimes Finance is a complex industry that a lot of people just don't have the interest in understanding the regulation quick frankly and the governments behind you know why you can or can't invest so events is more accessible to the

majority so can we just chat a bit about what you guys have been doing with events and how you have seen sharing enhance the user experience of somebody both a user and an event holder sure yep so basically if I'm going to an event a ticket isn't just enough right so I may need to prove that I'm over 18 to be able to access that event or I may need to sort of give my ID or something like that so that they scan to go into that event so obviously the first side nfts as event tickets has been there's a lot of discussion around that so we spilled that into the Vault because we sort of see things like tickets is another thing that is part of you right but when we've been speaking to a few number of

stadiums and providers of information the identity site is actually a really big deal to them and part of the reason why like there's one use case we were speaking to last week and basically they run some of the stadiums that where there's been some incidents of fights and things like that in the stadiums and one of the problems that they've got is during the event they have no idea who is in that Stadium at all so because having this someone buys a ticket and they scalp the ticket to someone else and then they sell it to someone else and they go in with this piece of paper that piece of paper scanned they go in they're sitting in a specific seat and they don't know anything about so part of our technology with the Vault SDK allows you to import that ticket and then when you scan into that event you

can share just enough information about yourself to prove who you are to be able to enter that event and then if there's something that goes wrong or something happens and they need to identify you or something like that they have the ability to do that during the event after the event the information's gone so for them this ability to actually allow for that free sort of sale of tickets and things like that through either physical tickets or nfts or whatever it is but also the ability at the point of entry to be able to attach that to some sort of identifiable information or even just proving that you're over 18 or something like that that's for them reduces the bottlenecks in the queue because you'll have hand your ticket over grab your ID show your ID get you back

searched scan the ticket at the go like there's this bottlenecks with you know these 50 000 people events that are just unnecessary so if you could go in and just scan a QR code or have your QR code scanned on the way in and go straight in with no additional checks then that's a big cost saving for these organizations but also if it's a risk reduction for them too and so the organization has the incentive what about for the user how do you get the vaults on the phone of the user yeah it's a good question I mean that really goes down to that whole control of my information so the more the narrative moves towards you should have custody of your information

the easier it is for us to start pushing this Mission and people are starting to demand that as well an interesting fact when we first launched our app just as a beta last year we had I think it was about an 80 bounce rate so people went into the app the first thing they were asked to do is scan their passport and they basically said no I'm not doing that and they shut the app down and that's because our messaging wasn't very good in terms of telling them we're not storing this information you're doing this to create a foreign identity so we're focusing very much on that narrative to help people understand that this is about them taking control back to themselves so once we get a few of these pilots and then the rollouts going

we'll start seeing people demand organizations that they start using technology like this so it's about getting that critical mass first through these parts improval Concepts and then pushing the narrative to make it reusable I talk about SDK a lot as well so one of the things that we've developed is this idea where you can have say multiple apps that use the sharing Vault installed on a single phone so they can share the same Vault with the same information so you might have an app from an alcohol delivery company you might have an app from a banking organization maybe a government or a stadium out for events happen or something like that all of those can actually share that same singular Vault that basically is effectively run by our

SDK that we've created that's something that I haven't seen before because most of them are sort of like oh you have to use say the sharing app and then access all these things we're not saying that we're saying that you'd need to use the vault which is covered by an SDK and you can white label your own product on top of it so interesting so if you were to talk to a user and I mean what's your sales pitch to a user okay why should you take the steps to set up your Vault and have self-custody of your data I think the sales pitch is going to be different for different people so some of them the pitch is going to be easy because a company that we've partnered with or that is using our SDK needs them to use it to get started right so once

they've got it installed because they're using company XYZ then the pitch to them is you can use this in so many more places and then we incentivize them to well basically start pushing for companies to accept it and things like that but I think overall The Narrative is about taking back control taking control of your information taking control of your data this whole concept of self-sovereign has been floating around for so long but as I said really at the start of this discussion we talk about custody of you know take custody of your crypto take custody of your money be your own an owner of that so we should be following the same idea for our identity as well we shouldn't be giving away all of the information about

us because it will come back to bite us it has already come back I was in so many different occasions and not only in the way that it could be hacked and stolen but also in the way that it's we're currently used as the product in so many of these major social media websites that we use we are solds for advertising dollars and yeah that we have no control over that we have no choice and don't get me wrong sometimes we slam web 2 and social media a little bit too hard because look like they provided an incredible service to us we've all been to connect we've been able to share photos do things that we couldn't do before and they had to make money in order to build the Great ux and

the great UI they have so there is benefit but it's gone a little bit too far where do you see this going when we have control of our data maybe take us out 10 years from now where self-custody is the thing what does that look like from a user standpoint in terms of the way we interact online and interact digitally I think for that having self-custody shouldn't make things harder for you so we actually see in the future that this is genuinely a way to remove friction how many times have you gone to check into a hotel and you've had to fill out the forms and hand your passport over and wait in a queue and all that so there's bottlenecks everywhere because we have to keep filling forms out we have to keep giving

information about ourselves away I've talked about Google before about storing so much information but even they don't want to store too much information about you in terms of the central information they don't store a photo of your passport or driver's license so it even means when I sign up for a service and I use my Google login to sign up for that service I still have to enter all these information about myself and sign and my passport that's friction right so self-custody of that information where it's completely portable should also be able to remove allow me to remove friction from any of my daily interactions I should be able to scan a QR code on the car windscreen for a company I've never used before they get just enough information to be able to trust me when I go to the 7-Eleven I

should be able to just sort of tap something or scan something and approve that I'm over 18. so I think the future for self-custody of your identity is all about removing that friction so you're creating this trust Safety and Security of your ID but you're also removing that friction and if our solution isn't removing friction then we haven't done what we set out to do when you say it like that it sounds so simple it's so desirable oh well that's the idea right the underlying Tech there's a huge amount that's gone into it like it's hard it's really hard but our goal is to make it so that the user experience is as simple as possible it's as simple as scanning a code or putting your thumbprint on something or scanning your face and that's it I don't want to dive too deep into the underlying Tech but

let's since you bring it up but I do think it is important to understand so first tell us how our documents stored within the share a ring Vault how does that storage work within the Vault the first thing that we do is let's say you're on boarding an ID so you use an ID what you're asked to do is take a photo of it and then for this particular one I've got you you hold it to your phone and it'll scan the NFC chip and sucking the data into your what we call the Vault so our system will do some things on it it'll check do a face match check or dot OCR if it's using say an accredited certification somewhere it may sort of check the public key repository for that ID or something like that what it then does is it takes the

image and also all of the details associated with it and we create a hash on the blockchain of that information so we don't store that information on the blockchain we don't encrypt it onto the blockchain or anything like that we do a digital hash of it like an MD E5 or something like that and it's like 128-bit representation of your ID and it's called asymmetric encryption so it's one way it's impossible to decrypt the information's not going to change just the hash of it so what that means is that when I'm say sharing my information with you then you can actually check the hash on the blockchain to see whether or not I've changed that information so that's where trust comes in even though it's self-sovereign I have complete control over it there is actually a mechanism to

prove that I haven't edited it and to also follow the chain of custody of that identity so we've got a mechanism in there so when I share it with you we can log that I've actually shared it with you so if you have a leak then I can always trace it back to you as well so there's that traceability that's included there and that's with any document that you store within the Vault the data in the vault is encrypted with your seed phrase that's created when you first load the account that the Vault can also be backed up to a secure drive or something like that so it means if someone gets access to that Vault it's impossible for them to decrypt it unless they have your seed phrase so once again it's secure but we thought about a lot in this we thought about what happens if

you lose your phone what happens if somebody steals it so the only way to access data in your Vault you still need to use a biometric so your thumb print or your face match within the phone and that also allows you to prove that it's you that's actually using that Vault for an online transaction and not someone else so there's a huge amount of sort of edge cases we've thought about in terms of accessing the Vault storing the Vault securing the volt you're using the bolt and so on yeah and you brought up w3c before you've used their standards for the most part we are so within the storage of it and also the creation of the hash we use a Merkle tree structure so that sort of allows us to save on well to be a lot more efficient in the space but also to

be more efficient in how we do the hashing of the documents and then in terms of the documents themselves in the metadata or the attributes Associated that we use VC standard for that there we're actually going back to verify in terms of the DI standard within w3c to make sure that we're 100 allow for that part of the beauty of what we do is the storage of the information is secondary to the transmission of the information and the reason why is because we can technically transmit that information in any standard that the end user needs through the block query language so if there's an organization that requires receipt of that information in VSC standard then it can be transmitted into whatever standard they want as well so it's designed to be flexible in that manner who pays so

there's gas in order for any transaction to be so for me to upload into the Vault and yeah who's paying for that payment of that was always secondary to the creation of the technology for us and we've had a lot of interesting discussions over the last few months in terms of the payment of all that so we're out at the moment is we fund the creation of the digital ID itself so if the use of any technology you need to look at where the barriers for entry are and if we suddenly said okay to create this digital identity user you need to pay for it we've just created this artificial barrier that's not necessary so we fund the creation of a digital identity and where we charge is for the utilization of our service to present that digital identity to someone else

right so let's say verifiable or not a verified credential so it might be your email address or name you can share that with anyone that's free to use vql someone can receive that information if you want to share it with them we don't charge for that where we do charge is where there's an organization that uses our services to receive say a verified credential so something where there's a hash that's been created on the blockchain for that credential will charge for the receipt of that data we've got this sort of long-term Vision though of this whole idea of information as an asset where the user can effectively start charging for the sharing of their data as well or getting rewards for sharing their data so it's something that we need to hit critical mass for before we start

implementing it but this whole view that this data that I hold has some sort of intrinsic value associated with it and then also let's say University that creates graduation certificates to go into the Vault the university could charge nothing to put it into the Vault but if you share it with someone the university could actually charge for you sharing with someone because it's IP that they've actually created so this whole idea this information can be worth something in the future and creating an open system where we effectively just take a cut off those sort of different transactions or interact with that Identity or data has so much value to it yeah so absolutely it makes me think of

Brave browser is probably the most keys that is most familiar to the most people which is where when you use the browser you can get paid in Brave tokens for sharing your data and seeing certain ads is that sort of how you think about it or is it yeah I mean you could do something like that so you could basically you go into a shoe shop and they've got a QR at the front saying sign up to our mailing list you could scan that and receive 20 cents or 20 tokens or something like that for sharing that information so someone's effectively paying you to be able to advertise it's not a new idea there's been startups that have tried to start to say that to create a mail system where you paid seriously oh you get paid to receive advertising and things like that so that's sort of like a pretty

simple extreme example of it but you could even do it in more sort of commercial sense where you know if I share my information with that 7-Eleven that we spoke about before they give me a reward or a discount for actually using that technology to do that so once again my information is an asset where I can benefit from the sharing of that information excuse me yeah it makes so much sense so one thing that I'm very curious about to get your opinion on is how this is all going to work with digital wallets we use the term wallet it's interesting that you chose the term Vault for sharing Vault but we've seen those words be used interchangeable Reddit calls it the vault in their case

where do you see the future do you think that we will have one Vault for identity and another for our crypto or money and then another for our Arts for another for membership passes do you think it'll all be within one that's a very good question and I see a future where it can be one okay but I don't think it's possible and it's got nothing to do with technology it's got to do with the fact that we can't even get standards for cables correct in terms of plugs and things like that it's one of those things that there's going to be too many opposing standards and attempts at doing this that it's going to be very very difficult to settle on one for

everything there's a book by Neil Stevens um you can't remember what it's called basically within that book they've got that a similar concept of a single sort of storage mechanism for everything about yourself that's your payments it's your crypto what's your uh everything about yourself and that's the difference areas that's sort of stored on the cloud but it follows you around and every time you want to sort of say something about yourself or share something about yourself or pay for something you just access that to do it so I love that as a Future Vision I just don't see as I said all this competing Enterprise and competing Technologies I just don't say it as an easy thing to get towards as I mentioned the cable problem is a classic example we came up with the Vault because we sort of saw this idea of all of your information is

cartilage the audience say a filing cabinet so I put my passport in the following account and things like that the word file income that just seemed too old school it didn't really make sense so we thought oh is it like a safe and it's not like a safe Island because safe is more like I stole my money and valuables in there so we sort of saw like the vault is where often we store a lot of our personal information in like a bank vault sort of thing and that's something that when we need it we can grab it and use it so that's sort of where we came up with the idea of the Vault I'd love to see it all everything's stored in there the other part in terms of the vault is within our life we take on different personas right so I've got my work Persona I've got my

social sort of media Persona I've got my this photo of who I am at home who I am when I go traveling and things like that so one of the things about this only share what you need to From the Vault it allows you to put on or have different personas and only share that part of the Persona that you need to share for accessing that sort of thing at that point in time as well at the moment there's not really any technology that allows you to have these sort of different personas in these different environments very interesting and wouldn't it be so nice if there was just one Vault that held everything but like you said for so many reasons it just won't be possible I mean it's more likely that depending upon what use you

are using what company you're trying to connect with what car service what jurisdiction you live in what passport you have you will have a vault accordingly or a wallet according to what standard that company or organization or institution have decided to follow how do we get sharing to infiltrate everything to be the one that wins yeah I mean we need to be flexible as you said if power sharing company IE requires something to be stored in a standard you could still use the sharing Vault and transmit to car sharing a in their standard right so that's the ability of you know the Vault to sort of be able to sit in the middle of it and be able to sort of Follow The Very

standards that these other companies sort of have and I think that's the power that we have in terms of being able to sort of sit in the middle of that and being the roll-up of all of these sort of other sort of organizations or companies requirements as well so you could have a car sharing company that has their own system and all that sort of stuff and we could infiltrate that and say well car sharing company we also want you to accept data from people that have got a fault and then people can start using the Vault to access theirs and they might still have their own app but eventually we may have more people accessing next system with the Vault and then move over to that it's so interesting to think about not just building the tech but the steps that need to happen in order for it to

become part of our everyday lives and for us to use it do you see people right now setting up volts on their own without they're going to an event or they need it yeah or is this interest in that I think we've got about 15 000 active users but a lot of those do it because they're sort of staking or using a crypto side of things so you've got a lot of people to sign up for that but then since we launched sort of the vql Vault query language as an alpha the website we've had a lot of sign ups a lot of people sign up just to play with that so there's been a lot of uptake just to sort of see how it works and play with and things like that so far the feedback that we've really received of that and it's only been out in the

wild for a couple of weeks but the feedback we've received of that is is absolutely incredible so people are saying hey I can use it in this or my company would love to use this or things like that so the best thing we did was release that as an alpha we did release a version of The Vault what we call the basic identity so you don't do any identity stuff you just create the vault which then allows you to put your own documents in it so we do see I'd say about 20 of people have signed up and done that but they haven't been able to use it with anything yet and that's sort of where the next step is now we've got a great user base in terms of people that can test it with us and we're starting to release it like there's one

invite-only beta that we're releasing shortly which is really just a very simple mechanism to trial some things you can do with the Vault it's a password manager so like you know LastPass one password dash line and it's simply a chrome plug-in and I love this what we've done so basically the ability to store any of your passports or private information in the vault so my username and password and a plugin that will search for email and password or username or password and it puts a little sharing logo next to it you click on it and it'll pop up a QR code you scan the QR code with your phone and it'll securely transmit your email address and password to that website and log you in so that means you don't need to remember those but what we've done is created a purely self-sovereign version

of a password manager so it means that you're not storing it on this your passwords on a central server no matter how secure they say it is you still then want your passwords on a central server we all know the hacks that happen at the start or the end of last year at the start of this year with one of those companies and the beauty of what we've done is the QR that pops up on the screen actually has a encryption code in there so that when I scan it my data is sent using the encryption code that that QR tells my phone to send it as so it means we've removed any man in the middle attacks 100 secure from me to that website to log me in and it means I can go to Shared computers and all that sort of stuff and I've always got my

passwords here I can just sort of QR code scan log in and so on so for us that's just like a fun little Alpha that just demonstrates some of the power of what you can actually do with the vault it's amazing it's incredible what happens as you said when you put something out there and you see what users do is it what Builders do is it cures for a few things one is you mentioned hackathons that you guys are doing where are you going to be doing that how can people find out and participate this is like a pile of hackathon approve of concept technology so we are running one that's sort of underway now in Vietnam so basically the target for this is mostly sort of students inside the universities in Ho Chi Minh city so we launched it about a

week ago we've got 10 applicants already so 10 teams that have applied to basically enter which we've already hit our Target for that there and we'll shortlist a few of the teams and then they'll come to our office next month it's basically be part of the 48 or 72 hour hackathon to just build identity Solutions on our chain either using uh rust smart contracts or using the Vault or the SDK or something like that so they're pretty flexible how they do it based on the success of that we will be running others around the world following that so we've been invited to participate in one co-sponsor one using our technology in Europe in the middle of the year so we're in discussions about that one and then we're in sort of discussions with a couple of other companies that specialize in helping to

run these things to run a few this year as well and so we will be posting more and more information about that as it comes up great and from a user perspective or I guess the other from a business perspective how can Business Leaders listening to the show or users who want to get their vault where can they go how can they find that out yeah just contact us throughout our website sharing.network so basically if you come to our website contact us there we are doing a revamp of the website to sort of outline the Business Solution side a little bit more because it's very very sort of crypto slash blockchain focused at the moment but as we sort of launch that over the next few weeks it'll be more obvious about where our target areas but anyone that sees this that's interested in using Valkyrie

language using our sdks or has some ideas of how to work with us just please contact us through our website fantastic all right before we wrap I want to ask you a couple speed round questions what's your favorite AI or web3 tool can't say sharing gold favorite I all have them already is chat DB titty and it's only because it's just really really fun to interact with so I'll be following these Reddit channels about how people are kind of hacking it like allowing to bypass its core rules and I've been doing that myself and it's so much fun so it's sort of stuff to pass time but I also love the fact that you can use it to write code to review code definitely chat GPD I love what Bing is doing with it though so I've got access

to their pre-release in terms of actually overlaying and more of a Persona over it and it's been interesting so far that's really cool can we see that okay one prediction for 2023 was in web3 wow so web 3 predictions everything's gonna moon no so and this is just purely from our own self-interest but I think that identity is going to become more and more important within web 3 but in terms of zero knowledge types yeah so you know AML and things like that I think that that's going to be an absolute essential to bring the institutions and the retailers to bring trust back into that sort of environment yeah I think that ZK

to me I think it's going to be the breakout Tech of the year that we're gonna move from a there's so many chains that are coming out with ZK right now and it's happening and B I think there's going to be an understanding from the user side and the business side of okay we understand ZK we understand the value this is what we've been waiting for let's go start to use it so I completely agree yeah I think ZK is essential to keep facilitating decentralization right because the other solution is centralization obviously the last thing that we want we all know where that goes okay last question this is a tough one so if you need to take a minute to think about it if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what

would you write on it what would I write on it own your data Take Back Control own your data self-custody is the way to go I love it it's funny how there's sort of a few different styles that people take with that question some take the marketing and would just say you know sharing.network and just put your URL in there others take the more philosophical approach which usually revolves around being vulnerable knowing yourself you know Community loving yourself but what's interesting about what you're saying is yours is sort of the same philosophical side but in the digital way of data which not enough of us really understand it's so important for

us to understand so Tim thanks for sharing that thanks for being a leader in the space really appreciate everything you do great questions thank you all right everybody thanks for listening have a wonderful day thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the

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